From The Pulpit to the Boardroom
Sitting on corporate boards regularly placed me among people who did not need me the way my church members needed me.
Years ago, I decided to supplement my pastoral work by pursuing opportunities to become a paid corporate director. After researching what it would take, I felt the goal was within reach—and worth pursuing—for five reasons:
Corporate directors are in a unique position to influence decisions that impact employees, consumers, and communities
Corporate directorships offered a different kind of intellectual and professional engagement alongside my pastoral vocation
Participation in corporate governance would help me gain knowledge useful in my work as a pastor
Directorships would expand my network of colleagues beyond clergy circles
Director compensation would contribute to my retirement savings
By the time I retired from the church, I had served on nine corporate boards—seven paid, for profit and two non-paid not for profits—including two banks, a mortgage company, and a real estate investment trust (REIT). Along the way, I met people who have become some of my closest friends, and built affiliations that have carried into my retirement years.
What surprised me most was how collegial and respectful these businesspeople were—predominantly white, with backgrounds and perspectives entirely different from mine—toward a Black Baptist pastor. I expected to have to earn my place. What I found was that I was welcomed into the work, and into genuine friendships, more readily than I had anticipated.
And there was a spiritual dimension to the boardroom that I didn’t see coming. Pastoring is a vocation of being needed by many. Church members bring you their grief, their crises, their questions about God and life and death. It is sacred work, but it is heavy work. Sitting on corporate boards regularly placed me among people who did not need me the way my church members needed me. They needed my judgment, my experience, my vote—but not my prayers, not my counsel at 2 a.m., not my presence at the hospital. That was a large part of what I meant by needing a different kind of room. The boardroom gave me a place where I could contribute fully without carrying anyone’s soul home with me.
Next week, I will depart from a public company board where I served for eleven years. I led the compensation and human capital committee for most of that tenure, and as my expertise grew, I’ve been able to share what I learned with other companies. I also created a course to help those who aspire to become paid corporate directors understand the things I wish I had known when I first set out. My areas of expertise—and my greatest strengths—became executive compensation and corporate governance.
If you’re an accomplished professional who can contribute to a public or private company, for-profit or not-for-profit, especially in the areas of risk, compliance, technology (especially cybersecurity), audit, compensation, or governance, I encourage you to consider pursuing directorships. The work matters. And, if you are a pastor or someone in another vocation of being needed, it may give you something you didn’t know you were missing.
“The boardroom gave me a place where I could contribute fully without carrying anyone’s soul home with me” is such a profound line because it names a form of emotional and vocational exhaustion many caregivers, clergy, and service-oriented leaders quietly carry for decades without language for it. I was especially struck by the distinction between being needed personally and being valued professionally, because healthy leadership spaces often allow people to contribute wisdom, judgment, and stewardship without requiring total emotional depletion in return. What gives this reflection such depth is the recognition that board service was not merely strategic or financial; it also became a different kind of human and spiritual room in which identity could breathe differently. Grateful for the honesty, wisdom, and vocational clarity throughout this reflection.