When my girls were young and people asked what I did for a living, Austin and Savannah struggled to provide a succinct answer.
“He’s a reverend,” they said.
“Does he have a church?”
“No, he has his own business.”
Brows furrowed. “What does that have to do with being a reverend?”
“Good question,” they replied. “He helps churches and nonprofits.”
“So what does he do for them?”
“Well,” they said, “he tells stories.”
Austin and Savannah recounted these inquiries because they knew I would share their amusement at people’s puzzlement. And, it occurs to me now, they intuited that laughter was the best way to clear a path through an identity crisis, which was my crisis. I had trouble giving a brief description of my occupation, much less my vocation. Clarity — like “I put out fires” or “I bury the dead” — eluded me. I had to stack up several sentences to say anything.
In 1999 I was four years into a six-year journey to earn my master of divinity degree. I doubled the length of the program because I worked full-time managing corporate communications for a nonprofit senior housing and healthcare provider. I entered the American Baptist Seminary of the West thinking I would follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and become a pastor, but halfway through I sensed I was after something else, though I couldn’t name it precisely. Looking back, I see that what I wanted was to write and speak of a strange and beautiful way evoked by explorations in multiple places with many people. But it took me some years to explain this vocation in a single word: witness.
So 25 years ago, when I hung out my own shingle, I didn’t know for sure what I wanted or where I was going. I described my work as “mission-driven marketing and communications.” In the first of many one-pagers written over my career, I said of myself: “I guide nonprofit organizations nationwide in developing marketing strategies to fulfill their missions. And I create communications that deliver results. Stronger identities. Increased revenue. Enhanced missions. The reason: I want nonprofits to thrive.” All of that was true, and the message was clear enough. But then I got into organizational development and leadership formation, a deep and murky work. Even more sentences were required to say anything.
My company, which I called Signal Hill after the Southern California town where I spent my early years and where my grandfather was pastor of the Baptist church, became a “leadership and communications consultancy.” A small team joined me. They handled the communications, and I spent most of my time on leadership engagements. So “consultant” was my shorthand for what I did in the world, but I was never enthusiastic about that descriptor. I wanted to be more than an advisor, and “consultant” felt like clipping my creative wings.
Still, the story I’m telling now was a story I stepped into then, and, in time, it led to an explanation for my work that satisfied me (for the most part) and seemed to make sense to others: We use narrative-based practices to help organizations get clear about their identity and improve their performance; and we create multimedia communications to share organizations’ stories with stakeholders. Our mantra was “get into the story and get the story out.”
Signal Hill has been on the back burner the past few years while I did other things. I was the interim pastor of a church in Austin, Texas, helping the congregation figure out its future. I launched a nonprofit that repurposes religious assets for the common good. I helped my younger brother, Andrew, start a technology outfitter company. All of these experiences are part of the story I’m telling now.
I subscribe to the notion that we choose the story we tell. We can tell the story this way or that way. Some stories might serve us well for a time; and then it behooves us to change it up, to tell a different story.
I also realize we don’t know where a story will go, what it will do for us or how it will impact others. There’s a mystery in the outcome of the telling of a story. Yet if we like mystery, if we find delight in what might be a strange and beautiful way, then we expect something of the story, though it may be difficult to name exactly what it is we expect. I believe it’s enough just to trust the story is leading somewhere. After 25 years, I am clear (for the most part) that we’ve got to let the story do its thing.
So this is the work I undertake today with my compatriots and the organizations we care about: We delight; we believe; we trust.
We tell stories to see what happens next.