My friend Josh started an apparel company a few years ago. He named it “Personal Brand.” He sells plain shirts with the phrase “Personal Brand” on them.
He started the brand when he was in college in the late 2010s, as Instagram was taking off and TikTok was on the rise. It was his way to poke fun at what he was seeing all around him—by creating the most plain, unimpressive t-shirt and calling out the thing in plain sight.
The idea of a personal brand is very familiar to us who are swimming in the Digital Age, but in the grand narrative of human history, is really a concept that is only about twenty-five years old.
There is a lot of pressure to have a personal brand, for a multitude of reasons. A personal brand can lead to amassing a major social media following, which can then lead to fame, opportunity, and a lot of money. A Forbes article from 2020 claims that more than 50% of Gen Z hopes to start a business, and it’s easy to see why. They’ve seen it work for ordinary people like them.
I told myself I wanted ministry. But what I really wanted was significance.
The same pressure applies to us who belong to the Church. I have been a worship leader for fifteen years, and I started playing piano in 2007 (ironically the same year as the release of the iPhone). The first year I encountered this phenomenon first-hand was 2015. Not just on social media, but right in front of me.
I worked for a large church for two years out of college as a worship intern. It is a well-known church that has a worship program with a strong reputation. Many of the worship leaders were heroes of mine from afar, both men and women who influenced me.
If I’m honest, I knew that if I could be a part of their brand, I’d get opportunities that I otherwise would not. I was right. It led to job opportunities, youth retreats, camps, and credibility. But within the greater collective brand of our worship team, there was an insidious pressure that crouched at the door, waiting to devour me—the temptation to build a personal brand instead of building a ministry.
While I do not think that building a personal brand is necessarily a bad thing, a personal brand should be a byproduct of ministry; too many worship leaders hope that ministry is a byproduct of brand. The modern temptation of worship leaders is to reverse this pursuit and focus more on personal brand than ministering to God and others, assuming that if their brand is successful enough, genuine ministry will just automatically happen.
For the purpose of this article, I am using “personal brand” to mean influencing others’ perception of you. I am using “ministry” to mean leading others into the reality of Jesus.
In my internship, I had proximity with one of the world’s best known Christian songwriters. His kids were in the youth group that I led worship for. I wrote a song and sent it to him over email, hoping that he would like it and would want to co-write with me. I had big dreams of the song getting picked up by my church, or by Nashville songwriting circles, or even Hillsong United!
He emailed me back and said, “This is good bro! Thanks for sharing.” That’s it. I was crushed. Why was I crushed by an encouragement?
Because I didn’t want this man’s encouragement, I wanted to co-opt his platform and use it to leverage myself upward so that people would know my name and I would feel like somebody. That’s the honest truth. My motive was to build my own brand.
I told myself I wanted ministry. But what I really wanted was significance.
I wanted that famous songwriter to say, “Kenny is a good songwriter,” to more than just me—I wanted him to say it to his Instagram followers, and my boss, and industry gatekeepers. The hunger to be seen can quietly corrupt your ministry while disguising itself as ministry.
[Jesus] asked about his personal brand. The disciples let him know that there were mixed opinions.
Marty Neumeier once said, “A brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is.” If a brand is just perception, then building one means living under the constant scrutiny of public opinion and reputation management. It quietly turns ministry into a self-conscious performance instead of service to others.
Jesus asked his disciples the Marty Neumeier question in Matthew 16:13: “He asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’”
He asked about his personal brand. The disciples let him know that there were mixed opinions.
Jesus could have drilled into that and started curating his image. He could have softened up on his sermons. He could have revisited his aesthetic. He could have done emergency brand management. Instead, he asks the more important, insightful question in verse 15: “Then he asked them, ‘But who do you say I am?’” (emphasis added).
Jesus was far more concerned with the people that he knew, shepherded, loved, and lived with, than the perception of the crowd. In other words, his ministry mattered infinitely more than his personal brand.
We often get this backwards. We are tempted to believe that we must build a following and be known about by thousands instead of building a life of service to a handful of people while being known by them. We think that if we could just hit that metric, or just have that worship leader follow us back on Instagram, or just get invited to that songwriting session, then we are really ministering!
But that is not the way of Christ.
In Matthew 11:11, Jesus said that of all who have ever lived, none were greater than John the Baptist. That is significant praise from the Savior. That man said this: “[Jesus] must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less” (John 3:30 NLT).
Doesn’t sound like a very good personal brand strategy, does it?
The ultimate calling of a worship leader is found in Romans 12. The first verse says: “give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.”
Worship leaders do our job when we focus on ministering to God and others by offering who we really are to Him. We still love and show compassion to the crowd, but they do not dictate our primary focus. That belongs to loving God and the people that He has entrusted to us.
True worship is a life laid down. Not a platform built up.
