I was born in 1980 and introduced to comic books by my uncle in 1986. I read his collection when he was not at home and started my own around that time. I was mostly a Marvel reader and a big fan of the various X-Men titles. Those are the titles I started collecting again about three years ago.

Some of them are really inexpensive. For example, I managed to buy the entire first run of X-Factor for about $200. But The Uncanny X-Men is an extremely popular title, especially because of the forthcoming movie. My goal has been to collect issues 93 through 300, since those were the ones I read as a kid. Some of those comics have gotten insanely expensive. There are more than a couple of issues that would cost what I paid for the entire collection of X-Factor.

So I’ve been looking for what you call raw books. These are books that have not been graded. Grading is where you assess the condition of a comic book on a 10-point scale and then put it in what’s called a slab, basically a sealed plastic container designed so you can view the front and back covers while protecting the condition of the comic book. Graded comics are considerably more expensive than so-called raw comics.

Well, I’m pretty devoted to this quest. I don’t want to overspend money on it. But there’s another problem I have with graded comics in a slab, and that’s the one that relates to this entire conversation about ownership.

The purpose of comic books is to provide a visual story a reader can enjoy. If you slab them up, you can’t read them. And I want to read them.

Now, of course, you could buy two copies: one that’s slabbed and one that’s not. But that’s expensive, and still, the slabbed copy becomes something else. People will say it’s an investment. It’s something you can hand down to your kids. True, but not as a comic book. They won’t read it. They won’t get to know the characters and enjoy it anywhere near the way you enjoyed it as a kid, which is why it matters to you.

For me, I moved from town to town year after year when I was small. Back then, comic books were sold in drugstores and grocery stores, and my mom would let me go to the magazine section and sit there and read comics while she shopped, and often she would buy me one. Then I’d take those comics home, read them, trace the pictures, and read them again. They were kind of like friends. They were a comfort, and that’s why I like them.

I’m buying them to read them again in their original format, and I’m trying to share that love with my kids. But it’ll never be for them what it was for me, because we don’t move around a lot, comics aren’t sold in grocery stores anymore, and the circumstances are very different. But they certainly wouldn’t appreciate them for what they are if they were just slabbed up, like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.

So I do want to hand these down to my kids, but not necessarily so they can sell them and get the cash. I want them to enjoy something their father enjoyed. If they sell them, that’s their decision. But I’m not presenting them merely as something you can cash in. Their value isn’t primarily monetary, not to me.

This brings me to home ownership.

This is a subject I care about deeply because I have children, and I want them to own a home. Moreover, I am a pastor, and I care about the young families in my church, especially their ability to own a home.

The housing market has been insane for many years, and based on what I’m seeing, it will undergo an incredible correction sometime late next year. There are many factors, but a big one is that the older generation is aging out of their homes. Many of these homes have exponentially increased in value, but there aren’t enough buyers who can afford them.

As I read on this topic, I notice that people think of houses primarily as financial investments: something they buy that increases in dollar value, which they can then sell for more dollars and perhaps upgrade to a house that is better in some way.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying and selling your house for a profit. What I do think is that a house is, at its core, more than a financial investment. It is your home.

It is the place where you share meals together, where kids learn to walk, and, in some cases, where they were even born. It is a place where memories are created, a place of safety and warmth. The doorframes have little lines on them reminding you how tall you were when you were two, five, and thirteen. It’s a home.

It is something that can be passed down from one generation to the next. When a family member gives another family member the childhood home, it’s much more than a financial gift. It’s a little baton of history. It’s the setting of their family’s story. It’s a store of wealth that, yes, has financial value, but that’s only part of it.

I don’t like how we treat comic books and homes first and foremost as financial investments that allow us to get more USD at some point in the future. It seems to me that we are allowing the worldly materialism of our day to rob us of enjoying things for what those things actually are.

I live in a house that’s just under 2,800 square feet on three acres of land, with a large barn and garage. For a family of ten, we’re packed in pretty tight. We have five small bedrooms. But Hudson moved out in January. He doesn’t live there anymore. And while we’re not rushing anyone out the door, our smallish home is going to get more spacious every couple of years going into the future. Soon, except when the grandkids come over, we’ll have more room than we know what to do with.

I don’t want to upgrade to a bigger house. I don’t want to lose the memories. My son Pascal is buried on this property. My son Foxe was born in this house. This is our home, and I want it to stay in the family. I want it to be part of our roots.

The only childhood home I have is my grandmother’s farm, which was sold to a non-family member in 1997. It killed me. I actually cried. All the other places I lived in were rentals, usually for only a year. And the apartment I lived in the longest in Bloomington was such a dump that it was knocked down and replaced when they built a larger bridge over Tanners Creek.

I’ve been unable, to a certain degree, to show my children where I grew up. Yes, the cities, but not so much the homes. I love that my wife’s childhood home is being kept in the family and that my children have stayed the night there with their grandmother.

I am very interested in accumulating wealth for my family, but of a robust sort: a wealth of traditions, a wealth of skills, a wealth of memories, the wealth of a place where you belong.

Stories are written to be read, and houses are built to become homes. And when possible, some houses become homes for generations. In those situations, ownership isn’t just the possession of a financial asset, but a much more robust sort of wealth.

Painting: Sofiya Bryuhovich

First, let me just say you can all unfollow me, and my life will be just fine. This platform has been fun and helped me get my writing out there, but I don't need it. It's just a cool opportunity God's given me. And if it was just for a season, that's fine.

Second comment: unfollowing people because they disagree with you on something is going to increasingly narrow who you allow to speak into your life until you only want to hear your own thoughts. This will make you into an idiot.

