Sometimes, when I tell people that I help authors build online platforms, I feel like I’m being judged.

My job—as in, the means by which I pay my mortgage and buy food—is to help pastors, scholars and other Christian leaders build their online platforms (blogs, social media, etc.).

So, that either makes me the most or least qualified person to talk about this subject. You decide.

The Context

A lot of people wonder:

“How is it not sinful for Christians to build an online platform? On what basis is it acceptable that Christians start blogs, asking us to “like” their Facebook pages and trying to sell us stuff?”

If you use social media or read blogs, you have seen the “brands” or “platforms” to which I am referring. You have likely read blogs or watched videos of pastors, scholars or other Christian leaders.

God has gifted people with incredible communication skills, and in the 21st century, many of these people are using these gifts via social media and other digital outlets.

However, many see a problem with Christians (pastors, in particular) building “platforms” online. This is understandable. On the surface, a pastor or other Christian wanting to build a platform seems like nothing more than the sinful fruit of pride, flowing out of the sinful desire to “get famous.”

I get it. Digital platform-building can definitely be a vanity game, but it doesn’t have to be. A Christian who seeks to build a brand or a platform is not inherently sinning, necessarily.

Building a platform for the right reasons ultimately comes down to three factors: motivation, goals and accountability.

Here are three questions Christians should ask themselves before building a brand or platform:

1. What is my motivation?

I praise God when I sit down with an author at our first “platform strategy” meeting and he or she says, “I just don’t want to promote myself.”

I seriously say, “Praise God!” I’m not just saying that metaphorically.

Self-promotion is not only a sinful platform-building motivation, but it’s also an ineffective one. No one likes a Christian leader who lauds his or her newest book or worship CD all the time.

God is not pleased and the Christian leader’s audience is annoyed.

Christians must only seek to build a brand or platform if their motivations are outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused.

I was meeting with an author a couple of months ago who was afraid of promoting himself online. This author is a world-renowned Bible scholar and professor.

I said to him, “Think about all of the people around the world who would love to study under you or even just attend one of your classes but cannot do so for one reason or another. Your blog and social media isn’t a means to serve yourself. It is a means to serve them. Let them be your students online, for free.”

This really resounded with him, and together we were able to create a strategy that allowed him to open up his “classroom” to the world via blogging and social media.

His motivation is outwardly focused.

Christians must not build platforms motivated by selfish gain.

2. What is my goal?

Even if your motivations are pure and others-focused, the temptation of fame and fortune still lies in wait for even the humblest of us.

When building a personal brand, the Christian must have goals in mind that benefit others more than him- or herself.

As you’re starting a blog and hiring someone to coach you on social media strategy, what does “success” ultimately look like for your personal brand? If “success” is defined by personal gain, you need to check your heart.

When I meet with authors and we have discussions about their online platforms, I repeatedly circle back to one word: service.

I serve authors in an effort to help them better serve their readers. Wanting the best for the authors I serve, of course I would love for them to sell more books, but if their personal brand somehow leads them to sell a bunch of books, yet poorly serve their audience, I would feel as though I have failed.

Christians must build personal brands ultimate with the purpose of serving others. This doesn’t mean you can’t make money off of ads or through other means—there’s nothing wrong with profiting off of your gifts. But if “success” hinges on how much money you make rather than how well you serve, you need to be careful.

3. Who will keep me accountable?

This is perhaps the most important question of the three.

At the beginning, you may be motivated by your love for others and your primary goal may be to serve the church, but maintaining pure intentions is difficult, especially when the opportunity to make money comes your way.

If you’re hoping to establish a personal brand, you need accountability. You need a mentor or two who can tell you when they think you’re sinning.

You do not need “yes (wo)men.” You need people who will tell you the hard truth about you and your activity online.

If you do not have someone who can tell you the truth when it’s hard, you shouldn’t be trying to establish a personal brand.

