It’s been over a week now since my last day on the job, and it occurs to me that a fellow might should have a good explanation at the ready for something like that—especially when he cashes out his 401k and has no job offer in hand.

Decisions like this are never made for just one reason.  But as much as I’ve gone on here about the importance of weaving new narratives about our lives, I’m going to try and resist just numbering off a list of reasons.  I hope what follows turns out to be something of a story. 

You could divide my professional life into two periods: before and after I left the ministry.  No, I wasn’t ordained by any denominational body, and some would consider my whole professional life to therefore be outside the ministry.  But when you’re raised around faith healing and tongue talking—where "the priesthood of all believers" is taken with deadly seriousness—and when you have an MDiv and five years of half time church staff experience, you’re inclined to take that line of reasoning as a bunch of high filutin’ rich boy bureaucratic bullshit.

So "before" and "after I left the ministry" it is.   

Before I left the ministry all my professional decisions were made, as you might expect, for sweet baby Jesus, the reason for this being that he would surely bleed more if I did not.  My "call" to the ministry—I have now abandoned the notion of "call" for the notion of "gifts"—was experienced at the ripe old age of fourteen at a church camp at Oral Roberts University.  After I told my "church family"—I told you I was raised around tongue talking—my "testimony" about my call, I felt honor bound, and guaranteed, to follow through on it.  It never occurred to me that I could have been misled (or could have misled myself).  I needed that experience to be real, to be authentic.  And god knew I was the holiest kid in the youth group.  They didn’t call me the "living bible" for nothing.

I started work as a youth director my junior year in college, and my senior year I got recruited away to a larger suburban church for double the pay.  I was good with the kids, I was good with their parents, and I was an excellent teacher.  My evangelical boss took my bullshit identification as a "liberal evangelical" in stride—I was long past the tongue talking at that point.

I ran into a rep from our denominational seminary in Boston at a conference, and they soon offered me the largest scholarship they had.  (I was told it was the largest seminary scholarship in the US, but I’m now disinclined to believe that.)  There was no choice in the matter.  I had to go off to liberal Boston.  I had things to prove, to myself and to everyone else.

My half time church job there was shitty, even abusive.  My denominational caretaker from back home never called.  My classes did not engage me, and the faculty were aloof.  I had the worst episode of depression in my life.  And I could not leave Boston, especially not my school or my church job.  I had no choice, remember?

When the reality of graduation set in the last semester of seminary, I realized that I could not, would not go further into the ordination process.  But I had no preparation to do anything else.  All my professional experience was church-based and hard to translate into secular terms, and both of my degrees were in religion.  The chair of my church’s church-staff committee went so far as to ask me if I could say, "Would you like fries with that?"

If all my professional experience before I left the ministry was for sweet baby Jesus, then all my professional experience after I left the ministry was make-up work.  My secretarial job earning a hefty $28K at Boston’s seminary consortium (which obviously highly values the degrees which its schools confer) was definitely make-up work.  The job in Atlanta putting my web and desktop publishing hobbies to work for the sake of ethics was also make-up work, if less so.

The ethics work was good work, to be sure.  Which is to say, it was for a good cause, and for a good organization, and for good people.  But then a colleague told me she felt she was professionally regressing, and the echo of recognition pained me.  

I found myself telling my wife that the last life-giving, energizing conversations I had at work were at that youth director job my senior year.  That the good and meaningful conversation I’ve had at work these past five years were about what was wrong and what needed to be fixed (which is to say that they were merely life-preserving).  That I had more life-giving, energizing conversations at a youth group retreat these past 36 hours than I did at work the past 36 months.

And that, my friends, is why I quit.  I need time to find where those life-giving, energizing conversations take place for me.  I need to time to find out how to make a career decision that isn’t for baby Jesus, that isn’t make-up work, that is just for me.  And goddamit, I’m going to do it too.