From Boardrooms to Pulpits and Back Again: Why I Walked Away...

I didn’t write about my time in the church until now, and that was intentional.

Not because the story was difficult to tell, and not because there was nothing to say, but because I wasn’t interested in writing while I was still inside it. I didn’t want to process publicly, perform resolution, or turn a complex season into commentary. Writing from inside emotion is easy. Writing from integration and honesty takes longer.

I needed time for the dust to settle. Time to see what was actually mine to own, what belonged to broken systems, and what simply needed to be left behind. I wanted enough distance to tell the truth without bitterness, defensiveness, or the need to explain myself to anyone. I’m writing this now because the clarity arrived before the urgency did, and that’s the only time a story like this is worth telling.

There are seasons in life when the version of yourself you thought was stable splits open. Not dramatically, but quietly. You realise the story you believed you were writing was only ever a preface.

This is my story, told honestly. Any learnings it offers are for the reader to recognise and carry for themselves.

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My life didn’t unfold in a straight line; it spiralled. Business shaped me. The church confronted me. The collapse inside ministry disassembled me. And leaving institutional religion did not destroy the foundation I stood on, it clarified it. What followed wasn’t a return to who I once was, but an arrival into someone I could not have become without walking straight through the middle of that storm.

Before any of this, I was building. Investing. Structuring. Backing founders. Turning ideas into traction. Taking risks that made sense to nobody but me. I lived in the arena where consequence shows up quickly and clarity is earned, not given.

After university, I started in stockbroking with nothing but a spreadsheet of names and a phone. Cold-calling teaches you quickly what most leadership books avoid: rejection, pressure, reading people in real time, and the cost of hesitation. It was a ruthless apprenticeship, very early mornings, long days, constant performance, but it trained my nervous system for responsibility.

That work led me to family office advisory between Melbourne and Perth with a Sri-Lankan group who made much of their money in tyre-recycling (of all things). The work evolved and soon I was buying stakes in all kinds of ventures, part-owning health businesses with hippies and yogis, running e-commerce wine and camping brands with mates, dabbling in hospitality and helping build start-ups from scratch at the Centre for Entrepreneurial Research and Innovation (CERI) and Ignition Programs. I’ve been in just about every industry lane.

Some of those plays took off and still run strong today, like U Group & Co with its omni-channel intelligence humming quietly under Australian (and international) retail. Others folded, one notable failure, was KinChip Systems, an attempt to digitise the Purple Book (mother's receive at pregnancy), the idea wasn't a failure because the idea sucked, but because the founder’s mindset snapped before the business ever had the chance to.

Nothing teaches you the truth about people like startup failure. Nothing forces you to confront your own motives like watching something you care about collapse because someone else simply stopped fighting for it. I believed for years that if I backed people hard enough, they would rise to the level of potential I saw in them. What I didn’t realise was how much of that belief was tied to my identity. When a venture soared, I felt justified. When a venture crumbled, I absorbed the wreckage personally.

Taking on a Venture Partner role with a Venture Capital firm, 808Ventures and coaching founders kept me moving, but it didn’t really settle anything underneath. Outwardly, it all made sense, advising, investing, helping others build, yet there was still a quiet fracture in how I understood myself. I was productive and useful, but not fully integrated. The work filled my days, but it didn’t answer the deeper questions that had been forming for a while.

By the time COVID arrived, I had spent years carrying responsibility for other people’s outcomes, businesses, balance sheets, founders’ confidence, families’ financial security. I was highly functional on the outside, effective by most measures, but I hadn’t paid enough attention to what that weight was costing internally.

When the noise dropped and the pace slowed, the questions I had been deferring surfaced. Not dramatically, but persistently. I began to see a familiar pattern: helping build other people’s frameworks and structures while leaving less margin for my own. It wasn’t failure. It was neglect through over-functioning.

In that context, pastoral ministry didn’t feel impulsive. It felt coherent. I was already studying theology and the ancient greek language and (as many of us did then) ask deeper questions about purpose, responsibility, and integration. Ministry appeared to offer something my life lacked at the time, a way to bring conviction, service, and inner coherence into alignment.

Moving to Denmark wasn’t an escape. It was an attempt at reorientation. A deliberate decision to slow the pace, bring the family into a different rhythm, and place myself in a context where formation mattered as much as function.

At the time, it felt right. In hindsight, it was incomplete. Not wrong, but not sufficient on its own.

What I didn’t see then was that fragmentation doesn’t disappear just because you change lanes. It follows you (some realise this earlier than others...I was late to this one...) and most fractures don’t show up dramatically, they hide behind competence.

