Reckoning and Rebuilding: A Call to Maturity Before the Next Platform Falls

Reckoning and Rebuilding: Why the Church Must Face Its Shadow Before the Next Platform Falls

There is a hush before the reckoning comes. A silence that is not empty but waiting, heavy with things unsaid. It lingers in the spaces between sermons, in the quiet corners of green rooms, in the uneasy shifting of those who sense that something is unraveling but cannot yet name it.

We have all felt it.

Perhaps it was when another name—one we had trusted, one we had admired—became a headline. Perhaps it was in the whisper of a friend, confessing what they had seen but never spoken aloud. Perhaps it was in our own hearts, in the way we averted our eyes when something didn’t sit right, in the way we silenced the questions before they could take root.

But now, the silence is breaking.

We stand at the edges of a reckoning that is not just about fallen leaders, but about us—about the culture we have built, about the way we have mistaken spectacle for presence, anointing for character, gifting for formation.

And if we are brave enough to look, to really look, we will see that this reckoning is not a punishment.

It is an invitation.

The Culture We Created

We have always been drawn to fire.

It is an old hunger, this longing to be near something wild, luminous, untamed. We have sought out those who burn bright, those whose words crackle with something electric, those who carry the kind of presence that makes the air shift when they enter a room.

And so we built platforms.

We built them quickly, stacking stones beneath the gifted, the anointed, the called. We raised them high, higher, until they stood above us, until we could no longer see them as people but only as beacons, as bearers of the fire we longed to touch.

But fire that is not tended does not only illuminate.

It consumes.

And when those we placed upon the platforms began to crumble beneath the weight, we were astonished. We mourned. We distanced ourselves.

We did not stop to ask: Did we build something that could never stand?

When a Person Becomes a Commodity

I have sat in rooms where the weight of expectation was so thick, it felt like something alive. I have seen the ones we call anointed move through a world that does not see them as human, but as something to be consumed.

And I have seen what happens when a person is given a stage before they are given a home.

Not a house. A home.

A place where they are known. Where they are safe. Where their shadows are not ignored but held, where they can be whole rather than only useful.

But we do not build homes for the gifted. We build platforms.

And then we wonder why they fall.

The Slow Work of Becoming Whole

Jesus never built a platform.

He could have. The crowds were ready. They would have built it for Him, brick by brick, if He had let them. They would have raised Him high, given Him a throne, made Him a king.

But He walked away.

Again and again, He moved toward the margins. He lingered at wells and stretched out meals and disappeared into the hills when the frenzy became too loud.

He did not build a brand.

He built a table.

And He invited people—not an audience, not admirers, but friends—to sit and break bread and be known.

What if we did the same?

What if we stopped building ministries that rise quickly and fall spectacularly, and instead built something slower, something truer?

What if we became people who cared more for depth than visibility?

What if we valued formation as much as we valued gifting?

What if the next great move of God was not a conference or a revival, but a return to the slow, sacred work of becoming whole?

Becoming Ember Keepers

Perhaps we do not need another movement that burns bright and burns out.

Perhaps what we need are embers—those quiet, steady flames that do not demand attention, but warm everything they touch.

Perhaps we need people who tend to their own souls before tending to a stage.

Perhaps we need churches that do not just anoint the gifted, but walk alongside them, making sure their calling does not outrun their character.

Perhaps we need to stop mistaking performance for Presence.

Because the Spirit does not need our frenzy to arrive. The offering can be drenched in water, and the fire of heaven will still consume it.

If we long for God to come, then let us not prepare stages.

Let us prepare hearts.

Let us be ember keepers, not fire-starters.

Let us tend the slow, steady flames of integrity.

Because the next great move of God will not be built upon platforms.

It will be carried in the hearts of those who have learned the sacred, hidden work of becoming whole.