Final Thoughts

At this point, I have written nearly a thousand words on this subject, and I could easily write a thousand more, but that would be boring for both of us.

In short, it is problematic for a Christian to build a personal brand online only inasmuch as it is problematic for a Christian to pursue a music career, or a book deal, or any other sort of individual expression of his or her gifts. In our time, we like to deride blogging and social media as an overt expression of hubris, as if blogging or having a Twitter account is vastly different from other means of communication in the past.

Just this week, I saw a pastor tweet that he thinks it is problematic for pastors to build online platforms. The irony was that he communicated this via his online platform. This is a common occurrence.

Like any medium, building a personal brand is a neutral act that can be righteous and God-glorifying in nature, or sinful and self-serving in nature.

Christians need the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the wisdom of friends in this pursuit as in so many others in our lives.

This article originally appeared here.

Living for Christ is hard—sometimes so hard that we’re tempted to wonder if it’s worth the sacrifice. It is, of course, but difficulties sometimes cloud that truth. Based on my years of studying spiritual warfare, here are characteristics of believers who don’t give up in the battle:

1. They’re solidly connected to a local church. That is, they don’t just attend a church; they participate in it. They’re involved in a small group, and they serve in some capacity. They’re living for something other than themselves.
2. They have a devotional life, even if it’s not perfect. They might be struggling with consistency, but they’re working at it. They make time to read the Bible and pray.
3. They have somebody to walk with them. They don’t fight the battle alone, because they have a Christian brother or sister who stands with them. They share their burdens and their struggles—which always lightens the load a bit.
4. They choose to believe what the Bible says. Even when they may not “feel” like it’s true, they make the choice to trust Bible truths like “I will not leave you or forsake you” (Heb. 13:5) and “greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
5. They rehearse God’s care in the past. It’s easy to forget yesterday’s blessings when today’s hard, but those who don’t give up fight hard to avoid that error. They continually remind themselves, “God has never let me down in the past. He won’t now, either.”
6. They trust that when they are weak, God is their strength (2 Cor. 12:10). They may not like the battle, but they learn from the apostle Paul’s prior experience. Weakness doesn’t bother them, for they know God’s power is most evident when they are weakest.
7. They understand the witness of faithfulness in the battle. They recognize that somebody’s always watching them—and that their witness is most potent when life is hard and their faith is stretched. Their faithfulness in the valley catches the attention of the watching world.
8. They cry out to God. There’s no pretense in their praying. They sugarcoat none of their words, and they follow no formula in their prayers. They know God’s big enough to handle their questions and their pain. He is, you know…

Let us know how we might pray for you if you’re tempted to give up.

This article originally appeared here.

[Ed. Note: This article is adapted from a talk Amy Sherman gave at the Denver “Redeeming Work” conference sponsored by Christianity Today Institute September 2014.]

Congregational leaders, and especially pastors, often experience people telling them: “This is REALLY important! You MUST preach on this!” The “this” can be all manner of things, from evangelism to missions to financial stewardship to why the youth group shouldn’t be allowed to play paintball in the gym. Sometimes it’s easy to sort the wheat from the chaff. Other times, it can feel like there are 20 or so “top priority” topics for preaching and teaching. At Made to Flourish, we’re unapologetically arguing that teaching on faith and work is a top priority—in fact, one that ought to be ranked higher up than the top 20.

Why does it matter to have a strong theology of work? Why should congregational leaders help their flock connect faith and work? Why should we talk about vocation when there are so many other worthwhile things we could talk about, like evangelism or compassion ministry? Why does it matter?

1. It matters because discipleship matters.

Jesus has commissioned us to make disciples. Discipleship ought to be a primary topic congregational leaders are thinking about every day. And discipleship that doesn’t equip people for the activity they spend 40 percent of their waking hours doing is not discipleship.

