Build Something That Outlives You

Pastoral Influence, Personal Brands, and the Necessity of Self-Liquidating Leadership

I got this video by Ed Lawrence the other day entitled Why Growing a Personal Brand Is an Awful Idea. The big idea is that while there are benefits to a personal brand, it can create a sort of dependence for whatever business is behind it. Essentially, that business needs the personality to keep working. And in many cases, the person behind the branding imagines that success will give him more freedom. But instead, it becomes all the more of a grind to keep feeding the machine.

Here’s the video if you want to watch it…

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.