Shownotes
Summary
In this episode of "Echoes Through Eternity," Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner delves into the often-overlooked dangers of personality-driven church planting. He highlights how the focus on a pastor's charisma can unintentionally shift Jesus to the background, leading to a church culture that prioritizes metrics and visibility over genuine spiritual growth. Drawing on insights from various thought leaders, including Henri Nouwen and Francis Chan, Dr. Skinner emphasizes the importance of maintaining a Christ-centered approach in worship and ministry, warning against the seductive nature of success that can lead to spiritual complacency.
Dr. Skinner also discusses the pressures faced by church planters in today's digital age, where constant notifications and social media can distract from the core mission of discipleship. He encourages listeners to reflect on their own practices and the health of their church communities, urging them to prioritize worship that forms rather than merely inspires. The episode concludes with a call to lead humbly, plant carefully, and keep Jesus at the forefront of ministry efforts, ensuring that the church remains a true reflection of Christ's teachings.
Takeaways
'The most dangerous churches are not the ones that fail.'
'Worship does not exist to inspire you. It exists to reorder you.'
'If the church can't function without you, that is not a compliment.'
'You cannot rest without checking numbers.'
'Saying no is a form of faithfulness.'
Key Resources from this epsiode.
Peterson gives language for longevity over visibility.
He names the danger of speed, success, and celebrity in ministry long before social media existed.
He reinforces your central warning without sounding reactive.
Books to reference (essential)
• A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
This book is a direct antidote to personality-driven planting.
It frames discipleship as faithfulness over time, not momentary impact.
It fits perfectly with your theme of resisting urgency and re-centering on Christ.
Primary voice for the episode’s theological frame.
Her line—“What is essential is never demanding”—is the backbone.
She supplies the foreground vs background image, the Jordan River moment, and Christ-centered worship as re-centering.
Names the digital attention problem clearly.
Gives language for the inward gaze and how technology disciples us.
Helps you connect culture, formation, and ministry drift.
church planting, personality-driven ministry, Christ-centered worship, spiritual growth, Henri Nouwen, Francis Chan, digital distractions, church health, discipleship, ministry challenges.
Serves as the cautionary example.
Models humility, confession, and courage to step away.
Illustrates how success can still be spiritually dangerous.
Quoted directly from In the Name of Jesus.
You accurately reference his warning about the temptations of relevance, popularity, and power.
• Neil Postman-Amusing Ourselves to Death
Referenced for cultural critique.
You quote Amusing Ourselves to Death accurately and apply it to digital formation.
• James K. A. Smith-You Are What You Love
Referenced for worship and formation language.
Worship forms desire before belief.
Dallas Willard-You reference The Spirit of the Disciplines
Quoted directly regarding grace, effort, and formation.
The Spirit of the Disciplines accurately.
• Byung-Chul Han-The Burnout Society
Referenced for burnout and self-exploitation.
Used to frame exhaustion without external oppression.
Alan Hirsch
Chapters:00:00 The Hidden Dangers of Church Planting
05:33 The Pressure of Digital Culture on Church Planters
10:12 Understanding Personality-Driven Church Planting
14:27 The Cost of Success in Ministry
20:10 The Role of Worship in Re-centering Ministry
Takeaways:
- The most perilous churches are not those that falter, but those that thrive while neglecting Christ.
- Worship exists not merely to inspire, but to fundamentally reorder our lives and priorities.
- When the church operates solely on the pastor's charisma, it risks losing its Christ-centered mission.
- Saying no to certain demands can reflect true faithfulness in ministry efforts and priorities.
- A church that cannot function in the absence of its leader is subject to unhealthy dependency.
