Church culture often rewards the visible leader: the bigger room, the longer introduction, the clip that travels. Dr. Nicole Martin argues that this reward system has crowded out something at the center of the faith. Following Jesus as a leader requires suffering and surrender because the cross is the pattern of his leadership, and the cross means dying to self. That includes dying to the success a leader is tempted to keep as personal property. In Martin’s account, the church has lost crucifixion as a daily practice and filled the empty space with comfort.
She calls this “the core of the gospel that’s missing for the church period,” and she refuses to confine it to people with titles: “This isn’t just about leadership, this is life.” Weighing that claim fairly means naming what the church is rewarding, where those values came from and what the cross asks a leader to hand over.
What Is Church Culture Rewarding?
Martin names the rewards directly. “We’ve gotten caught up in the accolades that we get on this earth,” she says. She also names comfort, and a version of Christianity whose main job is to make the believer feel good. She hears two parallel promises in the church. The first is that “when you come to Jesus, you get your best life.” The second is aimed at leaders: “You can get your best likes. But that is never at all what the Bible says.”
The two promises share one idea. In both, faithfulness is measured by what you receive and how visible you become. Martin describes the inner voice this produces in a leader: “I want my introduction to say fastest, greatest, best, you know, most fill in the blank.” A bio becomes a scoreboard.
Institutions keep the system running. Leading in Christian organizations is harder than secular work, Martin says, because “first you have to get through Christian nice.” She means performance reviews and budget meetings where no one will say the bad news plainly. A culture that rewards image tends to punish honesty, including the honesty that would help a leader grow. The polished image becomes the safest place to stand.
Martin still honors what these institutions do well. “You do not work in a Christian space to make money,” she observes, so teams are often more committed, and the mission outlives the people doing it. Her quarrel is with the rewards. The mission keeps her loyalty.
Whose Experience Is Behind This Critique?
Martin’s critique has a specific origin. She wrote her book on leadership partly out of frustration with the standard leadership books. “I felt like I was doing what a lot of my younger friends, what a lot of my women friends, what a lot of people of color were doing,” she says. They kept adapting principles written for someone else. “So we would read something and be like, that’s not gonna fit for my context.”
She describes what that mismatch felt like from the inside. She says she never thought about what it meant to lead as a person of color until she heard white leaders describe their process and realized how little second-guessing it involved. Her question to them was pointed: “You mean you don’t have to navigate a conversation to make sure that you don’t offend someone?” Early in her leadership, she says, she was “hyperaware” of “not being too anything.” She avoided seeming too emotional, because that would mark her as a woman leader, and too passionate, because that would be stereotyped as a person of color.
Her resolution is theological. “Now, I think for the first time in my life, I’m like, what you see is what you get.” She describes trying to push herself out of her own stereotypes “and force myself into the gospel.” For Martin, the gospel is what frees a leader from managing other people’s assumptions. The same move appears in her later critique of platform culture: both require a leader to stop performing an image.
She is careful about generalizing. Women leaders have different personalities, gifts and callings, she says, and there is no single type of woman leader. Her own story complicates any simple picture. Some of the hardest resistance she faced as a woman leading in the church came from other women, who warned her that “there is an exchange you cannot lead without a cost” and named that cost as her marriage, her children and her soul. Encouragement often came from unexpected places, including men outside her organization and Hispanic, white and Black leaders. Her account describes one leader’s experience and a pattern she recognized among friends. It does not speak for every Black Christian or every woman in ministry.
A second source of the problem is broader, and it should be kept separate from the first. Martin also points to a national mood: “And let us not talk about the American stress that we are under, and this constant triumphalism, and we’re always victorious, and we’re always the superpower and we’re always on top.” She chose to open her writing with the question “What is the impact of triumphalism?” This critique concerns the whole American church, whatever a leader’s background. A nation that pictures itself always on top teaches its churches to read winning as blessing, and a church that absorbs that story will struggle to make sense of a crucified Lord.
She also names what she wanted to leave behind: “worldly disciplines of power and scale and platform.” In their place, “I wanted to get lost in spiritual disciplines.” Her word choice is telling. Power, scale and platform are practices that form a person when repeated long enough. A church that borrows them without examination will produce leaders shaped by them, even when it describes those leaders in Christian language.
What Goes to the Cross?
Scripture’s pattern of leadership runs downward. Paul writes of Christ:
“But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:7–8).
Paul wrote this to urge a quarreling church to have the mind of Christ toward one another (Philippians 2:3–5). That context supports Martin’s point. The cross shapes every Christian’s life, and a title grants no exemption.
Martin lists what a leader brings there: sins, recognized and confessed, and weaknesses, brought honestly. Then comes the item most church cultures skip: “that I’m aware of my success and the places where people like me and the places where I quote unquote go viral. And then I’m willing to say, God, take that. Use it for your glory. Nail that to the cross so that it might find glory in you.”