You’d think that the activity people spend that much time doing would be addressed regularly from the pulpit. It’s not (at least in most churches). Dr. David Miller at Princeton University’s Faith & Work Initiative reports that fewer than 10 percent of church-goers can remember the last time their pastor preached on the topic of work. Research in 2014 by the Barna Group shows that nearly two-thirds of churched adults say it has been at least three years or more since they heard church teachings on work and career. (Happily, according to more recent research from the Center for Faith and Work at LeTourneau University, more pastors are preaching about a biblical view of work more often.)

But just not talking about work isn’t the only problem. Inadvertently, certain language and practices that are commonplace in churches can actually send a negative message to congregants engaged in the marketplace. Chuck Proudfit, a Harvard-trained businessman in Cincinnati who founded and oversees At Work on Purpose, one of the largest marketplace ministries in the U.S. (with over 5,000 active members) says businesspeople regularly complain they feel like second-class citizens at church. Why is this? It’s because the language at the church betrays a functional theology that accepts the sacred-secular divide. When congregants hear church leaders say, “Did you hear about Doug? He left the firm to go into full-time Christian ministry with Young Life,” it implies that Doug’s work at the firm was not full-time Christian ministry. Similarly, if the church regularly commissions “full-time missionaries” or commends the folks who volunteer as Sunday School teachers—but never commissions marketplace professionals seeking to be “missionaries” in their own vocational sectors and never commends the people in the pews who serve as full-time public school teachers, they reinforce this message that “churchy” work is what really matters in the Kingdom of God.

It may be the case that some pastors think they don’t really need to provide much teaching on faith/work integration because, after all, there are a lot of parachurch “marketplace ministries” out there that are doing that. Well, it’s true that there are indeed many such ministries. And some of them are doing a fine job of helping marketplace Christians understand their vocation in light of their Kingdom citizenship. But it’s also the case that the message of some marketplace ministries is insufficient: They limit their focus to the traditional three E’s: ethics, evangelism and excellence. Those three E’s are good but insufficient because they don’t concentrate enough on the work itself or connect our work to God’s work in the world.

“How to think about work” is not an arena we can just leave to chance. Average Christians need guidance from the church because the culture regularly bombards us with two loud and oddly conflicting messages.

On the one hand, there is a cultural message that work is everything. “What do you do?” is typically the first question strangers ask one another. Many of us are embarrassed if we cannot say, when asked how we’re doing, that we are “busy.” Many of us want people to know we’re busy—really busy. Because busy = important.

Americans work longer than the citizens of most nations. In the U.S., according to Forbes magazine, 86 percent of men and 67 percent of women work more than 40 hours/week at their paid jobs. In fact, 10 million Americans work more than 60 hours week. Americans work on average 1,778 hours a year—more than the British, the French and the Belgians. One in three American workers don’t take all their vacation days. Many rarely take time out for lunch. Not surprisingly, our society is replete with workaholics and all kinds of work-related stress and disease. In short, too many people are working too much and putting too much value, or investing too many hopes, in their work. Work has become an idol.

But there’s a second loud cultural message that’s common in America, and it’s a very cynical one. This is the message that work is generally stupid, meaningless and petty. Work is a curse, a drag; something we have to do because we’re not rich. It’s something we should try to avoid if at all possible.

Think about the huge popularity of the TV series The Office or of the comic strip Dilbert. They were hilarious, but they were also ruthless in their view of work as meaningless. Bosses are stupid, office politics are adolescent and company “missions” are a joke. It’s just dog-eat-dog, make a buck. It’s Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” where they use your mind and you never get the credit.

Given these twin problematic pressures of contemporary culture on the folks in the pews, pastors need to step in. Congregants need to hear good teaching on a biblical understanding of vocation that can help them navigate the world of work faithfully in the midst of these unhealthy messages.

2. The vocation conversation is critical because failure to teach and equip on vocation and how faith and work connect is a major contributor to the young adult drop-out rate from church.

Hopefully, congregational leaders care about reaching the next generation and stemming the tide of Millenials leaving the church.

