I Resigned from Ministry A Year Ago. Here’s What I Have Learned.

It has now been slightly over 1 year since I resigned from full time pastoral church employment.

Which means, its time for an update!

What on earth have I been up to? What has the journey post-employment been like? And what has been the biggest difference between being a fulltime pastor and a volunteer?

Here goes!

What on earth have I been up to?

A lot of people ask me what I have been doing since transitioning out of church employment. Afterall, I have a bachelors in theology and a minors in biblical languages. Not exactly the kind of papertrail that gets you hired at a well paying coorporation.

But the good news is, God has gifted me with the gift of writing and I have been using that skill to build my own marketing business where I work with other businesses to help improve their branding, sales, and engagement. And while the business is still growing, so far we are doing good!

Candice and I also launched 'The Hunger App' - a trauma-informed devotional app for survivors of church harm, religious trauma, and spiritual abuse. Its still in its early stages with lots of growth projected for the future but this project has also kept us pretty busy.

And of course, there is 'The Story Church Project'. I've teamed up with pastor Mario Alvarado to relaunch the podcast. I've also continued to run the online school and have a new book I've been preparing to publish (Volume 1 of the Adventism+ series).

What has the journey post-employment been like?

It would be disingenous of me to say any of this has been easy. To be honest, the last year has been the hardest year of our family life. If it wasnt for the love, support, and encouragement of our church family we wouldn't have survived. The body of Christ has kept us going and its only toward the end of the year that business began to pick up enough for us to stabalize again.

I share this because I want to encourage anyone reading who feels called by God to leave a comfort zone and do something radical. It's unlikely to be easy. Following God doesn't mean all the pieces of the puzzle will magically come together. It doesn't guarantee an easy journey or even a steady stream miracles. We have wrestled through months of silence, lack of clarity, unknowns, and doubts. We even wrestled with whether we misheard God. But through all our prayers and conversations, the conviction that God led us this way has only grown stronger.

I loved working for the denomination. I learned a ton. Met incredible people. Served with amazing believers. And had inspiring leaders who supported, encouraged and poured into me during the last 10 years. But we also knew that if we were going to fully immerse ourselves in the work of secular mission, we needed to humbly step out of the system. And while its been insanely hard and we have more obstacles to overcome, we wouldn't change the journey for anything in the world.

What has been the biggest difference between being a fulltime pastor and being a volunteer?

I always try and walk this line as carefully as possible because while I think its important to challenge the church, I never want to come across like one of those toxic independent ministries who are bitter, cynical, and divisive. Hopefully I walk that line well as I answer this very relevant question.

The honest truth is, the biggest insight I have gained since leaving church employment is how much innovation is valued outside the church versus within it.

Now I get there are legitimate reasons for that. I don't advocate for an innovation free-for-all. Healthy adaptation must involve a balance of modernization and risk management. And when the novelty wears off, not every innovation is positive or good.

However, while risk management is good the church often seems to confuse risk management with risk aversion. In the companies that I work with, risk management is a huge part of what they do. They want to ensure new innitiatives minimize risk while maximizing results.

But the difference between risk management and risk aversion is that risk management welcomes new ideas and explores them enthusiastically within an intelligent execution framework.

Risk aversion, on the other hand, simply rejects new ideas outright. There is no enthusiasm, openness, or interest. Instead, we lead with a posture of immeditate suspicion and rejection of anything that is new or different.

The easiest way to put it is that risk management leans into innovation and engages it enthusiastically while maintaining smart execution processes.

Risk aversion leans away from innovation and runs from it, views it with suspicion, and prefers to simply do the same "safe and familiar" thing over and over even if it doesn't work.

Now I can't speak about our church's upper administrative layers like conferences and unions because I never worked in those. But when it comes to the local church, I can confidently say a culture of risk aversion is what I have encountered most often.

In fact, I encountered it so often that in my first post-pastoral-employment meeting with a client I offered a new idea and immediately my body clenched with the expectation of resistance. Instead, the opposite happened! Client after client has responded to new, innovative ideas with so much enthusiasm that it took me a while to get used to it.

So that appreciation, curiosity, excitement and eagerness for new ideas has been the biggest difference for me. But I don't say this in a critical way because I believe the church can develop a more elastic approach to mission and culture. That vision is a huge part of why I started and continue to nurture this project.

So there you have it! My 1 year update. If you have any specific questions you'd like to ask, post them below! Comments and thoughts are also welcome.

Much love!

Pastor M