There’s a certain tone a man uses when he believes the room belongs to him.

Not the building. Not the microphone. The room.

You can hear it in the cadence—relaxed, almost amused, but tight underneath. Like someone who has never had to be contradicted without consequences. That’s the tone At Boshoff carried in that now-circulating clip. For those who have never heard his name before, he’s a South African megachurch pastor who oversees roughly 90 multi-site campuses and claims north of 120,000 members. That’s not a church. That’s an empire with a worship band.

And in that interview—with Ed Young Jr. and sitting alongside the king of narci-gesis, Steven Furtick, listening in and nodding along—Boshoff tells the story of firing a man who opened a meeting by saying, “We are here for Jesus, we are not here to serve a man.”

Pause there.

That sentence should be the safest sentence in any church on earth. It should land like gravity. It should be assumed, baked in, uncontested. Instead, in Boshoff’s telling, it was treated like an insurrection. A threat. A disruption to the proper order of things.

Why?

Because in Christ-less kingdoms, reminding people that Christ is King sounds like rebellion. Remember Herod? Yeah, just like that.

You can see it in every megachurch—stage lights, cameras, curated atmosphere, the slow drift from shepherding souls to managing optics. The pastor is no longer just a pastor. He’s a visionary. A brand. A builder of movements. He casts vision, not sermons. He doesn’t teach God’s word—he steers destinies. The vocabulary changes. The posture shifts. The theology moves quietly underneath it all.

And then one day someone says, “We are here for Jesus,” and it feels subversive.

That’s not paranoia in isolation, it’s a system that has already elevated the man higher than he realizes.

Boshoff reportedly made clear he would remove anyone who spoke negatively about his wife. Loyalty tests. Guardrails around criticism. But then—years later—he divorces her in secret and the church is not told. The disclosure comes only after exposure more than a year later. The same leader who demands protective silence around his household quietly restructures his own without transparency.

This is not small. Scripture lays out qualifications for elders—not as suggestions or PR guidelines, but as marks of spiritual fitness. A pastor is not above scrutiny. He is called to it. If he cannot withstand the phrase “We are here for Jesus,” then something foundational has cracked.

And here’s the thing—this isn’t just Boshoff.

Look at the broader ecosystem. Steven Furtick has built a multi-campus machine that looks, feels, and operates like a spiritual production studio. The lighting, the cinematic preaching style, the careful avoidance of hard cultural edges—it’s engineered. It’s controlled. It’s polished.

And from the youngest age, it’s taught that it is all about…the man.

The sermons center around destiny, calling, overcoming. Rarely around repentance, judgment, the wrath of God, or the narrow road. The controversial issues? Sidestepped. The cultural flashpoints? Softened. The brand remains intact.

When your platform reaches that size, silence is not neutrality. Silence is strategy.

And Ed Young Jr.—another architect of the spectacle model—long ago removed the barrier between shepherd and showman. The megachurch template is now familiar, curated experiences, personality-driven messaging, strategic emotional pacing, and a hierarchy that insulates the senior leader from meaningful accountability. The pastor is the gravitational center. Everything orbits him.

This is how altars unto men are built.

No one stands up and declares, “Let us worship me.” It’s subtler than that. It’s structural, cultural, and habitual. The stage grows larger. The man’s name becomes synonymous with the ministry. Criticism is framed as rebellion. Loyalty is framed as spirituality. And slowly—imperceptibly—the pastor functions as high priest of his own kingdom.

Vision becomes revelation. Dissent becomes disloyalty. Transparency becomes optional.

And then someone says, “We are here for Jesus,” and the machinery shudders.

You want to know the diagnostic question? It’s simple. Who can contradict the man publicly without consequences? Who can correct him? Who can confront him? If the answer is “no one,” then what you have is not elder-led church governance. You have monarchy.

The tragedy is not that these men built large churches. Large churches are not inherently evil. The tragedy is that scale magnifies ego if ego is left unchecked. When thousands cheer you weekly, when your face fills LED screens, when every sermon clip is edited and distributed to millions—the temptation to confuse your voice with authority itself becomes suffocating.

Christ said the greatest among you must be servant of all. He washed feet. He did not fire men for insisting He be central. The apostle Paul confronted Peter publicly when he erred. Authority in the New Testament is accountable authority. It is cruciform.

But in the megachurch kingdom-builder model, authority often ascends and then it demands. It then must protect its own image. It quarantines dissent and becomes allergic to being reminded that it is not the Head.

And when a pastor begins to functionally operate as if he must be served, he has stepped into territory reserved for God alone. Not doctrinally, perhaps. He would never say it out loud. But practically? Operationally? In how power is structured and guarded? It’s there.

Altars unto self.

That’s what these sprawling, multi-campus empires risk becoming. Carefully constructed monuments to visionaries who slowly drift from under the Word to standing over it.

You can smell it when it happens. It’s not incense. It’s ego.

And when reminding a room that Jesus is King gets you fired from church staff, the problem is no longer subtle. It’s shrieking in agony.

The church does not need more architects of empire. It needs shepherds who tremble at the Word. Men who can hear, without flinching, “We are here for Jesus,” and respond, “Amen. Always.”