In his book You Lost Me, Barna’s David Kinnaman estimates that some 5 million young adults today—a group called “Mosaics” who are ages 18 to 29—leave the church or are putting their faith “on hold” in large numbers. Fifty-nine percent of Mosiacs drop out of church after attending regularly as a teenager.

Kinnaman argues that one of the most important reasons is that the churches don’t provide them a connection between Sunday and Monday. “One of the most recurring themes” in his research with dropouts, Kinnaman reports,

is the idea that [the Christianity they’ve been taught] does not have much, if anything, to say about their chosen profession or field…. It is a modern tragedy. Despite years of church-based experiences and countless hours of Bible-centered teaching, millions of next generation Christians have no idea that their faith connects to their life’s work.

These 20-somethings want their marketplace vocations affirmed, but instead hear theologically misguided teaching that “spiritual” work is superior to “secular” labor. They desire guidance and equipping on what it means to bring their faith to work, and how to renew culture through it. Instead, inside their congregations they have faced suspicion for their choice to work in fields like science, fashion and film. Coddled by overprotective parents and churches, they’ve also been warned to eschew the world and deploy their artistic talents only inside the church, where things are safe. But, Kinnaman notes, these young adults “want to be culture-makers, not culture avoiders.” Their churches have dismayed them with simplistic black-and-white answers that don’t match the complexity they sense in their world.

Kinnaman quotes one 20-something young woman, Kellie, who pleads with church leaders to change:

I am misunderstood by my Christian community because I am young and because I am a woman. People often assume that my international development work is just a “phase,” done for my own fulfillment, as if I do it for the thrill or for the snapshots I bring home. I would like my community to see my work for what it really is: the best thing I can do to act out the heart of Christ. It’s not a phase, but an important part of who Christ made me to be. Our work doesn’t look like a traditional Christian ministry.  The name of Jesus isn’t in our title, and evangelism isn’t the primary focus of our daily activities. But we are working for God’s kingdom and believe this is the way God would have us reach people for His purposes. God has placed a dream and calling within us, and we ask the church, rather than seeing us as young and idealistic, would see us as warriors of God who are acting as the arm of Christ, reaching the world with love, hope and empowerment.

3. The vocation conversation is critical because, to quote my friend Steve Garber, “Vocation is integral, not incidental, to the mission of God in the world.”

Again, hopefully congregational leaders care deeply about God’s mission in the world and the role their churches are called to play in that mission.

God through Christ is on a mission to renew all things. The grand story of His love begins with the creation of paradise in Eden and ends in a recreated garden city of perfect shalom. From the beginning God has invited human beings into this story. In creation, God invited human beings to become culture makers who make something of the world He created, filling it and ruling it with wisdom; tending and keeping the garden. He created us to be both lovers of Him and laborers with Him. (Or, better put, to receive both His love and His invitation to allow Him to work His purposes through us—for both our own and others’ good.)

The Fall alienated us from God. But through Jesus’ comprehensive atonement at the cross, comprehension redemption of all that was lost in the Fall—peace with God, peace with self, peace with others, peace with the creation—is made. The way is opened once again to be in a love relationship with God, and to participate again in His work, His mission in the world.

Because the missio Dei is about renewing all things, our daily vocations as Christ-followers have huge importance. In each workplace, in each work sector, Christ wants to work through us to promote all that advances His shalom and resist all that which corrupts it. Our daily work—not so much that week-long summer mission trip or the Sunday worship service—is one of the primary places where we participate with God in His mission in the world.

This is a message that people in the pew are hungry to hear. One 2014 survey reported that fully three-fourths of U.S. adults say they are looking for ways to live a more meaningful life. And among Christians there is an additional question being raised: What does God want me to do with my life? According to the survey, only 40 percent of practicing Christians say they have a clear sense of God’s calling on their lives. And the younger Christians—those in the millennial generation—are especially eager to hear counsel on this. Six out of 10 say that they want their work to make a difference in this world.

