When the Title Changes but the Call Remains
Transitions are strange things.
You don’t realise how much a role has shaped you until you’re no longer in it.
This year has been about learning who I am, and who God is asking me to be, without the title I carried for a long time.
For those who don’t know, at the end of 2024 Katie and I stepped out of our role as Senior Pastors of Curate Church.
Curate was home.
Nineteen years a part of the church.
Eighteen years on staff.
Thirteen years leading it.
After that transition, we spent the rest of 2024 travelling, catching our breath, healing, and seeking the Lord about what future ministry might look like. So 2025 has really been our first year in this new season.
And honestly… it’s been wonderful.
God has been incredibly faithful. He’s surprised me, stretched me, and required more adjustment than I expected. New seasons usually do.
I love the Church. I love pastors. (And I think my love for Jesus goes without saying.)
The deepest motivation behind stepping out of being a Senior Pastor was a growing sense of call to serve the wider Church and pastors in some way. For a while, I thought that could happen alongside being a Senior Pastor. But the Lord had other ideas. He invited us into a leap of faith.
We didn’t have a clear plan.
We didn’t have an income pathway mapped out.
We simply discerned that it was time to step toward what God was inviting us into.
Faith often involves risk.
This certainly did.
So where did we land?
Our ministry now flows in two directions — and I’m deeply grateful that it does. Local & Global.
We’ve always believed deeply in the local church. It’s where God is worshipped, faith is formed, community is shaped, and discipleship actually happens. We didn’t want to drift away from that or float above it. We wanted to stay rooted.
At the same time, we sensed God inviting us to lift our eyes a little wider — to serve pastors and churches beyond our own context. For a while, I wasn’t sure if those two things could genuinely coexist. I worried it might have to be either local or wider ministry.
But we prayed for a both/and.
And God, in His kindness, opened the door for that.
Local still comes first for us. Being grounded in a church community matters. Serving faithfully where we’re planted matters. And from that place, God has allowed a wider, more global expression of ministry to flow, not as a replacement, but as an extension.
I’m grateful we don’t have to choose between loving the local church and serving the wider Church. I’m learning that when things grow from the right soil, they tend to bear better fruit.
Local comes first in very practical ways.
This year marked the end of our first year on staff at LIFE — a multi-location church across New Zealand and Australia. We’ve loved being part of the team: working with the teaching team, campus pastors, pastoral teams, and kingdom projects.
God is on the move here. The church is healthy, vision-filled, and full of great people. We are genuinely stoked to be a part of it.
The leadership has been incredibly kind — making space for us, welcoming us onto the team, and giving us enough flexibility to also tend to the call we feel to serve pastors and churches more broadly. It’s been a true privilege to serve.
Alongside that, starting a ministry that serves pastors and churches has been its own faith journey.
I’ll be honest — the whole coaching and consulting space (and the vibes that sometimes come with it) makes me want to vomit a little in my mouth. The online hustle, the constant problem-pointing, the selling and scaling — it’s just not my thing. I worried about how to enter that space in a way that was actually authentic to who I am.
I wasn’t trying to build a product.
I wasn’t trying to scale an offering.
I wanted to walk with pastors.
Prayerfully.
Relationally.
Deeply.
Slowly, I think I’m finding my feet.
I’m bringing together whatever successes I had as a Senior Pastor, along with far more lessons learned from my mistakes (mostly those), and the tools I’ve picked up along the way. I love helping pastors lead healthy teams, preach well, fund vision, and grow in sustainable ways.
I still pinch myself that I get to do this.
Some friends have become clients.
Some clients have become friends.
Instead of hustling online, I made a quiet commitment to pray most days that God would bring me the people He wanted me to help. And He has. The growth I’ve seen in these pastors and their churches this year has been remarkable — but they’re not my stories to tell. I’m just grateful to serve behind the scenes.
This year I’ve also had the privilege of speaking and ministering in sixteen different churches. Everywhere I’ve gone, God is moving. Truly — we are living in exciting days.
And somehow, alongside all of that, I’ve finally been getting stuck into my Masters. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
Lessons from a new season
New seasons teach you things you couldn’t learn any other way.
One of the biggest lessons for me this year has been comparison.
Comparison is a killer.
There have been seasons this year where I’ve had to step away from social media altogether. When you’re doing something new, it’s incredibly easy to compare yourself to others in similar spaces — and if you’re not careful, it slips quietly into your soul.
There were moments where I felt like things weren’t moving fast enough. Looking back, that wasn’t God — it was comparison. There were times I felt jealous of others’ opportunities, and I had to intentionally come back to celebrating them, blessing them, cheering them on, and choosing contentment with the path God has me on.
When I compare, joy turns into frustration.
Maybe that’s true for you too.
What path has God placed you on right now?
Is comparison robbing you of the joy of your path?
Another lesson has been this: trust not just what God asks you to build, but how He asks you to build it.
I’ve entered this space of serving pastors with my own values — behind the scenes, relational, slower, and (I hope) deeper. That doesn’t look like much online. But social media is a strange and shallow world anyway.
What has God asked you to build?
And just as importantly, how has He asked you to build it?
Learn from everyone.
But don’t forget to become yourself.
Changing roles also requires real adjustment. Moving from being the Senior Pastor to being on a team, serving at the pleasure of leadership, has stretched me in new ways. I always wondered if I’d be able to do it, especially after leading for so long.
Some days it’s been easier than others. But I feel like I’m finding my feet.
Every new season demands new ways of relating and operating. I’m learning not to compare it to the past, but to receive it for what it is — asking myself: How can I bring my full self, add the most value, and be faithful here?
Finally, I keep coming back to this: doors are for God to open.
I don’t want to be in rooms He didn’t invite me into. I don’t want to force opportunities. Scripture reminds me that God will work out His purposes for my life — and that promotion comes from the Lord.
My job is to trust Him with tomorrow and be faithful with today.
Mostly, I’m just thankful.
Thankful to God for His faithfulness.
Thankful to Ps Luke and Missy for making space for us on the LIFE team.
Thankful to the pastors who’ve invited me into their world, trusted me with their teams, and allowed me to walk alongside them.
Thankful to the churches who’ve had me minister, train, and serve this year — it’s a genuine privilege.
Thankful to the Galilean group for having me a part of the team
May we all have the courage to walk faithfully in the season God has us in,
trusting Him with what’s next, and being present to what’s now.
I might take a short break from the blog over the next few weeks.
We’ll see.
