The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
The Platform Trap: When Influence Grows Faster than Character
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This podcast episode, hosted by Todd Rhoades from Chemistry Staffing, explores the impact and consequences of celebrity culture within church leadership and addresses the moral and ethical failures that can lead to a fall from ministry. Through the story of 'Jason,' an example of a pastor whose initial success masked underlying issues, the episode delves into the importance of sustaining spiritual authenticity over public image. The podcast offers insights into how pastoral leaders can prevent the pitfalls of unbalanced public and private lives and includes an invitation to self-assess via the 'When the Church Falls' website.• Rising fame and demands can erode a leader's spiritual foundation.• Celebrity culture within church leadership can lead to significant failures.• It's crucial to maintain spiritual authenticity and accountability.• Pastoral leaders should focus on shepherding hearts, not on platform-building.• Opportunities to assess vulnerabilities in church leadership are available.
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Jason never set out to build a platform. He was 34, he was a young lead pastor, he was a a fairly basic communicator, and then one Sunday he preached just a raw message on anxiety. And somebody clipped it, posted it online, and it went viral. And all of a sudden, invites came, conferences, podcasts, eventually a book deal, and from a distance, man, it looked like a flourishing tree. But underground, the roots were just dying out. And when the winds came, the whole thing snapped. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. And today we are continuing in our series called When the Church Falls. We're taking a look at church falls and leadership failures, moral failures, financial failures, anything that will disqualify somebody from ministry. And during this, we started the series yesterday, and this week and next week, we're going to have 10 episodes specifically on this topic of when leaders fall, when churches fall. And our what we're trying to solve here is what happened, what are some of the common threads that happen when a leader falls? Yesterday we determined that this the headline breaks, but the story's been going on for a long time. And we're going to continue that theme a little bit today, but over the next two weeks, we're going to look at hopefully some remedies. What I want to do during this series, and what I wanted to do in this new book that I've written called When the Church Falls, is I really wanted to try and have this be a preventative measure for all pastors, all leaders. You don't have to be a senior pastor. A lot of worship pastors fall. And I I saw a story last week about a youth pastor that failed pretty dramatically. So wherever you are in ministry, just know that, man, when you fall, not only if you're a plumber and you have an affair on your wife, you're probably not going to lose your job. You might lose your wife, but you're not going to lose your job. When you're in ministry and you have an affair, you're going to, first of all, you're going to lose your job. You lose all of your livelihood. You good chance you may lose your wife and your family, but you're not just going to lose your job, you're going to lose your career, and you're going to be extremely embarrassed. And all that aside, the harm that you do to every bit of ministry that you've done up to that point, the harm that you do to your church, to your community, and the people in your community, the devastating blow that you give to their faith is just absolutely almost unmeasurable. So if there's a way that we can kind of work together and work through this and talk through this over the next week and a half or so, I want to do that and maybe we'll save somebody that's listening from what would have been a devastating fall. Alright. So let's start here. Let's go back to our star our story, our hypothetical story about Jason. For Jason, the spotlight felt good. It feels good. The spotlight feels good. I don't care who you are. But that's not the problem. Nobody dreams of becoming a spiritual celebrity. Maybe some people do. But most people don't. That's not what they aspire to. They get into the ministry to be a pastor. They get into the ministry to follow what they feel Jesus is doing and calling in their life. But here's the thing, once the attention starts, it's really hard to look away. You're seen, you're respected, which is a huge deal for pastors, right? You're seen, you're respected, and you're wanted. And if you've spent years just quietly laboring in ministry and suddenly I think people line up to hear you can feel almost like justice, but it's not a rival, it's just a dopamine hit dressed in spiritual language. Affirmation without intimacy and applause without accountability. Some leaders, and I'm gonna say it, I might get in trouble for saying it, but I've seen this over the years. Some leaders are just too talented for their own good. They're too talented for their own good, and that's the hard truth, right? They can fill a room, they can move a crowd, they can communicate powerfully. Man, they are an unbelievable