I Had the Title, But I Wasn’t Ready

I had just turned thirty.

My career had kind of wandered at that point. I taught in three different schools and worked as a director of admissions in the St. Louis area. I moved my family to West Palm Beach and was principal of a Christian school for two years. It wasn’t going great. I definitely didn’t like the job. I still didn’t really know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

That’s when I got a call that would change everything. A connection I had through my wife was the senior pastor of a church in Oklahoma City. They were hiring an executive director, and he thought I would be a great candidate for the job. I don’t really know why. I had been an average administrator, a decent director of admissions, and a great basketball coach up to that point. I went ahead and interviewed, and suddenly I was moving my family across the country for the second time to Oklahoma City.  I’d never set foot in Oklahoma before.

I went through onboarding and met a lot of people. I remember sitting down at my desk about a month in, looking at spreadsheets, insurance policies, revenue numbers—all the business aspects of ministry. I had a clarifying thought:

“I don’t know anything, and I can’t believe they put me in charge of all this.”

A few days went by before I had the guts to tell my wife what I realized. “Hey honey, we moved across the country, and I have no idea what I’m doing.” That’s quite the conversation to have. I had the title of a leader, but I wasn’t ready. It was the ultimate sense of imposter syndrome. It was overwhelming, scary, but deep down kind of exciting too. I did what I typically do.  I got right to work.

My first area of focus was to modernize our business approach. We were still only writing paper checks. We didn’t have direct deposit. We were stuck in a very expensive healthcare plan tied to our church network. The facility was kind of falling apart. The accounting books were a mess. I decided I was just going to overhaul all of it.

Surely then, people will think I know what I’m doing, and things might get better around here.

My view of leadership at that time was action-oriented: talking, directing, deciding, changing. I did it all, but there was one thing I was missing.

I never listened.

I saw so many things that needed to be overhauled, so many things that could be better, that I really pushed through all of the people around me. I said things like, “Well, they’ve been here forever. They don’t know the right way to do things. They’re just stuck doing it how they’ve always done it.”

I leaned heavily into my title. I took advantage of the fact that the church had never had an executive director before. The board didn’t really know how to react. I didn’t feel like they had much oversight of me anyway. I took the viewpoint that I was going to do what I was going to do, and if anybody got really upset, I would apologize later.

Sometimes I guess I was right, but I never cared to consider anything else because I never listened.

That all changed one Sunday, 18 months later.

The Conversation That Changed Everything

In June of 2021, the world was kind of opening up in Oklahoma. There were still the COVID vapor trails, but church had been so weird during that time period. We went from having a livestream that looked like the Zapruder film to something of much higher quality. We figured out how to have people gathered outdoors, spaced out indoors, and everything in between. We had people who were terrified of COVID and people who thought it was all a hoax. It was stressful emotionally, and it was also very stressful on our church financially.

I lived in absolute fear of being a leader who closed a church. At that time, there was a lot of political and cultural backlash toward Christianity, even in Oklahoma. It was an irrational fear, but I was always worried about being the leader who oversaw the downfall of a ministry. That fear consumed me.

It was budget time, and I was freaking out. We were going to take a loss on the previous year. Our attendance and giving numbers were down, and I wasn’t sure our ministry would survive if the status quo was maintained.

One Sunday morning, my friend Frank (name changed) walked into my office and sat down. Frank was in his late 70s, had been a member of the church for almost 30 years, and was a retired accountant. He had been very nice to me, and I think he viewed me as someone with potential. He had been the congregational president and had recently rotated off the board.

He asked me how I felt things were going. I told him, in a lot of words, what my concerns were. He just nodded, looked at me, and said, “A.J., do you think this place is in bad shape? Are you worried?”

“Yeah,” I responded. “I live in fear of this place closing.”

“A.J., have you listened at all to what God says about that?  I think you need to read Matthew 6.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks.

He continued, “A.J., this place is not going to close. That’s not going to happen. God puts the right people in the right place at the right time all the time. This church survived for thirty years without you, and it will survive for many years after you’re gone. You need to start taking a deep breath. Listen to what God wants you to do. Listen to the people around you.”

With that, he got up and left.

What Happened When I Finally Started Listening

From there, things changed. I spent more time seeking out conversations with God to guide our decisions. Like most people, I fell back into the old trap of talking, directing, deciding, and changing. The Holy Spirit would always bring me back.  Usually because I would run into Frank.