Third comment: many know that through my grandma's side, I have Jewish ancestry. And when I first got converted, I heard all the dispensational nonsense about how I was, like, doubly special. And I rejected it because I came to Christ the same way anyone does, which is by faith and through His finished work on the cross. I had people trying to introduce me as a Messianic Jew. I am not. I am a Christian.

And the Judaism that arose leading up to and after the fall of the temple is one that rejected Christ and later took on a very different shape than what we see in the Old Testament. There aren't the same. I was so aggressive about this in my late teens that when we would have Messianic Jewish friends over, I would serve ham and cheese sandwiches to them. In them, I saw the Galatian error, and I wanted to confront it. I still do.

I fully rejected dispensationalism back in 2002 and came to understand that it's wrong to think of the Israel of today as a direct analog of the Israel of Scripture. And therefore, I've never been a Zionist in the way that most people use that word. But people do use that word in all sorts of ways.

My heart toward these Jews would be something like Paul's. I want to see them repent of their many heresies and sins and become biblical Christians. The way I differ from Paul is that these are not my countrymen. I'm mostly Irish white trash from the northern border of Appalachia. If my heart belongs to any people particularly, it's those people. But I do want to see all the nations bow down to King Jesus.

Fourth, it is sad how disgusting and decayed this entire influencer ecosystem has gotten in the Reformed or Reformed-adjacent world. People define themselves by who they pay some small amount every month, get some sort of supporter mug from, and listen to tell them what to think. Instead of helping people discover a sort of biblical individuality, they've traded groupthink of one sort for another sort. Of course, not all of them. But how can we speak if we are constantly required to use mind-numbing precision?

It reminds me of girls back in elementary school who identified themselves by which one of the New Kids on the Block was their favorite. "Jordan is my favorite."

Again, follow me or don't follow me. I follow all sorts of people I disagree with, some in major ways. Sometimes I do it because there was a connection from years ago. I usually don't cut off old friends because they took a turn I despise. If I'm called to love my enemies, certianly I can love those how are outside "my camp." Other times, I think they're worth considering. But having your identity defined by who you follow and whether or not they're telling you what you want to hear is a sad affair. And if that's you, stop it.

Lastly, I guess I'll say that when the crowd demands that I give them something, it is my natural inclination to deprive them of that very thing. And these days, it's the constant scream of, "Declare your faithfulness by talking about the things we want to talk about" or "Disavow this person or you're guilty of whatever we claim they are guilty of."

No, I don't think I will.

I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing. And if you move on, cool. It's less distraction from the mission.

I appreciate those who give me a hearing. You don't have to. Your time is precious, and you decide to spend a little bit of it with me. Thank you.

If you want to know what I want from you, I'll tell you. It's the same thing that the older Christian men who poured into me wanted from me. I want you to be strong and immovable in the faith. I want you to be a person who thinks biblically and can stand against the crowd when needed. I want you to be a committed churchman whose energy is primarily invested in his local church and his local community, and, of course, first and foremost, the family God has blessed him with. I also want you to know that several years ago I got to look under the hood of the manosphere and conservative influencers from close up and discovered a lot of sad, lonely people who tended to not practice what they preached and often had weird sexual proclivities (a lot of bisexuals in those circles). So, yeah, as pills go, I'm pretty black pilled on those worlds.

What I write, on the whole, is my attempt to help you accomplish those things and, to a lesser degree, avoid getting sucked into some of the worlds I began to venture into.

Just as you have no particular obligation to listen to me, though strangers on the internet sometimes seem to think otherwise, I also have no obligation to give you what you want.

Phil Collins was right.

Alright, back to my regular content...

I am all for redeeming the concept of ambition and have written on it quite a bit. It’s good to aspire to great things for a great God. And it’s good to test your limits and capacity. That being said, a lot of what people call ambition is no more than discontentment with their lot in life. And consequently, they exhaust themselves in the pursuit of something that likely won’t happen and, if it does, will not be as satisfying as they imagine.

As a related side note, I do think this is one of the great sources of irritability and anxiety that I see ruling over so many right now.

The obvious key to getting enough is realizing that nothing will ever be enough if you aren’t right with God. God, after all, is the only true God; therefore, the promises He makes, He keeps. Anything else that we look to for ultimate satisfaction is a false god, and like all idols, they make false promises. So contentment cascades down from the fountain of life that is Jesus.

I say cascades down because being right with God is the beginning of being able to know your place in creation and with others. It allows you to start to determine what is enough in all these other contexts. It would be a super-spiritual mistake to say all that matters is that you are right with God. Yes, it matters. Yes, it is the main thing. But no, it’s not the only thing. Being right with the limitless God brings into focus your limits, and it changes how you labor and what you labor for.

I just got done preaching Psalm 8, and one of the great takeaways is that though I am small compared to the great expanse above me, and even smaller compared to the God who made both, I matter to Him. Maybe I don’t matter to you. Certainly, I don’t matter to a whole lot of people. And maybe if you compare me to someone else, they are greater in whatever sense. But the God who made all and who is greater than all cares about me, and because of the work of His Son, I have His approval. Paul said that no one stood with him before Caesar, but the Lord did, and that was enough to allow him to stand boldly for the gospel. It didn’t mean he didn’t care about other people or that he didn’t want to see his mission complete. He did. But he could labor without anxiety, without worry, because his labor was done in the Lord, for the Lord. And whatever he got done was enough.

Much more could be said about enough, and I certainly have more thoughts. But one little application: it is my observation that social media is driven by comparison. It’s a place for you to come and look at people who have much more than you. And if you could be like them, then you would have enough. Or perhaps, to flip it, it’s a place for you to come and look down on people who have much less than you, meaning that you are better than them because you have more. More of what? More of whatever.

