👋🏼 Hey there, I’m Evan. I spent 18 years working at a church, and I’d been part of that same church for over 20 years. I stepped away in 2020. When I decided to step away, what I thought I was walking away from was just the day to day of being a pastor. The rhythms, the title, that kind of thing. Turns out it was a lot more than that, and it took me a while to figure out what. About six months in I started wrestling with things like, who am I if I’m not doing this? What do I actually believe? What do I actually value? I’m also the host of The In-Between podcast, and I wrote a book called Inevitable about loss and transition. Here’s why I put this together. I worked alongside friends in ministry pretty much the whole time I was a pastor, and there were just recurring things we kept running into. I got curious about what was actually underneath it. For me it mostly comes down to trust, and then a layer beneath trust, what we actually value. Not the values on the wall, but what you actually value about how a team works and how people get treated. I don’t have a bullet point list of healthy versus unhealthy. I think it’s more useful to be able to ask where trust is breaking, and whether the conversation you need to have is even possible where you are. So that’s a lot of what we do in here. Three things, really. We get to be human. Our limitations and our questions get to be in the same room as our faith, and that includes looking at our own part in things, not just at the harm that was done to us. We make room to ask questions and think out loud about what might be next, without anybody imposing an answer on you. And we try things. I’m big on running experiments instead of waiting on one giant leap. Throw a few lines in the water, get some data, and use it to make a wiser decision. When I was untangling some of my own beliefs about pastoring, and even my faith, I didn’t want to swing a wrecking ball through my whole life, so I tried to be more surgical about it and look at particular pieces.