Calling : Life and Career Experience

Breadth and perspective.

As a 40-year-old priest with two years in a parish,
there’s more to what I bring than clergy seat time.

For the last 20 years I’ve been teaching, leading teams, working on effective communications and media, and creating strategy.

I bring an outside perspective that can gently question assumptions and assist in developing new parish initiatives, while learning established parish rhythms and comforts quickly.

First Career Experience.

My university training (2002) was in Digital Media with a focus on Computer Animation and a minor in Illustration.

I worked as a full-time Instructor in Animation at the university the year after graduation before forming a business partnership and producing an animated short for a division of Hallmark in 2005. I continued teaching as an adjunct in design for many years after.

I migrated into website design, merging technology, communications, and psychology into media.

Until entering seminary, I worked in cycles between my own freelance businesses and as an employee for media firms. This included:

  • Designing and overseeing the development of an online store platform that went on to run millions in sales for a venture-capital-funded startup.

  • Revitalizing, strategizing, and running the branding and messaging of a large international non-profit as Creative Director.

  • Founding a retail business with my wife, with a brick-and-mortar shop I designed and renovated personally combined with an online store, which we later sold.

  • Led design teams in research, visioning, and strategy, creating effective and lauded software solutions for large corporations.

 
 

I was good at this work, but my values and what my effort produced were increasingly at odds.

The last two projects I worked on before leaving for seminary were for large corporations:

  1. My business partner and I pitched, won, and developed a custom B2B software interface for a large poultry processing firm. The result has been praised as better than any competing product or offering, yet it serves an industry with troubling ethical foundations and labor problems.

  2. I was hired as a consultant to assist on several internal applications for an extremely large retailer. I was able to locate key needs, revise strategy, and quickly lead the team into a new and successful direction—yet the function of the software was deliberately and overtly anti-competitive, resulting in harm to workers and communities.

This tension between vocation and employment was part of what led me to the priesthood.

Knowing that many face a similar challenge in providing for themselves and families also supports my activism in rethinking our shared national values and economic structures.

I continued some design work through seminary and I put it to use in my ministry today, but with different ends in mind.

 Other Experience.

 

Outside of technology, I grew up building houses with my dad and have expanded that experience into a range of interests in architecture and construction.

  • I’m conversant with and personally experienced in plumbing, electrical work, and most aspects of building construction and maintenance—often a handy field as a smaller parish rector!

  • I have a keen interest in space and structure as a key element of the human experience in worship, learning, and communal bonding.

  • I’m particularly interested in rethinking past assumptions about our use of resources, including enthusiastically following the tiny house movement, building with natural materials such as straw bales, stone, and timber framing, as well as a variety of ways to achieve net-zero emissions.