- In the digital age, constant distractions can lead to a neglect of genuine discipleship and spiritual growth.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Missional Church Planting
- Dynamic Church Planning International
- Trivecca Community Church
- Cozy Earth
Mentioned in this episode:
Peace in that Finds You in the Middle of Chaos
Cozyearth.com. Use Code Echo for a 40% Discount Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner shares his experience with Cozy Earth's products, highlighting their impact on his family's comfort since moving to Nashville. He discusses the benefits of their bamboo-based bedding and blankets, emphasizing their softness, temperature regulation, and luxurious feel. The episode also includes a special discount offer for listeners. Keywords Cozy Earth, bamboo bedding, temperature regulation, luxury comfort, Nashville, family warmth, discount offer, Christmas gift, home sanctuary, podcast partnership
Peace in that Finds You in the Middle of Chaos
Cozyearth.com. Use Code Echo for a 40% Discount Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner shares his experience with Cozy Earth's products, highlighting their impact on his family's comfort since moving to Nashville. He discusses the benefits of their bamboo-based bedding and blankets, emphasizing their softness, temperature regulation, and luxurious feel. The episode also includes a special discount offer for listeners. Keywords Cozy Earth, bamboo bedding, temperature regulation, luxury comfort, Nashville, family warmth, discount offer, Christmas gift, home sanctuary, podcast partnership
Peace in that Finds You in the Middle of Chaos
Cozyearth.com. Use Code Echo for a 40% Discount Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner shares his experience with Cozy Earth's products, highlighting their impact on his family's comfort since moving to Nashville. He discusses the benefits of their bamboo-based bedding and blankets, emphasizing their softness, temperature regulation, and luxurious feel. The episode also includes a special discount offer for listeners. Keywords Cozy Earth, bamboo bedding, temperature regulation, luxury comfort, Nashville, family warmth, discount offer, Christmas gift, home sanctuary, podcast partnership
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Transcripts
Marcus Aurelius said, what we do in life echoes through eternity.
Speaker A:What is your life echoing through eternity?
Speaker A:Welcome to Echoes Through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey Skinner.
Speaker A:Our mission is to inspire, engage and encourage leaders from across the globe to plant missional churches and be servant leaders.
Speaker A:So join us and hear the stories of servant leaders reverberating lives as God echoes them through eternity.
Speaker A:Brought to you by Missional Church Planting and Leadership Development in Dynamic Church Church Planning International.
Speaker B:Welcome in that goes through Eternity.
Speaker B:I AM your host, Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner.
Speaker B:What is God echoing through your life today?
Speaker B:Today, I will talk about a quiet danger within a church plant that very few people, if anyone really warns you about, there's a few people out there.
Speaker B:Alan Hirsch talks about some of the stuff in the Forgotten Ways.
Speaker B:There is a Long Obedience in the same Direction by Eugene Pearson Francis Chan, but tells a story on recent podcasts that he's told before in, in one of his books.
Speaker B:He drove up into the church, his church parking lot.
Speaker B:You know, the pastor of this large church in, in California somewhere.
Speaker B:I think it was Southern California.
Speaker B:And how he just, he just didn't want to get out of the car.
Speaker B:He didn't want to go in and preach.
Speaker B:He was just burned out.
Speaker B:But he said he came to this realization before that that he had a bigger church than what Jesus did.
Speaker B:And he felt like he did that through his own expertise and he gave credit to the Holy Spirit.
Speaker B:But he could point to specific leadership examples, specific leadership practices that he had.
Speaker B:And he said it just all kind of became meaningless to him.
Speaker B:And so he talks about that and I'll reference that later in the podcast.
Speaker B:But that's kind of the kind of jumping off point that I want to talk about today is this is a hidden danger in church planting that no one really tells you about is where you center the plant around the pastor's personality, planter's personality there.
Speaker B:It doesn't look like sin.
Speaker B:It doesn't feel rebellious.
Speaker B:It often looks like success.
Speaker B:As I told you with Frances Chan talking to a pastor friend of mine today, and she recently resigned her church.
Speaker B:She's taken this church from small, very low numbers in just almost two years.
Speaker B:They've had no baptisms in eight years.
Speaker B:She's had I think nine or 10 this year and going to have another two more.
Speaker B:She's grown, grown the church.
Speaker B:She's almost tripled the size of the church and that's on a consistent basis.
Speaker B:There's Sundays that you have more.