But truthfully, competence was never my problem. I was comfortable speaking in front of rooms. I could handle pressure. I understood responsibility. Those skills transferred easily. What I wasn’t prepared for was the quiet politics of an institution where outcomes were shaped less by clarity and courage and more by unspoken anxieties and assumptions humming beneath the surface. I walked into ministry expecting conviction and truth to lead the way, and instead found myself learning how much restraint, preservation, and silence actually govern institutional life.

That tension didn’t heal the fracture. It revealed it.

After moving to Denmark and I stepped into the church, it was with the full force of everything business had made of me. Drive. Conviction. Pace. A belief that people can grow when challenged, not coddled. A desire to build something meaningful, something that shook people awake rather than lulled them deeper into comfort. And for a while, it worked. There was momentum. The preaching landed. I saw people come alive. I reached into the sporting clubs, the local community, the families sitting at the edge of hope and grief.

I took the same energy I once took into boardrooms into it all. I built programs, raised funds for the building project (that no one else could do in the 40+ years the vacant block was there), built the community building alongside some amazing tradespeople, counselled, listened, carried. I held stories for people who had nowhere else to place them.

But institutions have ceilings. And they guard them fiercely.

It started subtly. A quiet discomfort with my pace. A hesitation around my ambition. Aged, church purists with a poor grasp of their own maturity had a nervousness about the strategic lens I brought into spiritual spaces. A negative inertia and gossip rather than truth that stirred in the Denmark's regional town waters was controlling these church stalwarts. Despite full attendance (from just 25 pax of over 55s to 70-80+ of all generations), there were sideways glances at my training style, my routines, hobbies, my blog posts, my intensity...

At times it was like I was being put on trial for the seven deadly sins, every time I booked a fitness class or lifted a dumbbell. If I trained too hard, someone saw pride. If I posted a meal at the pub with a pint or wine, someone suspected gluttony. If I pushed for excellence, someone whispered about ambition. If I spent too much time thinking, someone saw sloth. If I talked about intimacy or sex, someone Googled lust. If I set high standards, someone murmured about wrath. Or if there was talk about building businesses, someone worried about greed.

I once joked privately that all I needed was a glass of Chablis and a plate of Albany rock oysters only to have someone send me a link to Dante’s Inferno. But beneath the humour was something more serious. The institutional church often talks a great deal about holiness while holding a surprisingly thin theology of human life. It is far more comfortable with avoidance than with restoration, more fluent in prohibition than in formation. There is an unspoken belief that righteousness is maintained by keeping life small, clean, and tightly controlled, rather than by entering the messiness of the human condition and trusting that God actually does His deepest work there.

The irony is that the Christian story has always been about redemption within complexity, not escape from it. Scripture (the Bible) doesn’t present holiness as the absence of appetite, ambition, or desire, but as their reordering. Yet institutional religion often treats vitality itself as suspect, joy, strength, beauty, drive, pleasure, even laughter, as though the presence of life signals moral danger rather than the raw material God restores. In doing so, it mistakes restraint for wisdom and reduction for faithfulness, forgetting that grace was never meant to sanitise humanity, but to redeem it.

Meanwhile, beneath all that, something real was happening. As my influence grew, so did the institutional anxiety around it. The more I challenged the room, the more the room resisted being challenged. I brought a strategic lens to spiritual life, and not everyone wanted that. I asked people to step out of comfort, but comfort was/is the institution’s currency. I brought pace, but the system preferred predictability. I spoke with clarity, but clarity often offends those who benefit from ambiguity. And somewhere in that tension, the quiet politics began: the small gossipy conversations in corners, the gentle but strategic distancing, the murmurs disguised as concern, the decisions dressed in discernment but rooted in fear.

And then the fracture, the one I carried unknowingly from business, widened. There are moments you can’t fully articulate while you’re living them. Nights when the house is quiet but heavy. Mornings when you walk past someone and feel a distance you can’t name, a silence that has nothing to do with noise. Life becomes a negotiation of space, emotional, relational, spiritual. You keep functioning because functioning is what you know how to do. You preach. You lead. You serve. You carry other people’s burdens while your own float somewhere behind you, half-seen, half-ignored. You tell yourself it’s a season, but seasons aren’t meant to feel like standing on an ice sheet that’s cracking under your feet. There were weeks where I felt two worlds pulling away from each other, and I was standing in the fault line between them, trying to hold everything together with nothing but willpower.

It is a strange thing to be a public leader and privately undone. To carry people’s crises while quietly walking through your own. To stand on a platform inspiring people while feeling the ground shifting beneath your own feet. Not broken, but strained. Not gone but dangerously thin. An ache settling between people trying to navigate expectations heavier than any of them ever agreed to carry. It wasn’t spoken. It didn’t need to be. The air said all it needed for us.