What an opportunity for pastors to respond, “Well, you can make a difference when you link your life’s work to Jesus’ work in the world.”

The pressure on pastors to preach on everyone’s pet subjects isn’t likely to diminish any time soon. But some topics really just are more important than others. Vocation is one of them.

This article originally appeared here.

It’s great to be “pouring into” people. That’s a popular phrase in today’s leadership environment. I’ve used it because I like the word picture of it.

Whatever I may have learned about life and leadership, I’m supposed to be passing along to others. But what does the phrase really mean? What, exactly, are we to pour into the people we lead?

We’ve been talking a lot as a church staff lately about leadership development. I really believe it’s the key to our reaching the next level of growth and effectiveness as a church. But I’m becoming aware of a couple of obstacles.

First, I’ve never led a church beyond where we currently are. I joined the staff of a church with well over 20,000 in weekend attendance, but I wasn’t there for the years when Saddleback grew from zero to their present size.

I’m facing the reality that what we’ve done so far as a new church plant has been good, but it isn’t sufficient to take us somewhere else. It’s the whole “law of the lid” that John Maxwell speaks about.

I think, on a practical level, that means we’re going to need to do some restructuring and shifting. We’re going to have to think outside of our already established routines. And we’re going to have to take some risks.

And the second obstacle is that I don’t think we’ve clearly defined what it is we need to be pouring into the leaders we’re developing.

Does that mean having coffee and chatting about life? Does it mean walking through a training course or workbook? I think the answer lies somewhere in between those two options.

There are at least eight gifts I hope to pour into the people I’m leading, and I hope they pass these gifts along to others too.

1. Love and concern

That is, living with a genuine interest in the lives of those we lead. And this is more than just the occasional “how are you?” question. It’s staying tuned in and aware of how life is along the way.

Loving people is pretty basic, but profoundly powerful.

2. Knowledge and skills

Obviously, if we’re going to raise up and train leaders, we need to pass along the knowledge and skills necessary to get things done. This comes in the form of apprenticing, coaching, resources and modeling.

3. Responsibilities, with clearly articulated expectations

I’ve had to learn a lot the hard way about being very clear in communicating my expectations of those I lead. I can’t assume that someone knows what results I desire to see unless I’ve painted a thorough and accurate picture for them.

4. Golden opportunities

As a leader, you no doubt always have a spot to fill and a task to assign. But do you reserve the very best opportunities—the ones most sure to be rewarding—for yourself? Or do you generously empower others with them to serve up the win to someone else?

Let me stop to note that the opportunities I’ve written about thus far are the easier ones to give. The rest get harder…

5. Theology—a peek into our view of God

You can always sit down with people and walk through some systematic theology, text-book style. But what I’m really referring to is that we speak openly of our faith in God in such a way that the people whom we lead have a bigger perspective of him from having been led by us.

6. Freedom

It’s hard to really let people go and entrust them with the freedom to fail, to make mistakes, to do things differently than we would do them ourselves. But that kind of freedom is necessary to effective leadership. When we fail to grant freedom, the best leaders will leave.

7. Accountability

Pastor Paul Chappell is always saying that “people only respect what you inspect.” My own tendency has been to give away tasks and responsibilities, but rarely to go and follow up on how it’s going. But good leadership requires us to check back in, to hold people accountable in a positive way.

8. Our big “YES!”

I’m not arguing that we should say yes to every idea or request that comes along. But those we lead should have the impression that it’s more likely that we’ll say “Yes!” than “No.”

Great leaders create “yes” cultures where people are encouraged to keep being creative. Sometimes leadership means saying “yes” to people even when it’s scary to do so.

I’m still figuring out how to give these gifts well, but I’m committed to doing so in order for our leadership development culture to thrive. You can have growth, or you can have control, but you can’t have all of both.

I want to err on the side of having just enough control to keep the train on the tracks.

This article originally appeared here.