Iemke Roos argues that Christian organizations gain more trust by letting founders, staff, and creators speak in their own voices than by protecting a single polished institutional brand.
A confession, before anything else: I once spent an entire afternoon rewriting a colleague’s LinkedIn post so that it sounded, as I put it then, “more like us.” It did sound more like us. It also sounded like nobody at all, which is rather the problem with most organizational writing, including, on my less careful days, my own.
Time magazine has apparently discovered something my afternoon of editing should have taught me. Its editor-in-chief describes bringing in social media creators the way a magazine once made room for columnists in the back pages - people with a recognizable point of view, whose personality was the point. The results, by Time’s own account, are not subtle: video views up seven-fold on Youtube in a single quarter. Meanwhile the fitness entrepreneur Gabby George built a platform with members in ninety-three countries not by hiding behind a brand but by putting her own face, her own wedding, her own workout studio in front of an audience that had already decided it liked her specifically. And NU.nl, the Dutch news outlet, has started showing readers its own reporters’ individual posts inside its app, a small but telling admission that people trust a byline with a personality attached more than they trust a logo.
People are interested in people
Here is the pattern, and it is not really about media at all. People are interested in people. They are not, on the whole, interested in companies, however excellent the company’s mission statement. Watch what happens when Elon Musk tweets something odd at three in the morning: the attention it draws dwarfs anything Tesla’s own corporate account could produce with a quarter’s marketing budget, for better or worse. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal choices - his beef, his jiu-jitsu, his occasional awkwardness on stage - generate more genuine curiosity than another Meta product announcement ever could. This is not a comment on whether that attention is deserved. It is simply an observation about where human curiosity naturally goes, which is toward other humans, complete with their contradictions.
The case for a little awkwardness
Christian organizations, in my experience, tend to resist this instinct rather than use it. There is an understandable caution: a founder’s stray opinion might embarrass the ministry, a staff member’s political comment might alienate half the donor base, and nobody wants a headline built from an unscripted remark. I do not dismiss that worry. It is a real cost, and any organization that opens this door should also agree on some sensible boundaries about what gets discussed publicly and what does not.
But the caution, taken too far, produces exactly the flattened, interchangeable voice that makes so much Christian media forgettable. A press release about compassion moves nobody. A slightly awkward video of the person actually doing the compassionate work, stumbling over their words because they mean them, moves quite a lot of people. Awkwardness, oddly enough, is not the enemy of trust here. It may be its clearest evidence.
The chief executive who admits uncertainty, the founder who shares a hobby that has nothing to do with the mission statement, the young staff member who posts something a communications department would never have approved - these are the details that make an organization feel inhabited by actual humans rather than run by an anonymous, always-composed committee. A personal brand, kept visibly separate from the institutional one, does not steal credibility from the organization. It lends credibility to it, the way a good reference lends credibility to a stranger. Gabby George understood this instinctively: she kept her personal following and her platform’s branding deliberately apart, and both grew stronger for the separation, not weaker.
Control the values, not the voice
The practical question, of course, is where the messaging starts and stops, and I will not pretend there is a formula. But a reasonable rule might be this: control the values, not the voice. Christian organizations tend to do the opposite, controlling voice tightly while leaving values implicit. Reverse it, and something interesting may follow. Let the people behind the mission speak like the people they are, in their own imperfect, particular register, and the mission itself, quietly, begins to seem more believable.