The institution had no idea. Institutions rarely do. They measure performance, not pressure. They reward compliance, not honesty. And they absolutely do not know what to do with someone who is evolving faster than their structures can accommodate. Eventually, the politics widened to a point where I could no longer pretend the system was capable of holding what I was called to. It became clear that the institution wanted a smaller version of me, not out of malice, but out of maintenance. Institutions don’t like variables. They like predictable preachers who fit predictable moulds.

I wasn’t built for that mould. And as the system tightened and mud was thrown at me, I then did the only thing left to do: I stepped out silently, but that didn't stop many both inside the church and outside of it, using me as a scapegoat...

The silence that followed was not peaceful. It was disorienting. The noise of ministry had filled so much space that when it fell away, the emptiness felt like exposure. For the first time in years, I heard my own thoughts without a congregation filtering them. I felt the weight of everything I had been carrying and everything I had ignored and I could see the cracks in the life I thought was stable. It was not ruin, but it was revelation.

Gabor Maté (I mentioned him in the last post, he is a Canadian doctor) wrote a book called The Myth of Normal and if I was to summarise his core theme it would be, "the greatest harm comes not from being rejected, but from betraying ourselves to avoid rejection." After grasping that, something clicked. I had spent so long trying to stay inside a system shrinking around me that I had slowly silenced parts of myself. Integrity isn’t just about morality; it is about alignment.

And I had fallen out of alignment.

Leaving the institution didn’t heal me instantly, but it stopped the bleeding.

And almost immediately after stepping out, something unexpected happened. The space that opened up, the space once filled with institutional demands, became filled with people who sought me out not because they wanted a pastor, but because they wanted a strategist. CEOs have reached out. Founders have reached out. Businesses across hospitality, agriculture, retail, tourism, sports, and family-office style ventures began leaning in again.

People wanted clarity, real clarity, not the filtered kind institutions demand. People wanted frameworks, culture-shaping, operational structure, psychological insight, business healing, and strategic direction. The very instincts institutional religion treated as liabilities became the exact qualities leaders in the real world wanted more of.

And there’s another reason people started reaching out once the institutional noise fell away, one that has very little to do with me personally and everything to do with the moment we’re living in.

The digital playbook is breaking. Not slowly, but structurally. Paid acquisition costs have exploded to the point where growth models that worked even five years ago no longer make economic sense. Social platforms are drowning in AI-generated sameness, content without authorship, insight without experience, volume without soul.

Authenticity hasn’t just become rare; it’s become almost impossible to verify. And across startups, hospitality groups, regional operators, family enterprises, and founders paying obscene rent for WeWork desks, the same realisation is quietly landing: the channels we outsourced trust to are no longer capable of carrying it.

What’s collapsing isn’t just digital marketing, it’s a way of relating.

For a decade, businesses were taught that growth could be engineered at scale without depth: funnels instead of friendships, impressions instead of presence, reach instead of relationship. But culture doesn’t form that way. Trust doesn’t form that way. Leadership certainly doesn’t. And as automation accelerates, what’s being exposed is not a tactical failure but an anthropological one. Humans were never designed to be mediated entirely through screens, metrics, and platforms. Formation happens face-to-face. Alignment happens in rooms. Conviction is transmitted through presence, not pixels.

That’s why the in-person channel, real human interaction, is no longer optional. It’s the only channel still compounding in value.

And this is where my work naturally sits. Not because I’m good at networking, I’m not interested in that, but because I understand how trust actually forms. I read people quickly. I listen for what isn’t being said yet. I can sit across from a CEO, a founder, a farmer, a top athlete, a developer, or a board chair and name the thing shaping the room beneath the agenda. That ability isn’t performative; it’s formed. It comes from years of sitting in complexity, pressure, grief, ambition, collapse, and responsibility, and not looking away.

In a world increasingly mediated by automation, leaders are desperate for the one thing they can’t outsource: someone who sees them clearly and isn’t trying to sell them anything. Someone who can hold the psychological, cultural, and relational weight of a situation without flattening it into a framework too quickly. Someone who understands that culture isn’t built through strategy decks alone, but through presence, language, alignment, and trust forged in real time.

That’s why CEOs call. That’s why founders reach out. That’s why regional operators want me in the room. They’ve tried digital growth. They’ve paid for ads with diminishing returns. They’ve hired consultants who optimise slides but never touch the real problem. What they’re confronting now is not a marketing gap, but a leadership gap, a loss of coherence, conviction, and relational capital.