And, of course, comparison is the thief of joy, but it’s also the seedbed of bitterness and envy. And if you hang out in the wrong algorithm, it becomes a toxic sludge of discontentment that makes you radioactive in all of life, and nothing will ever be enough, even God Himself.

But there is an odd paradox at play that I’ve discovered. If a man’s legacy is to grow the right way, he will become a smaller part of it. Maybe an integral part, but still, what once was pages about him will, Lord willing, become a sentence or maybe two.

Let me explain. Take East River Church. In terms of the means God has used, East River exists because of me. I fell in love with church planting and the east side of Cincinnati right around 1998 or so and had long planned to end up over here doing exactly what I’m doing now. I did all the initial work and took all the initial steps. But even before the church launched, other people started getting involved.

Probably most central to those early days was David Pryor, who has long been my co-laborer and ministry partner. Emily and I decided that we would not go forward with the church plant if David and Becky wouldn’t join us. And they did. Immediately, the vision I had for East River broadened to include David and Becky’s personalities and gifts. He and I are both particular in our own ways, and one of the reasons East River has a very different vibe is because it’s not the product of a single individual.

As the church has grown and matured over the last six years, more and more people have become integral to it. More and more people are part of East River’s story. And while I may have been the one who got this thing started, I am not the one who keeps it going. There are a lot of us.

And if this church should achieve my hope, to be an intergenerational church that maintains its commitment to doctrinal orthodoxy in the place God put it, I will become a smaller part of its story. Thirty years from now, I will be retired or with the Lord. East River will be under the care of a different pastor. Maybe a couple of elders will remain who were there while I was there. But for most people, I will be, at best, a name that comes up in a membership class or something.

I don’t think that’s a failure. I think that’s success.

Succession requires that you sacrifice your hubris and ego so that something else can grow and involve other people. It is one of the great tests of whether something is about you or about others and the Lord.

There have been some high-profile failures in my theological circles over the last ten years or so, where one man, or a couple of men, pulled down an entire ministry when they fell. G3 seems to be an example of this. I don’t know all the facts about that, and I don’t really care to. But I am willing to go out on a limb and say they wanted a great legacy, yet they entangled it with themselves, and therefore it could never grow past them. They became their own limitation.

Sometimes the limitation isn’t a matter of size but longevity. You can build something very big and still have it all be about you. But it’s rare for those sorts of things to last very long.

So as I build a church, build a family, build a company, and build a legacy, I know one of the things that will help protect it is simply focusing on succession: preparing the next generation so they can prepare the next generation, who then prepares the next generation.

I do want to build big things, but that requires me to become a smaller part of them. And the more resigned I become to this, the easier it is to enjoy the awesome things God is accomplishing through others.

If my great-grandson tells my great-great-grandson that he never really knew me, but he knows that I was a hard worker who loved Jesus and loved his people, I think that will be a fantastic legacy.

To see the work increase, you must embrace decreasing. And there’s a lot of freedom in that.

There are times when God pours out some sort of unexpected blessing. Maybe it’s a financial blessing that came from an inheritance that wasn’t on your radar. Maybe some chronic pain or sickness was suddenly lifted, and you have new vigor and passion for life. It could be something small. It could be something large. But whatever it is, its introduction into your life results in true gratefulness unto the Lord.

What I’ve observed, however, is that if that blessing lasts for more than a moment, over time it starts to become an expectation. It’s the new baseline of your existence. You expect that money. You expect that health. You expect that friendship. You expect that job. You expect that pay. And if you’re not careful, you begin to think it’s something you’re entitled to. So much so that, if your expectations are not met, you believe you’ve been robbed. It can get so ridiculous that the blessing that at first caused an explosion of thankfulness toward God can later, when removed, lead the individual to doubt God’s very goodness.

This is one of the reasons pain, suffering, and difficulty in general can be so spiritually helpful. These things remind us that our baseline, that is, our expectations, is very presumptuous. The things we take for granted are gifts. And often we don’t recognize that until they’ve been removed.

Much of my life is built around my ability to both think and speak with clarity. During a very rough season a couple years ago, due to all the pain and struggle in our life, the loss of normal sleep, and a poor diet and lack of exercise, I found my mind very foggy and not as quick as I had come to expect. Things that usually took me a few minutes started stretching into an hour. And I realized that I had presumed upon mental clarity. Many men and women were once witty and great conversational partners but now can’t tell one person from the next due to dementia. As I reflected on that, I repented to God for being so presumptuous.

I also tend to lose my voice for a couple of weeks (sometimes even months) every several years. This all stretches back to a time in my late twenties when I was legitimately unable to talk for a couple weeks. For someone who’s made his way through life as part of the chatter class, it was a wake-up call. I possess thousands and thousands of gifts that I don’t recognize as such. Some big, like the ability to think and speak; some small, like a good cup of coffee. But all of them are from God.

One reason I’ve been meditating on this is that I have found people’s sense of entitlement to be shocking. The things they believe are owed to them aren’t owed to anyone. Many of the things that our forefathers in America enjoyed were largely gifts, and those blessings became our baseline. And now that God has removed them, no doubt in part as a judgment, we doubt His goodness. Of course, we should instead be discovering our presumptuousness, recognizing how little we thank Him for all the other gifts we still have.

I’m using gifts and blessings interchangeably, so I’m not thinking of “gift” in a really technical way. Keep that in mind as I say this. There are some blessings that take the form of a partial reward. Part of our problem these days is that we’ve allowed blessings to become the baseline. We expect these things just to come to us, just to be there when we want or need them. But God, being a good Father, gives and takes away in an effort to shape us into virtuous men and women. Which is one of the reasons He blesses things like diligence and true cheerfulness. He blesses them not because He has a debt He has to pay, but because He has children He wants to encourage in the right way.

