Making the Leap: moving from success to significance

Last August, I left my 21-year corporate career to come on staff as Executive Pastor with Genesis Church. Prior to that, I held roles ranging from Buyer to Operations Manager to Director of Human Resources. The career change came with the requisite shift in responsibilities – less travel, better hours, and lower pay- and much higher job satisfaction. For weeks and even months afterward, I had lots of friends, colleagues, and former business associates that wanted to buy me lunch, or coffee, or just talk. I assumed it was because they were excited for me, or wanted to hear about my new role, and in most cases, that was true. But the one question I kept hearing from them, over and over again in these meetings, was more along these lines: “Well, what am I supposed to do now?”

It came in different forms and different ways, but the underlying tone of so many of these meetings was, “I envy you. I want to do what you did. I need my life to have more significance. I want to follow God’s lead. How do I do it?”

The truth is, I do feel like I’ve followed God’s lead in this endeavor. I never expected anyone to envy me, and I certainly didn’t think anyone would want to follow me. And they shouldn’t want to follow me. But because of the frequency of these questions, I’ve given this some thought in the past few months to this question: “How do you know if you’re ready to make the leap?” Here’s what I’ve come up with.

First, let me say this. I don’t have this figured out. I’m not (1) an example to follow, (2) holier than you, or (3) doing the “right” thing by moving into a ministry career, while you keep doing the “wrong” thing by staying in your corporate job. However, I do have some insight as to how and why I made the leap. I felt like I needed to get this down on paper (or in electrons) in the hope that it might help some of my friends understand the call God has put on your life.

In the coming posts over the next few days, I hope to tell the story of how I believe God prepared me to make the leap from a life of success to one of significance. For you of short attention span, I’ll give you the 30,000 foot view now. I believe that these things happened through this transition:

1) God prepared me emotionally.
2) God prepared me financially.
3) God prepared my family.
4) God prepared my place.

Making the leap to a new career can be a stressful decision and can also cause a pretty long chain of events. I hope you’ll stick around and read how He prepared me for this major life transition.