Season One of “The Candidate”

It’s almost impos­si­ble to escape real­ity TV these days.  Every new TV sea­son presents us with a vari­ety of new shows and con­tin­u­a­tions of older series.  Almost every chan­nel on the TV dial devotes some of its weekly sched­ule to real­ity based pro­gram­ming, that is, except for the faith based chan­nels.  Now, I don’t mean to rip off Larry Nor­man, but why should the devil have all the good TV shows?  Surely there is an aspect of the Chris­t­ian life that we can sub­jected to this kind of pub­lic scrutiny and pro­vide some level of pub­lic entertainment.

One of the most recent suc­cess­ful for­mats is to have an insti­tu­tion (ie. restau­rant, band, broad­way musi­cal) use the show to hire a new staff– or cast– mem­ber.  This not only makes a good show but also serves to adver­tise the insti­tu­tion.  Using this as a model, I’m think­ing about putting together a pitch to the var­i­ous faith chan­nels, I just haven’t decided if I should pitch myself as a con­tes­tant or as the host.

What we would need is a large and once pop­u­lar church fac­ing dwin­dling atten­dance num­bers and a pas­tor near­ing retire­ment.  It seems to me that this sce­nario isn’t ter­ri­bly rare.  Rather than going through the reg­u­lar process of search com­mit­tees and call­ing regional over­seers, or what­ever other denom­i­na­tions do, why wouldn’t a church like this want to use a real­ity show to pick their next pastor?

We could start with a group of can­di­dates, twelve is prob­a­bly an appro­pri­ate num­ber, and put them through a num­ber of chal­lenges.  Church mem­bers, and of course the view­ing audi­ence, could observe all them doing hos­pi­tal vis­i­ta­tions, lead­ing per­sonal and fam­ily coun­selling ses­sions, and sit­ting through long com­mit­tee meet­ings.  Each week, one or two of the can­di­dates would be elim­i­nated, and the one deter­mined to win that par­tic­u­lar week’s con­tests would be asked to preach the ser­mon that Sun­day morn­ing.  This could be even more bor­ing than it sounds unless the show’s pro­duc­ers and the church’s exec­u­tive board agrees to mix things up a bit.  Of the 12 can­di­dates, less than half would be from the orig­i­nal denom­i­na­tion the church is based in, there would have to be at least a few women, and there would have be rep­re­sen­ta­tion from var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties and lev­els of edu­ca­tion.  So far it prob­a­bly only sounds inter­est­ing to the­ol­ogy nerds like me, but this doesn’t have to be real­ity, just real­ity TV.

Instead of a search com­mit­tee, the church could put together a research com­mit­tee, made up of peo­ple who look into the past of all of the can­di­dates to see if there are any skele­tons in their closet.  Old churches and col­leges would be good sources of juicy details of days gone by, but why stop there?  Old rela­tion­ships and fam­ily prob­lems would spice up the show quite well.

Some church mem­bers could be assigned the task of push­ing them on hot-button the­o­log­i­cal issues.  Could they han­dle the pres­sure of Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists, social jus­tice advo­cates, expe­ri­en­tial highly spir­i­tual peo­ple, and indif­fer­ent neu­tral minded folk all try­ing to see if they were a safe pick?

Oth­ers could be assigned to present the can­di­dates with var­i­ous temp­ta­tions to test their level of piety.  Peo­ple may be inter­ested to know if they drink too much or they may be uncom­fort­able if they drink too lit­tle.  If the can­di­dates are unmar­ried the con­gre­ga­tion will need to know that they will respect the pro­fes­sional bound­aries and not date within the flock they are shep­herd­ing, but if they are will­ing to cross the line it would be help­ful for some peo­ple to know what their type is.

In mak­ing the final deci­sion, the con­gre­ga­tion or view­ers could vote along any num­ber of lines.  They might get caught up in the glam­our of it all and select the best look­ing per­son or the one with the flashiest per­son­al­ity.  They could make the safe pick and choose the per­son with the clean­est past.  They may even try to be respon­si­ble and pick the one with the sound­est the­ol­ogy or the best inter­per­sonal man­ner.  We’ll never know until some­one decides to foot the bill and put this on the air.  Either way, I’m pretty sure all of the mar­riages from the mar­riage based real­ity shows turned out well, so why couldn’t this work too?