Speaker B:This is an average attendance that she's almost tripled now she'll be the first to point back to Jesus.
Speaker B:She's not going to tell you that she did all this on her own, but there's a cost to and I'm not necessarily saying she did this, but there's lots of pressure inside of a planting a church anyway for that pastor because you're constantly living in that tension of you got to have momentum but simultaneously you've got to have a spirit led worship.
Speaker B:You've got to have be spirit centered in your approach.
Speaker B:A spirit centric, not a self centric approach there.
Speaker B:And I don't mean self centered.
Speaker B:There's a difference but, but it's a slow drift where Jesus moves from the foreground to the background and you, you don't even notice it happening.
Speaker B:I want to begin with a line from a sermon preached by Shawna Sonder Games this week.
Speaker B:She said what is essential is never demanding and what is unessential is always demanding.
Speaker B:And she was quoting someone else.
Speaker B:I can't necessarily remember who she quoted, but that sentence kind of names our moment.
Speaker B:We live in a world that constantly demands our attention.
Speaker B:Notifications, metrics, platforms, opinions, urgency.
Speaker B:News cycles used to be months and years and at the very least weeks.
Speaker B:It feels like news cycles are constantly becoming compressed into hours and moments.
Speaker B:And if you're a church planter, that pressure doubles because now the demands come wrapped in spiritual language, vision, calling growth impact.
Speaker B:Years ago, Henri now had warned about this exact drift.
Speaker B:In the name of Jesus.
Speaker B:He writes the three temptations facing Christian leaders today are to be relevant, popular and powerful, not immoral, not unfaithful, visible.
Speaker B:And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, Jesus quietly waits.
Speaker B:This episode is about how churches drift into being personality driven.
Speaker B:How planters become the center without attending to and how Christ centered worship pulls us back before damage is done.
Speaker B:The digital pressure on planters.
Speaker B:Again, I will reference my own pastor Shauna in her sermon she tells two stories about two men named John.
Speaker B: entury, the other wakes up in: Speaker B:The first John rises with the sun.
Speaker B:The second John wakes up to his phone before his feet hit the floor.
Speaker B:People are already waiting.
Speaker B:Emails, texts, calendar alerts, news headlines, social media.
Speaker B:Decades ago, Neil Postman warned about this very thing.
Speaker B:In amusing ourselves to death, he wrote people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Speaker B:Let me state that again.
Speaker B:Neil Postman wrote this before media was becoming personality driven.
Speaker B:This was just as media had begun to be televised.
Speaker B:And he wrote about the dangers of televising media and are televising the news.
Speaker B:I highly recommend that book.
Speaker B:But he was prophetic.
Speaker B:He said in this statement here, people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Speaker B:Not because the tools are evil.
Speaker B:The tools are amoral.
Speaker B:They're neither God good or bad.
Speaker B:They're.
Speaker B:They're not evil because they are formative.
Speaker B:Everything we do, something is forming us.
Speaker B:For good or for bad, it is forming us.
Speaker B:Petra wrote a song about this way back when I was growing up.
Speaker B:Garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker B:If you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.
Speaker B:We live in a digital world that trains us to respond before we discern.
Speaker B:We've got to do a quick reaction because there's other people on the other side of the phone waiting to see if we like or don't comment on a particular post.
Speaker B:Now, I say all this knowing that I live in a digital world because right now I don't have a platform.
Speaker B:One of the rules of church planting is you got to have widespread awareness of your church when it launches.
Speaker B:I'm trying to do that for the refinery church.
Speaker B:And so anyway, the algorithms, the social media, they train us to react before we pray, to measure up before we worship.
Speaker B:And that's why Jay Kim, in his book Analog Christian, says the digital world is not neutral, it is shaping us.
Speaker B:And he adds, we are being trained to live distracted lives.
Speaker B:This, that matters for church planters because if you are not careful, you will plant a church shaped by the same forces that shape your phone.
Speaker B:And I mean, I can't tell you how important and how timely Shauna's sermon was for me yesterday, as these are some of the things that I've been wrestling with myself and trying to figure out how I balance visibility for echoes through eternity and getting that out there into a space where I don't really.
