In January I ended a twenty-year career with a large ministry organization, exiting at the senior leadership level. There was something about the crushing of the pandemic season that left me sure that I needed to move into a new place of ministry calling, one where, among other priorities for this season, I could have more influence over the core operating system of an organization. Following the advice of Gordon T. Smith in his book, Teach Us to Pray, it was not a decision made out of desolation. It was a decision made out of consolation with a sense of the Lord’s leading, promises, and call to more deeply explore who I am created to be.

My unique talent, I realized, is to make unhealthy things healthy–to bring alignment where alignment is lacking. Not alignment from the top to the bottom. I’m convinced that is a wrong alignment which has fundamentally distorted us in this world. Rather, I envision and implement spiritual alignment of an organization, more like the plumb line we hear about from the prophet Amos.

Six months after my last paycheck, I am still looking for where to land. I hope someone is willing to pay for a prophet practitioner’s work. In the world we live in, the paycheck goes to those who can hit numbers and outcomes for organizations. I wonder whether a livelihood can be made by bringing the true alignment that the world needs?

Isn’t that what a pastor is called to do? Doesn’t a pastor speak God’s words to align our hearts to God’s heart? This is the only job that is supposed to be incorruptible, a job that answers to God and not to man. But here in the U.S., churches are businesses and brands. We end up needing to bring alignment to pastors and churches.

In this season, I can often feel so alone and yet I am not alone. When I left my role earlier this year, I received calls from a half a dozen women who were leaving or had left their institutions for a sense of new calling and purpose with an unknown trajectory. They all took risks.

And here we wait wondering where to go. I recognize this isn’t a new phenomenon for folks to feel outside of institutions, but I do think we are arriving at another crucial breaking point. We need new wine and new wineskins.

Just this week I prepared a breakfast table for a couple moms and we poured out our hearts to one another in anguish and tears. We attend three different churches. We have seven kids of all ages between the three of us, but we all have similar situations.

1) Our kids’ lives are on the line.

2) We are in religious institutions that we serve which often don’t work for us and our families.

3) We are brave.

So brave women of faith, this is a serious question. Where do we go?

Or maybe a better question is, what space will we create?