And while everyone is distracted by artificial intelligence and quantum computing, the quieter truth is this: the next decade will belong to leaders who can build real relationships in real places, under real pressure. Not as a soft skill, but as a strategic advantage. Not as nostalgia, but as necessity.

I didn’t take those comments as validation. I took them as data. They clarified the lane I operate in and the kind of work that creates momentum. Instead of shrinking to fit, I stopped fighting the shape of it. The work expanded, and so did the impact.

Great Southern Lime has become one anchor, a long-term, strategically complex, high-stakes project navigating the major issue of food security and the wider issue of soil acidity. Lobbying government and building relationships that helped educate a market on a very real state-wide need that has long been misunderstood. But it didn’t stop there. Hospitality groups have reached out about multi-venue strategies. Regional developments have sought advice on land, tourism, and economic uplift. Startups have come with questions about scaling, product architecture, investor readiness. Family enterprises wanted succession planning. Boards wanted help seeing what their internal politics had blinded them to. I have found myself back in the arena, not as the fragmented operator I once was, but as someone far more integrated, far more grounded, far more capable of standing inside complexity without losing myself.

The irony isn’t lost on me. The very intensity the institution couldn’t hold, presence, depth, interpersonal discernment, the refusal to sanitise complexity, has become the exact capability the market now demands. What once felt like a liability in one system has become a form of leverage in another.

And something else shifted, not because the strain disappeared, but because I stopped carrying it the way I used to. The near-fracture I had held quietly for a long time didn’t resolve through agreement or repair. It softened when I did. I realised I had been living in reaction to systems that couldn’t hold me, measuring myself against containers that were too small and calling that humility, when in truth it was misalignment.

That reckoning was painful. It meant owning the cost of shrinking, the fatigue, the edge, the resentment that creeps in when growth outpaces permission. But it also marked the beginning of real leadership. I stopped apologising for pace. I stopped diluting clarity to keep things comfortable. I learned that restraint is only virtuous when it serves the mission, not when it protects fragile structures.

As I grew quieter internally, everything around me grew lighter. Not easier, just cleaner. Decisions sharpened. The energy once spent managing tension could finally be directed toward building. Leadership, I’ve learned, isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the discipline of standing clear enough that others don’t have to carry your confusion.

Sometimes the most generous thing you can offer a room isn’t consensus or reassurance, it’s clarity, earned the hard way.

The work became clearer and more demanding. I have returned to coaching executives in a way that draws together psychology, systems thinking, leadership communication, and high-performance practice that gives them tools for decisions that carry real consequence. The conversations moved quickly from surface issues to the ones that actually matter. Leaders are bringing me into situations they felt unable to place elsewhere. CEOs spoke about problems they couldn’t safely explore in a boardroom. Founders asked the questions they didn’t know how to ask their investors. Not because I always had answers others didn’t, but because the space allowed honesty.

There is a quiet responsibility in being trusted at that moment, when the façade drops and the truth finally has somewhere to land.

And here’s what I have learned through all of this: leaving institutional religion wasn’t about losing faith. It was about reclaiming integrity. It was about stepping out of an environment that needed me small and stepping into arenas that required me whole. It was about admitting that the institution couldn’t keep up with the pace of who I was becoming. It was about protecting the parts of me that strained under the weight of performing stability. It was about finally acknowledging the cost, the unspoken nights, the quiet distances, the drifting conversations, and refusing to let an institution take any more from the life I was trying to build.

I did not abandon the church. They acted poorly and I outgrew the version of it that demanded my fragmentation.

And now, on the other side of everything that came undone, I move through the world with a strange mixture of scar tissue and strength, not perfect, not polished, but unmistakably whole. My life today spans more arenas than I ever could have imagined: strategy, coaching, advisory, operations, regional development, culture-building, personal transformation, board alignment, leadership psychology, and long-term vision. Not because I chased opportunities, but because opportunities chased clarity.

I am no longer the man who entered that system expecting permanence. I left knowing that some frameworks don’t exist to carry you, but to confront you. Some shape your character. Others expose its limits. And some seasons aren’t meant to preserve you—they’re meant to break the false layers away until only what’s real remains.

I didn’t walk away from leadership. I stepped into the kind I was built for: clear, weight-bearing, system-aware, and unwilling to shrink for anyone’s comfort.

The truth is, in every setting, for you and for me, the problem is rarely our capacity.It is usually the structure we’re asked to live inside.

If you’re shrinking to stay acceptable, you’re not lacking humility, you’re in the wrong space.

So find a bigger room.

TK