Chasing the Platform

When talent shows up asking to skip the line?

There is a dynamic that shows up in churches, in Christian schools, and in a lot of other places, and most leaders have a hard time knowing what to do with it. Someone comes looking for the platform.

They call it ministry, they call it service, and in their own mind they probably mean it, but what is actually driving the ask is identity rather than mission.

We are watching this play out in several churches right now, where an individual with a real gift wants to serve in the area where that gift shows up and somewhere along the way concludes that the requirements of service do not apply to them. It is never said out loud, and it usually arrives as an assumption rather than an argument, because the background and the skill set and the track record somewhere else all add up quietly in their mind to a reason the steps are meant for other people.

We want talented people serving, and I want to say that clearly before I go any further, because the risk here is not talent. The risk is what happens to a culture when talent gets a pass.

Created or allowed?

I have heard it said that a leader either creates or allows the culture that exists in an organization, and the longer I do this work, the more accurate that sounds.

Where you find a healthy culture, somebody created it through time and relationships and sacrifice and a lot of humility that nobody ever saw. Where you find an unhealthy one, there is usually a leader who stopped exercising their responsibility for culture, and something negative walked in through the opening they left.

Almost nobody allows a bad culture on purpose. It happens one accommodation at a time, and every one of those accommodations feels reasonable in the moment it is made.

Here is what that looked like in one church.

The young guy with the gift

Years ago I worked with a church that had a genuinely multigenerational staff, which was no accident. The senior pastor had been intentional about making sure people served in roles that connected well with different generational brackets, and then just as intentional about creating places where those relationships crossed over. It was good to watch, because that kind of thing does not happen on its own.

The pastor himself was a good communicator, though not a great one, and he had a guy on staff in a department lead role who helped with a range of things around the church. This younger man was charismatic, full of energy, and a genuinely excellent communicator, better than the senior pastor as both a teacher and a preacher, so from time to time he would fill in when the senior pastor was out of town.

There were other staff members who were older, seasoned, and fully qualified to preach, and when they were handed an opportunity they took it gladly. They simply were not pushing for it, and none of them were angling for a spot on the calendar.

The young guy was.

This church also had a standard in place, which was that anyone speaking on stage was expected to be serving visibly in certain other areas as well. That applied to staff, to volunteers, and to board members alike, because the platform was meant to be downstream of service rather than a substitute for it.

Over time, because the young guy kept pushing and the senior pastor did not want to upset him, the pastor started to compromise. The standards had been written down and communicated clearly, and then they quietly stopped applying to one person, who got the calendar more and more often and began stepping in front of people who honestly would have been a better fit for certain messages and certain seasons in that church’s life.

And then the thing you would expect to happen happened.

What it cost

He started to believe he was the best communicator in the church.

He began taking speaking opportunities elsewhere while neglecting the responsibilities he already carried, which is to say the actual job he had been hired to do. The requirements no longer seemed to apply to him, not in his staff role and not in the volunteer commitments that were supposed to come with the platform.

The effect on the teaching team was corrosive, because people who had been in the rotation for years watched the standard bend for someone who had never met it. The effect on the congregation was slower and quieter, the way it always is, and the staff did not notice it until it had already settled in.

It also created real insecurity in the senior pastor, who now felt threatened by a younger man who was simply better at the one thing the senior pastor was only good at. That is a terrible position for any leader to occupy, and he had walked himself into it by accommodating instead of leading.

What got lost underneath all of it was the sense of shared purpose, shared commitment, and shared service. Several people on that staff had spent years building relationships, studying scripture, learning to teach, and doing the unglamorous work of becoming genuinely qualified to stand in front of a congregation, and the young guy skipped every bit of it because he happened to be naturally good.

Over time several staff members left, and eventually he did too.

He left because he had come to believe he was a better pastor than the senior pastor, despite never having held the title. He had become insubordinate without ever recognizing it, since as far as he could tell he was not chasing anything sinful. He was chasing visibility, and he never once stopped to think about his own role in relationship to everybody else’s.

He did not see himself as part of the team so much as better than it, which is exactly why everything the rest of the team was required to do felt optional to him.

The pattern underneath

We see versions of this constantly, where people step into roles convinced they are further along than they actually are, work around the process instead of through it, and never get discipled, mentored, or grown into the role they are reaching for.

Leadership in a church asks more of a person than leadership somewhere else does, because it requires a higher level of commitment, a higher level of self awareness, and a great deal more humility. Being good at something is not the same as deserving a stage, and capability has never been the same thing as permission.

Sometimes the healthiest possible assignment for a gifted person is behind the scenes in a servant role, not because the gift does not count but because character gets built in the places where nobody is watching, and a gift that arrives before the character does tends to injure the person carrying it.

More and more churches are latching onto talented people, and here is what I would want every leader to understand about that. Talented people come and go, moving from church to church and role to role in search of opportunities to use what they have, and there is nothing evil in that. But when the talent has not been shaped, it becomes a vehicle for dysfunction instead of a contribution to a mission.

It can also repeat the pattern of revenge ministry that I have written about elsewhere, where someone’s unexamined pain quietly drives what looks like calling, keeping a person unaware of their own hurts and baggage and unaware of the people around them.

And it robs somebody else, because every time you hand the platform to the person pushing hardest for it, there is a person with the right heart and the right humility who needed that opportunity in order to grow and who did not get it.

Four suggestions

1.) Character matters more than competency.

We want competent people, and I want to say that plainly, because this point gets misused as an excuse for tolerating mediocrity and that is not what I am after at all.

But if you have someone who is good and does not care, who is not committed, or who will not serve humbly, then you have a problem that their talent cannot solve. Competency can be taught, while character is far harder to develop in an adult and nearly impossible to develop in someone who has been rewarded for not having it.

2.) Do not let people skip the steps.

If you have laid out a path for how people serve, how discipleship works, and how someone moves toward leadership, then hold that path, because being good at something is not a reason to bypass a process you built on purpose.

It also helps to understand what a bypass actually communicates. It does not tell your people that this one person is exceptional. It tells them the path is negotiable for the right kind of person, and everyone still walking that path hears it clearly.

3.) If you make an exception, make it carefully and explain it.

Exceptions are not always wrong, and there are legitimate reasons to accelerate someone from time to time.

Just do it out loud, saying what the exception is, why it is being made, what still applies, and what the expectation is going forward. An explained exception strengthens a standard, while an unexplained one dismantles it, and that dismantling happens whether or not anyone ever brings it up with you.

4.) Build shared values, and get specific about them.

Develop values for your church and your ministries, and then make sure people understand them well past the top level, not only as statements on a wall but as something that shapes what an individual person does on a Tuesday night.

Those values are what shape the culture, keep it consistent, and ultimately determine whether your ministry is healthy, which means they have to be concrete enough that someone can tell when they are being honored and when they are being bent.

How does the story end?

The young guy in that story is not a villain. He was gifted, driven, and almost certainly sincere about wanting to serve, and nobody ever told him no in a way that would have helped him. By the time anyone tried, he had already been taught something different by three years of exceptions.

That is the part that should get your attention, because he became what the church’s accommodations made available to him.

At some point you will have a talented person ask for something they have not earned, probably this year, and how you answer will teach your whole organization what your standards are actually worth.

Answer it on purpose.