Speaker B:This is my platform right now.
Speaker B:I don't.
Speaker B:I'm not pastoring a church right now.
Speaker B:I'm doing chaplaincy.
Speaker B:But those are micro minutes.
Speaker B:That's micro ministry.
Speaker B:Moments that are.
Speaker B:That happen in conversations often that last less than a minute.
Speaker B:But what, what's a great reminder yesterday was for me was that we don't want to confuse attention with fruit, visibility with faithfulness or engagement with discipleship.
Speaker B:I want to talk about personality driven planting and kind of what that means.
Speaker B:So I want to define that for us.
Speaker B:Let me name this clearly.
Speaker B:Personality driven planting happens when the planter's gifts, urgencies, preferences and identity move into the foreground while Jesus becomes assumed background.
Speaker B:Jesus is still There, no one denies him, no one rejects him.
Speaker B:But because.
Speaker B:But he becomes the setting instead of the subject.
Speaker B:This does not start with pride.
Speaker B:It starts with gifting.
Speaker B:You may be great at preaching, great at vision casting.
Speaker B:Most planters are.
Speaker B:You're good at gathering people.
Speaker B:Most planters are leaders that are magnets.
Speaker B:And people respond to your leadership.
Speaker B:So you lean into what works.
Speaker B:And I remember again I was reminded of a conversation that I had in a class that I was taking in my master's degree at Tribeca Nazarene University.
Speaker B:I think it was Kathy Mari M o W R Y that was the professor at the time.
Speaker B:And she said, just because something works doesn't mean it's faithful.
Speaker B:And she named in that moment again, this was over 10 years ago.
Speaker B:She named in that moment the pressures that can be on pastors to make things work.
Speaker B:I used to tell my church in Auburn, if all our goal is to gather a crowd, I can invite a famous former Auburn football player to speak on Sunday morning and we'll have a packed house and we can repeat that over and over again.
Speaker B:But that is just because that works doesn't mean that's faithful.
Speaker B:Henri Nouwen, spelled H E N R I some people call him Henri Nouwen presses us here again in the name of Jesus.
Speaker B:He asks a question is not how many people take you seriously, but are you living the life of the beloved?
Speaker B:That is the question personality driven systems rarely ask.
Speaker B:Here's some warning signs.
Speaker B:You feel personally wounded when the church is critiqued.
Speaker B:Well, I know someone who attends a really large church and someone critiqued their church and they got very defensive.
Speaker B:You cannot rest without checking numbers.
Speaker B:You feel pressure to constantly produce.
Speaker B:The church struggles to function when you are gone.
Speaker B:Worship becomes something you lead rather than something that forms you.
Speaker B:None of this makes you evil.
Speaker B:The point of this session is partly confession and partly caution.
Speaker B:None of this makes you evil.
Speaker B:I'm not trying to shame anyone.
Speaker B:It makes you human.
Speaker B:But simultaneously, Jesus was human.
Speaker B:So being human is not an excuse to fail.
Speaker B:Being human is not an excuse to be unfaithful.
Speaker B:Shauna told the story about a standing in front of the Domo in Florence, Italy.
Speaker B:And she said, it's a masterpiece designed to lift the eyes and quiet the soul.
Speaker B:But she said the crowd was not marveling at the structure.
Speaker B:They were taking selfies.
Speaker B:The masterpiece of the Domo became the background.
Speaker B:The self became the focus.
Speaker B:Neil Postman says this is what happens when entertainment replaces reverence.
Speaker B:The medium reshapes a message.
Speaker B:Even holy things become backdrops.
Speaker B:For the self, the church can drift the same way.
Speaker B:The cross becomes stage design.
Speaker B:The mission becomes validation.
Speaker B:The gathering becomes content.
Speaker B:This is why you are what you love matters so much.
Speaker B:When James K. Smith writes, worship is not just something we do, it is something that does something to us.
Speaker B:And he adds, before we are thinkers, we are lovers.