Painting: Lisa Godin

First, the project itself: it’s a documentary by a Christian director examining the history and consequences of feminism and offering a biblical alternative.

Second, here’s why I’m backing it. I’ve known Les Lanphere, the director, for a while, and I know him to be both a talented filmmaker and a principled Christian man. I trust him to tackle this subject biblically and with intensity, but without unnecessary harshness or shock-jockery.

I also believe this is one of the defining issues of our day, and it’s one I’ve worked hard to address for most of my adult life. Feminism has obviously affected men and society as a whole, but now that I’m the father of three daughters and have a daughter-in-law, I’ve become even more concerned about what it has robbed women of: the beauty of their unique, God-given design and purpose in His world.

So, for me, this is a trustworthy creator tackling a crucial subject in which I’m personally invested.

I’m not yet sure to what extent I’ll eventually be involved in the documentary itself, but I backed the project for $300 today, and I’ll probably increase that once I’ve had a little more time to consider it.

In the meantime, I want to challenge 50 of you to back the project for at least $5 each. That may not sound like much, but it helps. And the more people who get behind the project and follow its progress, the more attention it can gain.

Even if you can only give a few dollars, you can play a real part by backing it, following it, and helping get the word out.

The growth of the brand and the business is directly tied to his ability to stay interesting and generate attention. If he removes himself, then both the brand and the business begin to suffer. So essentially, whatever he’s trying to build is not scalable and depends on the founder.

In the business world, a normal business can usually hire someone to take on most of the founder’s functions. But not so with a personal brand, because it’s tied to a particular individual. So you can bring in people to help you edit videos and write scripts and all that, but you’re still essentially irreplaceable.

Worse yet, these sorts of brands/businesses are built around grabbing people’s attention. And people are really, really into novelty. I always think about Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17. Luke’s critique of these people is found in verse 21, where he says, “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” And that is how we’re wired, and that goes for Christians as well.

Anyhow, you have to keep reinventing yourself to stay interesting and grab attention. And that is hard to do. Even the biggest names come and go.

Lawrence’s eventual pivot in the video is that you have to take whatever influence you’ve built via your personal brand and, instead of making it about attention, make it about trust. Your ability to endorse something doesn’t require the same attention-getting sort of work. And that way, you can prop up something much bigger than yourself that will outlast you.

Anyhow, all this reminds me of what pastors who have any form of online presence need to wrestle with. And I certainly did a couple years ago and made some big changes.

I’m gonna take a slight detour that I think will ultimately be related. Recently, I saw someone refer to me as an influencer pastor, and I don’t take that as a compliment. And that’s because I see a difference between being a person of influence and being an influencer.

Influence is something that’s built over time, that’s tied to real-world accomplishments, like building an institution, whether it’s a church or a family. It could also be tied to just someone mastering a craft or leading some group through some sort of difficult crisis. This real work and these real relationships produce influence. And consequently, influence is something that gathers slowly and has strong ties locally. It’s tied to a particular set of people. And for that reason, if a platform should disappear, the influence the person has gained should still remain for the most part.

An influencer, on the other hand, is a person whose vocation is tied up in gaining attention. And central to that work is remaining very visible and interesting. The influence that they have is with an audience with whom they have weak real-world ties, as opposed to their local community. And their work is keeping that audience engaged by staying interesting, which almost always requires recreation and novelty, such as Lawrence talked about in his video.

A person of influence, because their influence emanates from a local reality, is generally answerable to people who can actually confront them, which is quite different from an influencer whose accountability is derived from metrics such as audience capture and engagement. That, in turn, favors flattery rather than confrontation. So the person of influence can say hard things, and because that is coming from a place of respect and real relationships, usually can survive. The influencer has a more tenuous relationship with his audience that favors pandering, by which I mean to say the influencer tends to tell people things they already believe, but just does it with a silver tongue.

Influence builds over decades through just hard plodding. An influencer can shoot out of nowhere if a piece of content he created catches the algorithm right and can ride that for a while. But it will start to decline because attention, the attention of a mass audience, is usually tied to novelty, and therefore it would favor recreation.

Now, of course, you can be both an influencer and a person of influence, but that’s very rare, and it’s hard to serve two masters, that being a local audience and a broader audience. One will always suffer. And because that broad audience doesn’t have as much real-world conflict, it’s the one that tends to win.

And this tension matters to me because it runs directly against what I’m ultimately trying to build.

My driving mission is to create institutions that are generational, meaning long-lasting. In particular, institutions that outlast me. I raise children who raise children who carry forth everything I want the Foster name to represent in the real world. The work that I did on manhood and sexuality was always tied to my desire to establish intergenerational households. I want godly, believing great-grandchildren. That’s what I’m after. And that means me being seen as awesome doesn’t really matter as much as me helping raise up my sons and daughters to be godly men and women of character.

The same applies to East River Church. I want it to be something that lasts far beyond me. I’m working hard at raising up leaders in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s because I want to see solid generational succession. My mission is so much bigger than me, and therefore it can’t terminate with me. I can’t make it about me, or it will fall apart.

So you can see how this is connected to my personal goals, but I do think it can connect to any pastor. I made a decision at the very beginning of all this that I would remain bivocational and have a heavy focus on where I’m at locally. Bivocationalism, at least the way it’s played out for me, means that I don’t need money from my social media, books, or conference speaking to make ends meet. And all that is much less than most people would think, since I don’t really lean into optimizing it.

I always saw the influencer lifestyle and temptation as a direct threat to what I was trying to accomplish. So I have increasingly avoided it while doing my best to hang on to some public influence without sacrificing the greater mission. Anyhow, let me connect this directly to why it’s problematic for the pastor.

But the problem is bigger than what this kind of influence can do to the pastor. It can also shape the church around him in unhealthy ways.