communicator. But inside, inside they're depleted and they're insecure and they're totally isolated. And because the fruit looks good, the big crowds are there, the viral clips, nobody really even thinks to check the soil. We elevate in the church, especially. Man, we elevate the most talented, not the most tethered. And we often praise results and overlook the roots. Man, I've seen this oftentimes. And in one of my past lives, I spent about a decade working at Leadership Network, which is no longer around anymore. I really enjoyed my time at Leadership Network and still keep in touch with a lot of the colleagues that I worked with there. It was a great time. We worked with, if you're not familiar, Leadership Network, I worked behind the scenes with mostly larger churches, not all, but mostly larger churches. And we get to work, I get to work with some really incredible leaders, but I also got to work with a lot of platform people. And some of the people that we worked with are still growing strong in ministry, and others, what I've been talking about exactly happened. It's like their character was not as strong as their theology. And here's the point I want to make. Okay. And I'm not against there are leaders that I follow. There are leaders that I used to follow that are no longer able to lead, right? I'm not saying that you don't read books from famous pastors or that you don't listen to famous pastor sermons or you don't admire and respect different people. But I will say this, and this is important. Celebrity, celebrity is a terrible pastor. Celebrity is a terrible pastor. Take a look at the last 10, 15, 20 years. Look at some of the examples. I talk about these a little bit in the book, and the book is not a tell-all, it's not a scathing. I don't dish dirt or anything. I don't, there's enough people out there doing that. There's enough books out there doing that. What I'm trying to do is figure out what happened and how we can make sure that it doesn't happen again. But celebrity is a terrible pastor. Look at Mars Hill, look at Hillsong, look at Will Willow Creek. Look at Gateway for Crying Out Loud is a recent example. In each case, the leader became the brand. Okay. And once that brand cracked, everything just around it started to crumble as well. Those churches didn't just lose a pastor. A lot of the people that went to those churches, a lot of the pastors that followed those pastors, they lost trust. The church lost momentum. People's faith in the church was crumbled. And most of those leaders didn't set out to become celebrities. They really didn't. They were just gifted. They were gifted. And then they found themselves to be over time unguarded. Jesus rejected celebrity. And sometimes I wonder if Jesus did, didn't chase celebrity. Why do we chase celebrity as much? Jesus had crowds too. He had a lot of people following him. He had so many people following him, he had to get in a boat and get out in the middle of the lake, right? He had a platform, but he ran from it. He withdrew to the lonely places. He delegated. He told people to keep quiet about his miracles. And he walked away from that applause. Jesus didn't need to be seen to be secure. So why do we? Here's the bottom line for today. Your soul wasn't built for the spotlight. You were called to shepherd not to perform. You were called to shepherd not to build your platform. So here's my action step, my question for you today. Is your public ministry outpacing your private devotion? Let me repeat that. Is your public ministry outpacing your private devotion? This week I want you to do something kingdom focused that nobody sees. Nobody sees it. Do something kingdom focused that only you and Jesus will see. Alright, this is part of a special series from my brand new book. It's called When the Church Falls. And if you want access, to access, assess where you are, not access, assess where you are or where your church is or where your church might be vulnerable, there's a free assessment that I've set up. You can go to the book's website, WhenTheChurchfalls.com, and you can grab a copy of the book there. I would appreciate that. But to go to the website when the churchfalls.com and room on there for you to take an assessment. It's absolutely free. You can take it as a pastor. If you're a board member or an elder, you can take it as a board member or an elder. And that will tell you a risk assessment as far as how far you are. Because I'm telling you, I mentioned this yesterday. I don't think any pastor, anybody wakes up and says, I'm going to do something really stupid today. I'm going to do something that's going to cost me my career today. Take the assessment, grab a copy of the book over at win the churchfalls.com. And if you need to talk through any of this, man, if you're close to a fall and you just you don't have anybody to talk to, hey, I would love to talk with you. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Hope you'll join me right here again tomorrow. We're going to continue this series. Hopefully you find this as interesting. Like I said, this is one of my passions. Hopefully you find this interesting as well. And as your introspective about everything we're talking about, hopefully this will uh help you stronger in your own leadership journey.
