Training: the Perfect Career for Former Ministers

So you've walked away from the ministry, and now you're thinking, how on earth am I going to make a living? If you're anything like me, you have a mountain of college and seminary debt and the very last thing on your mind is adding any more education to that mountain. You're ready to earn a paycheck. Besides, your wife is probably sick of working nights in the hospital, right?

But what do you do? Who appreciates the skills of a minister/intern/seminary student? What good does it do you? There's pretty much no application for these skills outside the church...right?

When I walked away from the ministry, I couldn't even get a call back from McDonalds. I ended up taking a job in a factory as a general laborer for minimum wage, despite having a Masters degree that required about three times as many credit hours as a typical Masters. I was just desperate to take whatever work I could find.

To be honest, I was scared. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to provide for my family. I was extremely discouraged and sure we were doomed to poverty forever.

I reached out to literally everyone I've ever talked to and asked them for ideas or leads. Would you believe that about a hundred people between them couldn't come up with even one job opening that might work for me? But at least half of them said I should be a teacher.

A teacher?! My mind raced back to my days in public school growing up. Those poor teachers! Overworked, underpaid, unappreciated, forced to teach from lousy curriculum. No way! Not me. Besides, I had actually thought about that before, and like everybody else, I knew several guys in seminary whose wives were teachers. So I knew enough to know that if you want to be a teacher, you need to be certified, and to get that, you need an undergrad degree in education - which I didn't have and had no intention of getting. And even then, you'd have to start as a substitute teacher or a teacher in some tiny, non-accredited Christian school for about 25k a year. No chance of supporting a family on that income, especially with my school debts. Teacher indeed!

So all those people, those many people who knew me who said I should be a teacher - they received a snarky response about how they were uninformed or hadn't really thought their idea through and why can't you give me a useful idea? Like me, they didn't think my skills were of any use either outside a classroom.

And then it happened. Someone forwarded my email to someone I used to work for in my distant past who remembered that I did good quality work, and they said, hey, I'll give you a job doing training! And it wasn't a job offer for 25k either - in fact, it was more than three times that! I felt like I won the lottery!

It turns out there is a kind of teaching you can do that's actually fairly lucrative. It's just not called teaching - it's called training.

You see, businesses employ people, and those people need training. They need training in simple things like: writing, critical thinking and public speaking. As a former minister, you wouldn't know anything about those things would you?

Now, you may not be all that confident in your thinking and communication skills. After all, there were people in your church that criticized you, and you weren't as good as the other guys in seminary, and you're just not sure that you are capable of very much whatsoever.

Well, I'll tell you a secret. If you could examine the thoughts of most people, you'd find that they're mostly completely confused and incoherent. This is why they'd just rather watch sports or Fox news or something. Trust me, after graduating seminary, you're pretty much a samurai master of critical thinking.

And no matter how bad you think you write, you're probably light years ahead of most people. I'm convinced that most people stop learning anything about writing somewhere around junior high. They begin with incoherent, inconsistent thoughts, so it's probably no wonder that their writing is a mess. Ask any college graduate to show you one of their papers from college. I'll bet you won't even be able to discern the point of the paper.

And let's talk about public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld has a great comedy bit about it. He points out that surveys consistently show that public speaking is peoples' number one fear, ranking even higher than death itself. That means that, for most people, at a funeral, they'd prefer to be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.

You've no doubt mastered public speaking. Even if you think you have room to improve (of course you do), just being willing to do it at all puts you ahead of most people. You can stand out in a crowd, literally and figuratively, just by being willing to stand up in front of people and speak.

Now when it comes to training, it turns out that in order to do it well, you need these skills in spades. You need to have sharp critical thinking skills because you need to be able to understand the material and explain it to others. You also have to be able to handle odd questions from students and recognize that they're asking it because they didn't really understand a concept properly that you had taught earlier. As a samurai master of critical thinking, you can see how the concepts all hang together in a coherent system and how pulling out a piece here or there will affect the whole.

Obviously, training involves a lot of public speaking in classrooms, so skills in this area are super valuable and essential. Your skills are so sharp, in fact, that you can probably train the trainers.

It turns out that you need writing skills as well. In the training world, we write lesson plans. You used to write sermon outlines or manuscripts. Now you can write lesson plans. And lesson plans have to be well written.

But, you say, I don't write well at all! My writing is quite atrocious! My seminary professor said so. Yes, but your seminary professor held you to a very high standard. Most people today write like 13 year olds. No, I'm not just being funny or even exaggerating.

I'll tell ya what. Do this little test. Ask someone at random who has never been to seminary if they can explain when to use I or me in a sentence. Oh sure, any child can probably tell you which one is correct in just about any given sentence, but I sincerely doubt any adult can explain it to you conceptually in the abstract, with the possible exception of a few over-acheiving alumni from some storied private school run by very old and very strict Dutch people or something who still hit kids on the hands with rulers.