There is no doubt in my mind that God works through personalities, and a pastor can actually use his reputation effectively to build his local church. However, there is a very powerful temptation for men to use the church to build their reputation, and in doing so, the church’s identity becomes enmeshed with the pastor’s identity. And just like a personal brand can be commercially powerful, a personality-driven church can be powerful. People are drawn to people they feel like they can relate to, especially if that person allows himself to be idealized. He almost becomes an avatar for them in real life. And that can attract a lot of people and lead to rapid growth. But the problem is that the church will suffer if that man suffers. Their fates become intimately intertwined in a way that’s not good.

Lawrence points out that with personal brands, the influencer becomes the marketing. This results in something that’s called key man risk. The growth and morale of the congregation end up being substantially dependent on that one man’s presence. And if that pastor should retire, die, or move away, that church will really struggle. I remember a pastor on staff telling me that they had to conceal whether or not the senior pastor was preaching on a given Sunday because they would see a massive drop in attendance, something like 30%. That is not good if you’re attempting to build an institution that will outlast a single man.

Another reality is that a pastor with a strong personal brand makes achieving healthy succession all the more difficult. I remember I was doing pulpit supply early in my ministry at a church that had a brass statue of its founder in the foyer. And they asked me what it would take to get me to come on staff. And I said that brass statue would have to come out of the foyer because I cannot live up to that. His daughter, who was easily in her late 60s at the time and was leading up the pastoral search committee, said she couldn’t do that. You don’t want to make the already difficult transfer of an office all the more impossible by intertwining it with the transfer of a personality. It won’t work. Churches that are built around a single personality always suffer, and we’ve seen that with a lot of the new Calvinist pastors who rose to prominence and have recently passed away.

In his video, Lawrence makes a strong distinction between attention and trust. An influencer pastor can generate a lot of buzz, but can he also build long-lasting trust? I want to come back to that issue of trust shortly. But pastors who are good at building buzz and attention and who have large public profiles can hide the institutional weakness of what they’ve built. We’ve seen this in some of those parachurch ministries, and I’m sure it goes for churches as well, where the founder got caught in some horrendous sin and the entire thing fell apart without him. It’s a massive mistake to treat buzz and attention as an indicator of institutional health. It’s foolish to measure the health of your church by how influential your pastor is. Really, from an organizational standpoint, what you should be asking is: Is he increasingly making himself unnecessary?

Lawrence talked about how a lot of guys think a personal brand will lead to greater freedom, but because they have to create so much content to keep attention and interest, they start to treat everyday life as a content-generation opportunity. You can see how this is especially dangerous in the ministry, where we have to operate with lots of discretion and be careful about what we use as sermon material and online content. Also, you can see how there would be a deep temptation to have an immediate take on whatever is trending that day. Hot takes perform well online, but they rarely produce stability in your people. And the influencer pastor almost subconsciously lives underneath the gaze of his audience. Even if they’re not looking over his shoulder, he acts as if they are. And he becomes an increasingly divided man between the congregation that’s actually in front of him and a much larger digital congregation that lives in his mind. You don’t want to just be interested in people who are interested in you, but in the particular group of sheep that God has given to your charge.

One last thing that really stuck out to me as I thought about this video is that influencer pastors have lots of fanboys and can even attract fanboys to join their church who think they’re awesome. They have these idealized pictures of these people in their minds. They have what’s come to be called parasocial attachment. It makes them feel intimately connected to someone they don’t even know. But as is well known, the same emotional intensity that produces fanboys tends to turn them into haters down the line. They get disillusioned when they find out the pastor isn’t all they imagined him to be or all he allowed them to imagine he was.

And then, when they don’t become really close and aren’t friends, the people think years of following him online and liking his stuff and resharing his stuff are the same as years of actual interpersonal loyalty. And they feel betrayed by him and think, apparently I mean nothing to him. These people are vicious defenders of you one day, and then, after they have been at your church for a couple of months, are the ones online talking about how, “I lived inside that world, and I’ll tell you who these people really are.” Obviously, these people have problems. But the influencer pastor encourages such people in his church. I heard someone somewhere say that with these sorts of influence-based churches, apostasy from the fan club becomes its own sort of personal brand, which is an interesting idea to explore sometime.

So what’s the answer? Well, this is clearly another one of my brain-dump posts that hasn’t been carefully edited or smoothed out. But I like where Lawrence takes it. And that’s why I said I was going to come back to the issue of trust. Lawrence’s point is that it’s not wrong to become well-known, but you have to use your influence to build up institutions and make them more resilient. Whatever attention you have, you should use it to establish trust and move people to actually commit themselves, not just to you, but more importantly, to God and to the ministry of their local church.

It really is that simple. Are you using your influence to build something up rather than yourself? Or are you using it to just build trust in yourself? If God gives you a spotlight, do you shine it on yourself? Or do you shine it on him and the things he loves?

The goal of any pastor who cares about generational succession can be referred to as self-liquidating leadership. His goal is to build a church that’s increasingly capable of surviving without him. He raises up other men to preach. He lets another elder handle the difficult situation, knowing that he’ll do well and come out with more respect from the younger elders and people in the church. He uses his platform to pull up other people and celebrate their gifts. Instead of talking about his ministry, he talks about the ministry of our church.

If he does that, he can take his 15 minutes of fame, which is sure to fade, and use it to build up his church for the glory of God. So many people would trade a hundred-year orthodox church for a 20-year personal platform. This is foolishness. The greatest measure of whether or not you built well is what happens after you are no longer there to hold it together.

