After fifty years of meeting and observing thousands of Christian leaders, I've come to a conclusion that makes most of us uncomfortable: we don't actually believe character matters as much as we say we do.
We would never admit this out loud. But watch how we hire, who we elevate, and who we excuse, and the unstated assumption becomes clear. Giftedness wins.
Musical ability, writing, speaking, leadership, motivational energy, wisdom, and knowledge; we deeply admire these things. And when someone has them in abundance, we quietly make allowances. We overlook warning signals. We assume that because someone is extraordinarily gifted, they must also be people of deep character. The two, we assume, travel together.
They often don't.
Through thousands of assessments of leaders across the church, I've observed something striking: gifts and character are almost inversely correlated. I believe this is because the more gifted a young person is, the more they can rely on those gifts for early impact, and therefore the less pressure they feel to develop Christlike character. Why do the hard inner work when the gifts are already working?
The MacDonald Principle
Gordon MacDonald wrote about this forty years ago in his classic Ordering Your Private World. He observed that naturally gifted young leaders frequently rely on their gifts early in their professional lives rather than developing what he called their "private world," their inner spiritual depth and skill sets. Because of this tendency, they fail to sustain lifelong effectiveness, passion, and character consistency.
Meanwhile, less gifted leaders who commit to a development path — building skill, cultivating deep spiritual roots — begin to bypass their naturally gifted peers in their late forties and fifties. The slow work compounds. It manifests.
This same dynamic fuels hero worship in the church. We're drawn to highly gifted people. We want to be near them. And that attraction can blind us to warning signals earlier in an influencer's life. We've watched so many influential Christian leaders fall miserably, and in nearly every case, the signals were there. We just didn't want to see them.
Impact Is Not the Same as Blessing
Several years ago, I wrote a piece called "Don't Write a Book Until You're 50," and this was the point. We associate visible impact with God's blessing. We measure fruitfulness by the world's metrics. And in doing so, we confuse gifts with character.
Christlike character doesn't work that way. It is forged through what Eugene Peterson called "a long obedience in the same direction."* It takes time. It requires struggle. It demands that we sit with challenges that don't resolve the way we want them to.
Part of what makes this so dangerous is that gifted leaders have almost no safe place to talk honestly about their struggles, what I'd call their dragons. To name a weakness risks losing the admiration of followers. So the dragons get denied. And denied dragons don't disappear. They grow until one day they cause a collapse that leaves devastating collateral damage in its wake.
How Character Is Actually Built
Christlike character is built differently. It comes through learning to anchor our identity in Christ's love and abiding presence, not in our performance or our gifting. It comes through submitting to God's providence and trusting that he is actively working on us. It means sitting with Scripture, journaling about our dragons, praying, repenting, and critically, allowing others who know our struggles to speak honestly into them.
That kind of transparency leads to a depth of freedom: to be seen, to grow, and to become who God is shaping us to be. God is more concerned about our character than our comfort.
What Paul Understood
Paul understood this at a cellular level.
As a young Pharisee, Paul was extraordinarily gifted. After his conversion, God didn't simply deploy those gifts; He humbled Paul through persecution, hardship, and opposition from both Jews and Christians. Paul's faith went very deep precisely because the road was so hard.
In 2 Corinthians 12, Paul speaks of profound personal encounters with God, revelations so remarkable that others would have held him in the highest reverence. And then, immediately, he describes how God also gave him "a thorn in my flesh" to keep him from becoming conceited. We don't know exactly what that thorn was, but we know it was genuinely difficult. Paul prayed three times for God to remove it.
God's response and Paul’s reaction, in 12:9–10 (NIV):
"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
God gave Paul the thorn so that his weakness would make God's power unmistakable. The Message puts verse 10 this way:
Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size — abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.
This is the direct opposite of what we practice in much of the church today.
Where This Leaves Us
Our weaknesses are where we learn humility. Where we learn to trust. Where we walk more deeply with God. Nothing else ultimately matters. We are responsible for the depth of our walk — not the breadth of our impact.
I am far from finished in this work myself. Even now, at this stage of life, I'm still working on Christlike character, and most of that work happens in difficult seasons, not comfortable ones. I'll leave the question of impact to my Lord.
The phrase "a long obedience in the same direction" was first written by Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 188). Eugene Peterson later borrowed it as the title of his 1980 book.