Speaker B:When worship stops, reordering desire formation stops.
Speaker B:Francis Chan talked about this when he when he was on a recent podcast, but also in his book, he confessed that something deeply troubled him.
Speaker B:He realized that his church might draw more people on Sunday than Jesus would if he planted a church in the same town.
Speaker B:Why?
Speaker B:Because Jesus message of crucifixion is not an attractive message.
Speaker B:Follow me.
Speaker B:Take up your cross and follow me.
Speaker B:I mean, that's the equivalent today of saying, hey, take up your electric chair, go hop in your electric chair and follow me.
Speaker B:The cross was an instrument of shame, of punishment, of humiliation.
Speaker B:And Jesus calls us to take that up and follow him.
Speaker B:So Francis Chan says the message that I'm preaching on Sunday morning is resonating with thousands of people.
Speaker B:He asked the question, am I preaching the cross?
Speaker B:He wasn't saying that to boast.
Speaker B:He was saying that as a confession.
Speaker B:It was a warning.
Speaker B:Alan Hirsch explains this in forgotten ways.
Speaker B:When movements become dependent on gifted leaders rather than shared practices, they inevitably collapse.
Speaker B:Momentum grows, longevity shrinks.
Speaker B:If you build the church with your personality, you must keep feeding it with your personality.
Speaker B:If you build it on charisma, you can never rest.
Speaker B:If you build it on urgency, see, silence feels like failure.
Speaker B:If you build it on the vision alone, the stake must always rise.
Speaker B:You become the engine, and engines burn out.
Speaker B:Byung Chul Han names this exhaustion clearly in the burnout society, he writes, the achievement subject gives itself over to compulsion until it breaks.
Speaker B:No one is oppressing them.
Speaker B:They're exhausting themselves.
Speaker B:So recenter us around the Jordan river and Shawna again, my pastor, if you have the opportunity, I encourage you watch their YouTube channel Trica Community Church.
Speaker B:She just does an awesome job.
Speaker B:Her and her husband Tim often co preached together.
Speaker B:I was telling someone earlier today that Trivecca Community Church is unique in that it holds a lot of diverse thought.
Speaker B:And I'm, I'm all for, you know, inclusion and things like that.
Speaker B:Let's include as many people as possible.
Speaker B:But oftentimes diversity basically is reduced to skin color.
Speaker B:And to be sure, there's lots of shades of colors and whites and browns and everything in between at Trivecca Community Church.
Speaker B:But what I love about Triveca Community Church and this is not a commercial for them.
Speaker B:They even pay me for this.
Speaker B:They're not a sponsor of this podcast.
Speaker B:But what I love about them is the way they balance that diversity of thought.
Speaker B:If I want to have a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian fundamentalist on Sunday morning, I could do it.
Speaker B:If I want to have a conversation with a Christian nationalist on Sunday morning, I can do it.
Speaker B:If I want to have a conversation with an academic professor on an academic subject on Sunday morning, I can do it.
Speaker B:If I want to have a conversation with someone who's way out there on the progressive scale, I could probably do that too.
Speaker B:That's what I love.
Speaker B:And I love the tension that they're able to hold there without making that the subject.
Speaker B:They don't make that the idol.
Speaker B:They don't lift up.
Speaker B:Hey, we're a diverse church.
Speaker B:Every Sunday they shape it around missional practices and sending and all kinds of several other core values that they have there that I won't go into right now.
Speaker B:But the point is, if you have a chance to listen to their sermons on YouTube, I encourage you to do it.
Speaker B:Some really good formational stuff there.
Speaker B:But by recentering this back at the Jordan River, Shauna brings us back to the baptism of Jesus.
Speaker B:John the Baptist is faithful, busy and exhausted.
Speaker B:People are lining up.
Speaker B:The work is demanding.
Speaker B:And when Jesus steps into the water, this moment disrupts John's system.
Speaker B:It slows work.
Speaker B:It recenters everything.
Speaker B:Heaven opens.
Speaker B:The spirit descends.
Speaker B:The Father speaks, this is my son, the beloved Dallas.
