I Am Not My Father's Pulpit

I preached twice.

Once at a local conference. Once at a school chapel service. I was eight the first time, eleven the second. I do not remember the texts. I remember the room — that particular kind of church attention, not warm, not hostile, just evaluative. Heads tilted slightly. Eyes narrowed the way church people narrow them when they are not judging whether something is true yet, but whether it feels familiar. They were not listening for revelation. They were listening for resemblance.

It did not feel like a beginning. It felt like a misreading. Even then, I knew the difference between something you can do and something you were built for.

I had the name before I had any language for the burden that came with it. And for a long time, other people treated that as enough.

What I did not understand then, I would understand later: being a namesake in ministry means the comparison is rarely direct. People do not always do it to you. They do it around you. Constantly. Casually. In introductions. In the extra half-second after your last name. In questions that sound curious but are really diagnostic.

People do not always ask who you are. Sometimes they are trying to measure how much of someone else made it through you intact — which means you can spend years being treated like evidence instead of a person.

For a long time, I measured it too.

I looked at my father — a man whose voice has filled sanctuaries, television screens, conference halls, and private rooms where powerful men came looking for counsel — and I tried to find myself in that mirror. I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t admire it. I admire it more than most people will ever understand. But admiration and assignment are not the same thing. Admiration can make you honor a calling you were never meant to imitate. That may be one of the hardest truths for people raised near visible ministry to accept.

The problem was never a lack of respect. It was that respect can become distortion if it keeps you searching for yourself in somebody else’s obedience.

So I followed appetite before optics. I studied the arts — piano, music production, the patient work of arrangement. Long before I had language for calling, I already knew I was drawn to structure: tone, pacing, sequence, what happens when the right thing lands at the right moment.

I came home after college and took an internship at The Potter’s House for what I thought would be six months. It felt like a temporary return, not a life direction. But proximity has a way of revealing assignment. I wasn’t drawn to the platform. I was drawn to everything the pulpit depends on but rarely gets credit for: the sequencing, the distribution, the hidden decisions that determine whether a word dies in the room or finds the person it was meant for.

I thought I had found a role. The pandemic proved I had found an assignment.

I helped manage the machine that delivers the Word of God to people who need it most. Campaigns, platforms, digital distribution — all the invisible labor that decides whether a word stays trapped inside four walls or reaches the person staring at their phone at 4:07 a.m., trying not to come apart.

Eight years now. Eight years of building God’s church with my hands — just not the way people assumed a Jakes would.

I got married on March 12, 2020.

If you remember that week, you remember why the timing matters. The world was shutting down. I was two years into leading the digital marketing team at The Potter’s House when I boarded a plane for my honeymoon, even as the church was meeting to discuss shutdown plans for what everyone assumed would be two weeks.

I was in the most beautiful season of my life — newly married, basking in that — and my phone was lighting up. My team was working without me. The tension between being a Jakes and working as one usually hums in the background, but my wife is the line where it stops. When she is involved, the work waits. That was the deal I made with myself, and I kept it.

Still, I caught up with my father on that trip, and of course, the conversation turned to what the church was facing. I felt it — the weight of a world desperate for solace in God’s word, and the reality that, as the church went digital, that shift would land squarely on us. Not on the pulpit. On the platform. On the infrastructure. On the team I was meant to be leading.

So I came back, and we went to work.

The numbers moved fast. Reach multiplied. Livestream audiences surged. Habits we thought would take years formed in months. But the thing that fixed the work in me was not the graph. It was the comment feed.

A woman in Zimbabwe asking for prayer in the middle of her night. Someone in a hospital room watching from a bed they did not know they would leave. Members staring at a Zoom wall during worship just to see one another’s faces again. That is when the work stopped feeling like support and started feeling like stewardship. The thousands we helped feed around the world, even when their communities couldn’t. The testimonies of people coming to Christ who had never been touched by a church before.

That period clarified something I think the church still struggles to name: ministry is not only what happens on the platform. Sometimes it is the infrastructure that gets grace to people in time.

The church has a vocabulary problem.

We say “called to ministry,” and often mean “called to preach.” We say “in ministry,” and picture a pulpit, a collar, a title. And when someone’s obedience doesn’t look like that, the church often treats them as adjacent instead of assigned — useful, maybe, but not fully consecrated.

That is not just a vocabulary issue. It is a discipleship failure. It trains people to doubt the form of their own obedience unless it looks public, audible, and easy for other Christians to recognize on sight.