When I finally started listening, things didn’t magically get easier, but they did start to make more sense. For the first time since I had taken the job, I wasn’t trying to prove that I belonged there. I wasn’t walking into every conversation with an agenda or a solution already forming in my head. I started asking questions and then actually waiting to hear the answers, and what I found surprised me.

People had a lot to say. Not in a complaining way. Not in a “tear everything down” way. But in a thoughtful, honest, “we’ve been here, we care about this place, and we see things you might not see yet” kind of way. The more I listened, the more I realized how much I had missed in that first year and a half.

I had been making decisions off spreadsheets and assumptions. I knew the numbers. I knew where we were spending too much, where systems were outdated, and where things could be more efficient. But I didn’t really know the people. I didn’t understand the history behind certain decisions. I didn’t know what had been tried before, what had failed, or why it had failed.

Listening started to fill in all of those gaps. I remember sitting in offices, lingering after meetings, and having conversations in hallways that I probably would have rushed past before. Slowly, things started to click—not because I suddenly got smarter, but because I finally had better information. Real information—the kind you can’t capture in a report.

Something else started to change too that I didn’t expect. People started leaning in.

The Shift From Control to Curiosity

I felt a true shift about two years after my conversation with Frank. There was a teacher in our school, Monica (name changed), who I had become friendly with. We shared a similar sense of humor and the same care for Lutheran education. I came to realize that she was my Nathan. Just like King David needed Nathan: someone to bounce things off of, trust, and be called out by when he was wrong, Monica became that for me. I convinced her to become principal of our school, and for the first time, I had a true thought partner to help me think through decisions and listen to what God was calling us to do, as well as what the people we served were experiencing.

Around the same time, our school began working with a company called ParentPulse, which helped me better understand what our families were experiencing. When you ask questions, when you are genuinely curious, things start to happen. There is more honesty, more openness, and less of that quiet resistance that I hadn’t even fully recognized before. When people feel like they’re not being heard, they either shut down or take their conversations somewhere else. I had created more of that than I realized.

But when people feel heard, they show up differently. They take ownership. They speak up earlier. They care in a more visible way.

For me, maybe the biggest shift was internal. I wasn’t carrying the same weight anymore.

For so long, I had operated like everything depended on me. Like if I didn’t get it right, the whole thing was going to fall apart. That fear had been sitting just under the surface of almost every decision I made. It drove me to move fast, control more, and push harder.

Listening did something unexpected.  It reminded me that I wasn’t alone. This wasn’t my church to save. It wasn’t my organization to single-handedly fix. God had been at work long before I showed up, and He will be at work long after I leave. There were wise, capable, faithful people all around me. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Leadership Isn’t About Having All the Answers

I think that’s part of why listening is so rare. It sounds simple, almost obvious, but it goes against a lot of our instincts, especially in leadership. We’re wired to believe that leaders are supposed to have answers, speak with confidence, move quickly, and make decisions that move things forward. And while that’s partially true, somewhere along the way we started to equate talking with leading.

So we fill the space. We respond before we fully understand. We listen just long enough to jump in. We convince ourselves we already know where someone is going, so we cut them off and take over.

Underneath all of that, if we’re honest, there’s a little bit of insecurity. Listening requires you to admit that you might not know everything. It requires you to slow down when everything in you wants to speed up. It requires a level of humility that doesn’t always come naturally. I know it didn’t for me.

Even now, I have to catch myself. I still feel that pull to jump in too quickly, to direct instead of discover, to solve instead of understand. Every time I do that, I miss things.

When I think back to that moment: sitting at my desk, staring at spreadsheets, feeling completely in over my head, I see it differently now.

“I don’t know anything, and I can’t believe they put me in charge of all this.”

At the time, that felt like a problem I needed to solve as quickly as possible. Like I needed to close the gap between where I was and where I thought I was supposed to be. But that gap was actually the beginning of something.

Because not knowing forced me, eventually, to start paying attention.  To ask questions, to listen to God, and to listen to the people around me. It helped me realize that leadership isn’t about having all the answers.

It’s about being willing to hear the right ones.

I didn’t become a better leader when I figured everything out. I became a better leader when I finally stopped talking long enough to listen.