Speaker B:Willard helps us understand this moment in the spirit of the disciplines when he writes, grace is not opposed to effort.
Speaker B:It is opposed to earning.
Speaker B:This moment was not productive.
Speaker B:It was formative.
Speaker B:Worship does not exist to inspire you.
Speaker B:It exists to reorder you.
Speaker B:Worship saves planters.
Speaker B:Here's what worship does that nothing else can.
Speaker B:It quiets the unessential.
Speaker B:It exposes false urgency.
Speaker B:It dethrones performance.
Speaker B:Worship kneels you before the cross so you do not stand in front of it.
Speaker B:Willard also warned that many leaders expect transformation without training.
Speaker B:Worship is where that training happens.
Speaker B:It teaches restraint.
Speaker B:It reminds you that rest is obedience.
Speaker B:It teaches you that saying no can be faithfulness.
Speaker B:And going back to this pastor that I was talking about earlier, who recently resigned her church and was having such success for her, saying no.
Speaker B:And I reminded her of this earlier today, that saying no is a form of faithfulness.
Speaker B:If the church can't function without you, that is not a compliment.
Speaker B:It is a warning.
Speaker B:So as we, as we bring this to a close, kind of bring this Podcast in for a landing here.
Speaker B:I want to give a pastoral invitation to you.
Speaker B:Let me leave you with a few questions.
Speaker B:If you stepped away for six weeks, would the church deepen or panic?
Speaker B:Are people following Jesus or admiring your leadership?
Speaker B:Does success make you grateful or anxious?
Speaker B:When was the last time worship disrupted your plans?
Speaker B:The most dangerous churches are not the ones that fail.
Speaker B:They are the ones that succeed.
Speaker B:While Jesus fades quietly into the background.
Speaker B:I'm reminded of the story of a pastor who failed.
Speaker B:He had spiritual failure.
Speaker B:And when he was interviewed, one of the things, one of the questions they had was, why did you do it?
Speaker B:I mean, what caused you to think?
Speaker B:And he said, I fooled myself.
Speaker B:I caused myself to believe that because I was having so much success in my church that Jesus was okay with it.
Speaker B:And there's a danger that's inherent in using secular world metrics to measure sacred world formation as we begin to think that because we're succeeding by the world standards, that Jesus is okay with it.
Speaker B:So let me leave you with this plant carefully.
Speaker B:Lead humbly, worship weekly, kneel often and keep Jesus where he belongs.
Speaker B:Not behind you, not beneath you, but always in front of you.
Speaker B:Because we can't follow Jesus if we're in front.
Speaker B:We can't follow Jesus if we're below.
Speaker B:We have to be behind in order to follow Jesus because then he's leading the way.
Speaker B:And then everything we do will be Christocentric and not self centric.
Speaker B:Well, this is Echoes Through Eternity, and I want to ask you again, what is God echoing through your life today?
Speaker B:If you have enjoyed this episode, I'd encourage you to support our sponsors.
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Speaker B:And again, the point here is not.
Speaker B:I am not trying to be the center of this podcast.
Speaker B:The only reason I have my name in the podcast is because the title Echoes Through Eternity also is shared by other podcasts that are out there.
Speaker B:So I needed to distinguish my podcast from everybody else.
Speaker B:So I said Echoes through Eternity with Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner.
Speaker B:But I promise you, I.
Speaker B:Everything I do, I. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it, but I try to keep Christ at the center of everything I do in this podcast, everything I do in ministry, because I'm not good enough.
Speaker B:Without Jesus, I'm nobody.
Speaker B:I'm a complete failure.
Speaker B:I laughed.
Speaker B:Without Jesus, I laughed.
Speaker B:I made a joke.
Speaker B:I used AI to create an image of me as a pirate, and I posted it on Facebook the other day.
Speaker B:And I said, I'm convinced had Jesus not rescued me, this would be my life.
Speaker B:So, anyway, until next time.
Speaker B:Again, I'll leave you with a question.
Speaker B:What is God at going through your life today?
Speaker B:If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe.