But Paul does not give us that narrow a frame. In Ephesians 4, the word that matters is some. Some apostles. Some prophets. Some evangelists. Some pastors and teachers.

Some. Not all.

That distinction matters because the body of Christ was never meant to be an echo chamber of identical callings.

Then in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul does something the church often refuses to do: he asks the question in a way that already contains the answer. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? No. The point is not uniformity. The point is interdependence.

Peter widens the frame without collapsing the distinctions Paul makes. Not everyone has the same assignment. But everyone who belongs to Christ carries sacred dignity. Priesthood is not sameness. It is consecration.

And this is not just a theological distinction for me. It is a human one. I grew up close enough to pastoral ministry to see what it costs the people who really carry it.

Growing up as a PK at the altitude my family operates at, you see what it costs. The hours, yes. The public demand, yes. But also the quieter rearrangements: dinners interrupted by emergencies, family rhythms bent around somebody else’s catastrophe, the way a household learns to stay flexible because the needs of strangers may become the schedule at any moment. And the less dramatic things: how rarely a life like that belongs fully to itself, how easily the line between devotion and depletion can disappear if the call is real enough to keep saying yes.

I watched my father carry it with grace, but I also watched him carry it. Period. And I became acutely aware, earlier than most, that the calling to pastor is not just a gift — it’s a cost. One that should only be borne by the people God specifically built to bear it.

I wasn’t built for that. And I respect the calling too much to fake it.

I think people expected to see me climb over pews mid-sermon in an oversized suit — the second coming of “Get ready, get ready, get ready.” And I get it. The name writes the script before you ever open your mouth.

On any given evening, I’d rather be home with my wife — praying together, quoting Pootie Tang, half-watching a true crime documentary, discussing gardening, playing Kendrick Lamar, maybe looking up a quiet omakase spot with a Japanese whisky we have not tried yet.

That is not what most people want from their pastor on a Saturday night. I know that. And I’m not going to put on a clergy collar and greet you each Sunday with a word that makes people feel something just because I can. There are people who were built for that — who carry that anointing and pay the cost of it gladly. I have deep reverence for them. There are plenty of pastors in my family. We’re covered.

Somebody has to serve the Kingdom without disappearing into it. That, too, is stewardship: not only giving your life to something holy, but refusing to offer what God never asked for — your personhood, your marriage, your full humanity.

So if you’re a PK — or simply someone raised close enough to visible ministry to confuse inheritance with assignment — hear me clearly: not feeling called to preach is not deficiency. It may be discernment.

Romans 12 is striking for what it normalizes: service, teaching, generosity, mercy, leadership, exhortation. The New Testament does not treat these as supporting roles. It treats them as gifts of grace.

Matthew 28:19 gives the charge in broader terms than the church sometimes does: make disciples. Jesus does not reduce obedience to one office, one platform, or one mode of visibility. The command is larger than that. And the promise that follows — “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” — extends that command past the eleven men on that mountain to every believer in every generation.

The question was never whether you are called to ministry in the broad sense. Faithfulness already settled that. The real question is narrower and harder: what kind of stewardship has actually been assigned to your life? What burden can you carry without pretending? What work can you do with both conviction and grace?

Maybe it’s teaching. Maybe it’s administration. Maybe it’s mercy. Maybe it’s the thing no one in your church has a title for yet — the creative work, the digital strategy, the quiet labor that makes the loud work possible.

For eight years, I’ve been a steward of something I didn’t expect to become my life’s work. And I’m grateful for it. But I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say this too: I want a life that is not exhausted by one institution, even one I love. That is not disloyalty. It is an attempt to honor the full range of stewardship God may have placed in me.

I want to make things. Build things. Follow curiosities that do not need ecclesial permission to matter. I am not just another Jakes. Not just a ministry worker. I am a creative, a husband, and a person whose life before God is larger than the room people most expect me to occupy.

See me as an individual — not as a role people pre-cast before I ever opened my mouth. I didn’t come with a prewritten ending from anyone but God. I’m still figuring out the middle.

I’m still learning every day how to balance working with Jakes and being one. Those are two different things. And some days, the line between them is thinner than I’d like.

But I’ve stopped apologizing for the distinction. And I’ve stopped shrinking the parts of me that exist beyond it.

I am my father’s son. The inheritance is real. The love is real. The resemblance is real. But inheritance is not duplication. Love does not require replication.

I am not his pulpit. I never was.