I love Brazilian steakhouses because I love meat. While I was on the business development team at Maddox, we routinely ate at Brazilian steakhouses, mostly Fogo de Chão. I’d always come home and tell my boys about how much meat we ate, how we got the meat sweats, and how glorious lamb is when it’s cooked right. Eventually, I brought most of my kids to a Brazilian steakhouse to enjoy the experience.

But my lovely wife, Emily, had never been to one.

I saw that Texas de Brazil had a steakhouse up by Kenwood Mall and said, “Hey, let’s just have the girls watch the little one, and we’ll sneak away for dinner there tonight.” She agreed, and we quickly got dressed and went up there.

It was good, but it was way too much food for my wife. She was not quite in a place to enjoy the glory of constant meat coming to your table the way I was. So after talking and having a glass of wine, we decided to take off.

But on the way out, we saw Barnes & Noble and decided to go in.

Barnes & Noble is near and dear to our hearts because it was often the site of our dates back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. We both loved books and people, and we would go to the Barnes & Noble in Florence, Kentucky, or down at Newport on the Levee, grab a coffee, look at some books, and get ourselves into discussions with people we had just met. Those conversations would often lead to discussions about the gospel.

Actually, while we were on our honeymoon on Sanibel Island, we went over to the Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers several days in because we had gotten bored. We struck up a conversation with a couple of strangers, became fast friends, and hung out with them even past closing. We sat on the bench in front of Barnes & Noble talking to them about Jesus and all sorts of things.

So, kind of out of nostalgia, we went in to check it out.

Right away, I noticed that while it had some of the old-school branding, it had a different feel. I would say it felt hyper-curated. Each table seemed to have more thought put into it. Obviously, the store was much smaller than the old stores, which were huge, with upstairs and downstairs.

I went upstairs to look at the trade paperbacks and comics. Sadly, they only had a small shelf, but they had a huge section for manga, which is another interesting conversation about how Japanese comics overtook American comics. But that’s a different article.

We both ended up buying some stuff and hanging out there for about 30 minutes. It was a good time, and it reminded me of our youth.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to return to Barnes & Noble. I love the discovery. Amazon is convenient, but it’s just not the same.

That’s been in the back of my head ever since. And recently, I stumbled across an interview with the newer CEO of Barnes & Noble talking about how they’re experiencing a resurgence, which is how all of this connects to a conference on localism.

You can listen to the eight-minute video. I think it’s worth it.

Or skip it and keep reading.

Essentially, Barnes & Noble had been struggling since the 2010s, closing stores, losing profits, and quickly running through six CEOs. In 2019, James Daunt took over to change the model back to being a bookstore that embraced limits and localized. Daunt wanted the locations to think like booksellars. He empowered the local stores to choose what they stocked, reordered, how they displayed, and even had the local media done by their local team. Daunt said they had “abandoned 100%” the old model of headquarters precisely dictating what every store did. Now, he said, “each store curates its own assortment, reorders its own books, does each to their own.” That’s why the Kenwood Store felt so hyper-curated to me. All of this is working; since 2019, they have opened 90 stores. Daunt attributes their renewed success to a form of localism. He said, “Most of that effort is being done at the local level,” he said. “What matters to us is what’s going on at the local level.”

I love this. And something like this seemed inevitable to me which brings me back to the conference.

County Before Country was a concept that came to me first as a tweet and then as a conference on what I called biblical localism. All I meant by biblical localism was the principle that Christians ought to give priority to the time, place, and people God has put around them.

People naturally want to take a principle like that and turn it into a blueprint or roadmap for exactly how to live it out. I’ve always resisted that. I think the principle itself is enough to get Christians unstuck and actually working. So at the conferences, I tried to invite speakers who were practicing what they preached, with a strong bias toward practical application.

For whatever reason, it attracted a lot of homesteaders and people whose idea of resisting the culture often dead-ended in the need for new militias. There were obviously all sorts of other people there, but that particular group was very vocal at the time, and I thought their vision was too small.

I’m all about gun rights. Gardens are good. Raising some of your own food is good. But localism is much bigger than any of that. It’s a principle that can be applied in all sorts of circumstances to all sorts of problems.

And I wasn’t particularly interested in building a brand or even a conference. I wanted a real network of doers. And when I say network, I don’t mean a bunch of names on a website. I mean people you actually know. You have their phone number. You’ve shared meals with them. You’ve shown them what you’re working on, and they’ve shown you what they’re working on.

We got some of that out of those first couple of conferences. So I thought it was better to pause while we were ahead rather than let the thing grow into something that wasted our time or, worse, undermined its original purpose.

Then this year, our church has been in the middle of buying a building, which we close on tomorrow. We appreciate your prayers. So we decided not to have a fall conference at all.

But I think it’s time to return to the topic.

County Before Country will be back Labor Day weekend 2027, and I think the theme will be ownership.

The advent of AI has added a whole new dimension to these questions. More and more of our lives can now be mediated through technologies and platforms we don’t own, operated by people we don’t know, from places we’ll never visit. And I think that makes it increasingly important for Christians to think about what it means to be owners rather than merely renters.

Which brings me back to Barnes & Noble.

The idea that everything can go digital, and that everybody actually wants it to, simply isn’t true. People were made to live in places and meet other people in places. We like physical things. We like places with character. We especially like things that belong to a particular place and remind us of that place. We also are getting sick of subscriptions (a form of renting) and what to own things.

As I’ve been saying for over a decade now, the future is local. The future is limited. The future is analog.

And I think increasingly, the future needs to be owned.

That’s what I hope for us to discuss at next year’s County Before Country conference.

First, as much as I hate the idea of a visionary, I know that vision matters in leadership. What I mean by vision is simply a mental picture of a task complete. So when you cast a vision, you’re using words and other tools to show people what can be accomplished if we work together toward a goal. Money and people follow vision. And so if your church is struggling, a lot of times it’s because there’s a lack of vision.