Most Christians have practices for failure, such as confession, repentance and accountability. Few have practices for applause. In a platform culture, applause leaves a leader most exposed, because success arrives looking like proof that God approves of everything about you. Surrendering a win still leaves room to enjoy it. What it does is remove the win from the foundation of a leader’s identity.
Martin guards against the opposite error too. “I’m not suggesting that we wear sackcloth and ashes all the time,” she says, and she affirms that God wants his people to see his goodness in the land of the living, an echo of Psalm 27:13. Dying to self reorders what a leader lives for, so that what lasts outranks what passes.
Why Does Hiding Weakness Feed Pride?
Martin doubts that any leader sets out to build a following of narcissists. Her diagnosis runs deeper: “I think we refuse to acknowledge our insecurities.” Leaders cover those insecurities, and the covering takes the form of pride and self-promotion. On this account, pride is usually a disguise for insecurity.
She grounds this in Paul’s thorn in the flesh, where the Lord answers Paul’s prayer:
“My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Paul concludes in the next verse, “for when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Martin follows the text closely: “Paul despised the thorn, but it was because of the thorn that he recognized when I’m weak, then I’m strong.” Paul still asked for the thorn to be removed. The pain stayed, and it taught him about grace.
Her image for the modern alternative is vivid: “We ignore the thorns in the flesh. We take so many medications to numb the thorn.” The metaphor aims at spiritual anesthetics such as image management and constant activity, and it leaves actual medicine untouched. In the same conversation she says of depression and anxiety, “These are authentic conditions that thank God for counseling and medication.” That matches the Jude 3 Project’s teaching that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. Her warning is that pretending can worsen real conditions, which can be exacerbated “when we try and operate out of this false sense of ourselves.”
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, adds the communal stakes. A leader’s character spreads. “So if you’re a prideful communicator, then you replicate that, and the people who follow you become prideful in their disposition.” A church that rewards leaders for hiding weakness will raise followers who hide weakness too. Martin’s remedy is authenticity, and she notes that the alternative carries its own burden: “It is exhausting to be inauthentic.”
Does Surrender Just Mean Burnout?
Talk of suffering and surrender can easily become a way to work leaders sick, or to tell exhausted people that their misery proves their faithfulness. Many ministry leaders have been crushed by that message.
Martin’s argument points the other way. The exhaustion she describes comes from the facade, the effort to look strong, and surrender lifts that weight. It also turns a leader’s attention toward the people being led. No one can lead well, she says, “without recognizing the tremendous amounts of stress and trauma that people are experiencing today.” Her model is Jesus with his first disciples: “He meets them on their turf, he finds them as fishermen, he sees what they’re doing, he identifies with them literally getting in their boat.” Luke 5:3 records Jesus entering Simon’s boat before calling him.
Fields gives a concrete case. Preparing for a Jude 3 Project campus tour of HBCUs, she asked a student leader about the biggest challenge on campus. He said everybody was depressed and that students needed hope. The team had expected questions about Christianity and whiteness to lead, and the need turned out to be elsewhere. Martin’s reply: “It is not a show of weakness to pause and care for them and give them hope. It is a show of strength to do that.” She contrasts ordinary event preparation with a different charge to a team: “Make sure we have the right placement. But y’all make sure that we are a witness of the joy and the hope that is found in Jesus.”
She also rules out surrender as a bargain, the kind that says, “If I give Jesus my heart, then he’ll give me the kingdom.” That would be platform culture in religious clothing.
Her answer has a limit. Martin describes an inner posture, and her claim that surrender relieves the strain of performance rests on her own experience and observation, without data behind it. A leader can sincerely practice surrender and still be overworked by an institution that demands too much. The posture she describes does not, by itself, protect anyone from abusive expectations. Those still have to be named and changed by the communities that impose them.
What Does the Cross Cost a Leader?
Martin is plain that “leadership is lonely. It requires suffering. Leadership is a cost. It is costly.” It can take a leader’s pride. It can require humbling yourself before people who may betray you, pouring hope into people who may turn their backs and serving without reaching your goals. “And in some cases, leadership will cost you your job if you really lead like Jesus wants us to lead.”
The work has no finish line. Writing the book taught her that “there’s no such thing as having arrived.” Her remedy is ongoing: “The only thing we can do is to practice the discipline of regular submission and surrendering to the cross.” She uses the same word, discipline, for the worldly habits she wanted to leave. One set of disciplines forms a leader for platform. Another forms a leader for the cross.
Her reason for paying echoes Psalm 84:10: “For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand.” She would rather spend one day with the crucified Savior “than to spend thousands of days on my own platform in my own kingdom.” Jesus states the reversal himself:
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mark 8:35).
The cross and the platform use different arithmetic. A leader formed by platform will read every loss as failure. A leader formed by the cross can lose a title, a following or a job and still count faithfulness as intact, because the account that matters is kept in the kingdom.