But perhaps some of you may not know either eh? Shame on you! You can translate Greek and write exegetical papers, but you can't explain when to use I or me in a sentence? Ok, I'll tell you, but you're going to feel quite silly. It's simple really. You use I when it is the subject, and me when it is the object. See? I told you it was simple and that you'd feel silly.

Now here's where you'll really be surprised. Again, choose any adult at random. Ask them to explain when to use I or me. When they can't tell you, explain it just exactly as I did above. No cheating. Do you think it will help? I have taught writing classes to recent college graduates. Granted, most of them were math, science and engineering majors, but some of them had humanities degrees. I have yet to come across anyone who can tell me the difference between the subject and an object in a sentence.

And of course that means they can't tell you what the passive voice is, but they're pretty sure it should not be used by them (ahem). You recognized that that sentence was a lame attempt at humor. Most people wouldn't get it if you held a gun to their head (nor if a gun was held to their head by you).

Not only can you write, but you can concentrate, you can focus, and you're not lazy. This means it's possible for you to write curriculum from scratch. Lots of people out there claim to be curriculum developers, but they accomplish very little. Almost no one volunteers for this either. It's tedious, labor intensive, requires a lot of intense focus for days or weeks at a time, and it's not sexy. There's very little glory in writing curriculum. Most people simply won't do it, and those that do take about 3 times as long as it should take because it's just that hard to concentrate. Worse, the finished product is often boring, not detailed enough, incoherent and largely the same as the old curriculum.

If you go in and make a concerted effort to the glory of God, you'll be a superhero and they'll still be using your curriculum 10 years after you've left. Most curriculum developers don't write new curriculum from scratch, they just make small changes to pre-existing curriculum and repackage it. It's the blind leading the blind in most cases. They spend a lot of time surfing the internet.

Alright, I know what you're thinking. I'm not saying all this to be arrogant and make fun of the poor, unenlightened souls who haven't gone to seminary (not exclusively anyway). I'm trying to encourage you. You're far more educated than most people, much more so than you realize. You have amazing, marketable skills. Your critical thinking and communication skills in particular are sky high. These are highly prized in the marketplace.

Once you've established a little training experience outside the ministry, and you do an excellent job and can prove it, you'll be able to get an even better job, possibly even managing other people conducting training. Training can be very rewarding and satisfying.

One area that you should really consider is software training. Did you know that people can make a really good living training people how to use Microsoft Office products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint? In a big enough organization, this is a full time job. Yep, they'll hire you to update their curriculum and teach whoever needs it. You'll probably teach 2-3 days a week for about 4 hours and "update curriculum" the rest of the time.

There are all kinds of software companies coming out all the time. Many of them are trying to sell their product to enterprises, organizations of various kinds. Were you a teller once upon a time before you went to seminary? That experience, believe it or not, plus your training experience as a minister makes you a very strong candidate to teach tellers and other bank employees how to use the new software the bank just purchased. Why? Because you understand their job and you understand training. The software company will most likely be able to train you how to use the actual software - that's easy. But you'll probably get trained by a software engineer who has no idea how the actual end users will use the software. But you do, because you used to be a teller. Sure, it was a long time ago, but you could pick it up quick. The job hasn't changed that much and you've experienced it for yourself.

Or maybe you were a paralegal. You can train software to lawyers and paralegals.

Heck, maybe you worked in a McDonalds in high school. You know what? You can train people at McDonalds' corporate headquarters when they send their store managers to learn the newest version of their software so that they can return and train their employees.

The point is, you can take your education/training for the ministry and any ministry experience and call it training experience. And that's certainly not dishonest by any stretch. You have those same skills. And you can pair that with just about any other experience you have on your resume, and you've just become the golden unicorn that someone's been seeking for their training team. It's your job to figure out who these people are.

Don't go searching on Indeed or Glassdoor. Go to Google and find the companies selling the software you want to train on. Find the hottest new Silicon Valley darling in the industry, go to their website and look for the tiny link at the bottom of the page that says Careers. Click it and apply.

In another post, I'll talk about how to rewrite your resume and talk about your skills in a cover letter and interviews in the language of modern training. First, build a list of companies who might be interested in adding you to their training team.

And by the way, it's ok to dream again. And it's not a bad thing to want to make money either. You have debts to pay, no doubt, and a family to provide for, not to mention your poor wife's night job. The sooner you pay off those debts, the sooner you can make a bigger monetary contribution at your church. Maybe you can even buy a house someday and be free from the sound of neighbors' feet over your head and the deep bass line that's felt as much as heard.

There is life after the ministry. You can survive. You can even thrive.

Remember, this website is purely anonymous: both those who post and those who comment. Comments that name people (including the name of the commenter), churches or organizations will be deleted.