For example, for our size, our church was undergiving. But after we sat down and put together some stuff to communicate what was normal and our needs to get into this building, giving has almost doubled. People just didn’t understand, and we lacked clarity, so we made clarity. This is what average giving looks like in a church our size in the Midwest. If we can get up to this, this is what we’ll do with the money and how it’ll be an application of our mission. That’s vision casting.

The reason we hate the idea of vision so much is that a lot of men who claim to be visionaries are what I would call delusionaries. These are men who don’t know the difference between reverse engineering a plan rooted in reality and attempting to execute their fantastic dreams.

Many well-intentioned people have mistaken the daydreams of delusionaries for vision and sadly wasted sometimes a decade of their life. Therefore, pastors don’t want to look anything like some cheap Christianese version of Steve Jobs. But you do need to have a vision. Matter of fact, I would argue one of the chief responsibilities of a founding pastor, or the pastor who is most experienced in leading an elders group, is to work with those men to create the vision and then keep everyone working toward it.

That brings me to my next thought. Though I’ve been adjacent to a lot of big-name or wealthy people most of my adult life, I myself was very much small-time until about seven or eight years ago, when I was in my late 30s. It was at that time my life took a pretty radical turn, and I quickly climbed up the leadership ladder in business, church, and broader society.

These days I belong to senior leadership in just about everything I’m involved in, and that requires that you think and behave differently. I can remember a year and a half ago when a bunch of employees were listening to me in a break room tell some really stupid jokes. And they just kind of stood around and listened and kind of laughed. And I remember thinking in my head, why are they listening to me like this? These jokes aren’t that funny. And then it occurred to me that in many cases I was their boss’s boss’s boss. It was a show of deference that you give senior leadership and a reminder to me that I’m not just one of the boys anymore.

And being one of the boys is fun. You can have a looser tongue. You can be less disciplined. You have less responsibility. But as you climb and gain more authority, with authority comes more responsibility. And responsibilities must always be dealt with soberly.

I remember watching some war movie where the general has to have the courage to send the army out to fight, even though he knows that the casualties will be extreme. But it’s what the battle requires. When he was a younger man, he was a doer. He was the guy at the bottom in the infantry. But now that he was an older man, he was the decider and director. And such authority, because of the power attached to it, required sobriety.

If you’re going to move up, you’re going to learn to speak differently, even dress a little differently, and recognize that while you must maintain a common touch and be reasonably accessible, the ladder is real and there’s a distance between the rungs by design.

To swing back to the delusionary just for a moment, most delusionaries are much more interested in skipping the doer floor-level rung and getting right to the decider-general rung, which is why their daydreams are so disconnected from reality. My years of laboring in obscurity and struggling were very good for me. Don’t resent where God has you.

Along with your responsibilities as a leader is the need to make sure you spend your energy in the right place and on the right people. A lot of people think of the pastoral ministry as almost like a spiritual first responder, as someone who prioritizes people in crisis. Therefore, many pastors develop a habit of giving attention to the most needy and desperate people in their churches.

The problem with this is that if you spend all your time on the needy and desperate people, who are often people who don’t actually have acute problems as much as chronic problems, you will overlook the people who are healthy and productive and, with just a little more investment, would flourish all the more and in turn create a more stable, healthy ministry that’s able to help the needy and desperate people.

First, as a senior leader, you will be the most visible, and those people will want the best help they can get, which is very natural. But you only have so much time, so you must be very careful how you spend it. I have found one of the best ways to help those people is to make them wait a little bit to see you.

Now, if it’s truly an acute situation, such as a death in the family, physical abuse, or something very dramatic, obviously that’s something you must jump on. But a lot of these things can wait a night or two, if not even longer. And by enforcing that boundary, you teach them a lot. You teach them to take responsibility for themselves and that the world doesn’t revolve around them. You also find that many times those people work it out themselves. It’s still good to follow up with them, even if just by a phone call and a prayer.

I will say also, as a senior leader, these are opportunities for you to help younger leaders get more experience in dealing with these sorts of problems. You simply tell that person, I’m not able to meet today, but why don’t we have you connect with this or that person? I’ll connect you by text, and you guys can at least have a discussion, and we can follow up.

You always have to be raising up new leaders. It never stops. The moment you stop raising up new leaders is the moment your church starts to die. Which is why it’s so important that you use your time to invest in the healthy people who often won’t ask for your time because of who they are. Those are the people you cannot ignore.

This brings me to our church building. We’re doing the final run-through on some things today, and we’ll close on it on Monday. This is truly incredible. We are a five-year-old church purchasing a 21,000-square-foot facility with 250 parking places and 19 acres of land.

The number of people involved in making this a reality is in the hundreds. There are the people who gave and prayed for it, and they’re foundational. And of course, there are the different laymen who are leading point on some of the cleaning, cataloging, and external renovations. And then there are those of us who have played a central role in negotiation, paperwork, design, and contracting with GCs to build our new sanctuary. It really is a team of people laboring with their various gifts to get it done.

If you can’t build teams, you can’t build. And if you can’t raise up other leaders, you can’t build teams. A healthy church has all different sorts of people involved with different roles, different levels of authority and responsibility, and different needs.

It’s really hard for a really talented quarterback to have success with a bad O-line. And the best O-line can’t compensate for a guy who can’t remember the plays and throw a ball well. You’ve got to find your place on the team. And sometimes it means you’re second string for years before you’re a starter. Sometimes it means you’re special teams. And while you’re not out on the field much, when you do go out on the field, it matters big time.

Whatever you are, you have to give yourself to it fully if you want to see a plan achieved.

If you ever build anything of value, you’re going to encounter them.

A momentum stealer is someone who appears excited about your mission, but is actually more excited about the energy surrounding it. Consciously or subconsciously, they want to redirect that momentum toward the things that have captured their interest.

That’s an important distinction.

They’re often not against your mission. They may even genuinely like it. They simply aren’t committed to it in the same way you are. What excites them is that something is finally moving, and they want to harness that movement for their own priorities.

Let me give you three examples.

First, family life.

Suppose you set aside an entire Saturday to clean out the garage. You’ve made good progress, and your spouse comes outside and says, “This is great! We should clean out the attic too.”

Now, you probably agree the attic needs to be cleaned. That’s not the issue. The issue is that today was set aside for the garage. If you divide your attention now, you may not finish either project.

If your spouse really wants to make progress, they’re welcome to help you finish the garage. Or, if they want to work independently, they can certainly start on the attic. But what they shouldn’t do is redirect the energy and momentum you’ve built toward the thing that’s been on their mind.

The same principle applies in business.

Imagine your company has a product that’s selling extremely well. There is still plenty of market share to capture, and you’re executing your strategy successfully. Then someone comes along and says, “You know what we should really do? We should launch this other product.”

Again, they aren’t necessarily against your current product. They simply aren’t committed to your mission of dominating that particular market. They’re excited by the momentum and want to redirect it toward the product that interests them.

Churches and ministries experience this constantly.

Take Ohio Valley Mission as an example.

We’ve intentionally defined the mission. We are a fellowship of churches subscribing to either the Westminster Standards or the Second London Baptist Confession, focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.

As momentum grows, I fully expect people to say, “Why not include the Savoy Declaration?” or “Why not the Thirty-Nine Articles?” Others will ask, “Why not include Tennessee? Virginia? Oregon?”

Those aren’t unreasonable questions.

But they reveal something important.

Those people aren’t actually excited about our mission. They’re excited about the general idea of what we’re doing, but they want to reshape it around their confession, their region, or their priorities. In other words, they want to redirect the momentum toward what matters most to them.

That doesn’t make them bad people. Many of them will be sincere and well-intentioned.

It simply means they aren’t committed to the specific mission we’ve set out to accomplish.

Now, there are certainly times to pivot. There are times to expand a mission. Sometimes the original plan was flawed. Other times the mission has been so successful that you’ve earned the opportunity to broaden it.

But that’s very different from allowing every enthusiastic outsider to redefine your purpose.

One of the primary responsibilities of leadership is simply restating the mission over and over again. In practice, that’s just another way of enforcing boundaries. You thank people for their encouragement. You appreciate their interest. But you calmly return everyone to the mission.

If you don’t, you’ll never build anything substantial.

Your energy will be scattered across a hundred good ideas. You’ll spread yourself too thin. And you’ll eventually discover that many of the people you were trying to accommodate were never truly committed to your mission in the first place. They were committed to their own agenda, whether out of selfish ambition or perfectly good intentions.

Building anything meaningful requires focus. And focus always requires saying “no” to good ideas that aren’t your mission.

Painting: Dawn Dwyer

Our shared commitments are our doctrinal and philosophical emphasis as to how our churches will function and how we conduct ministry and church life.

We are committed to historical biblical Christianity.

God gave the Church pastors and teachers to help lead it to spiritual maturity (Eph 4:11-16). Throughout history, these godly men have labored hard to clarify and summarize the doctrines contained in the Bible. The best of these helpful summaries of biblical doctrine have stood the test of of time. We call them creeds, confessions, or catechisms. We aren’t innovators. We aim to align with and build on the work God has been doing in His Church throughout history. Therefore, our member churches subscribe either to the Westminster Standards or the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith.

We are committed to a ministry centered on the preaching and teaching of the Word.

While historical doctrinal statements serve as helpful protective guides, the Bible remains the only infallible rule of faith and practice. God has ordained that Christians grow through the preaching of His Word and the administration of the sacraments, which themselves are a visible word. All godly change, whether individual, ecclesiastical, or cultural, flows from the faithful preaching of the Word of God. Consequently, we equip the saints to be “salt and light” by keeping the Word primary.

We are committed to being accessible to the everyday Christian.

Biblical truth is timeless and unchanging. Mankind, on the other hand, is bound by time. Our figures of speech, customs, and various aspects of culture have evolved over the years. Therefore, we must work diligently to communicate the unchanging truth of the Bible in a way that is understandable in each specific time and place. We strive for all aspects of our ministry, preaching, music, and more, to be as accessible as reasonably possible to the communities where God has placed our member churches.

We are committed to addressing the issues of our day.

Every age faces its own set of challenges. In the first four centuries, the Church worked diligently to clarify the doctrines of the deity of Christ and the triune nature of God. During the Reformation, the doctrines of justification and the sufficiency of Scripture were robustly defended. Today, we see significant confusion surrounding topics such as biblical sexuality, bioethics, and the proper use of authority. We aim to address contemporary issues regularly while ensuring they do not overshadow foundational doctrines.

We are committed to supporting and resourcing church revitalization efforts and new church plants.

The local church is at the center of God’s plan of redemption. Through it, the gospel sounds forth as disciples are raised up through the ministry of the Word. As the church goes, so goes society. Therefore, the greatest need for our society is Bible-centered, historically-rooted, and locally-focused churches. We are dedicated to training, coaching, and supporting pastors who are revitalizing or planting these sorts of churches.

We are committed to mutual accountability.

First and foremost, this is demonstrated through the plurality of ordained pastors and elders leading our member churches. These men take vows to uphold their confessional standards and follow all the processes outlined in their constitutions and bylaws. While local leadership remains primary, as a fellowship, we offer a secondary layer of relational accountability by aiding, exhorting, and admonishing the officers of our member churches to keep their vows and uphold their governing documents.