When Your Relevance Moves
We just crossed a strange milestone in our family.
All three of our kids are driving now.
For almost 21 years, some version of “Mom, can you take me?” or “Dad, can you pick me up after practice?” has been part of everyday life. Between school, sports, friends, church, work, and everything else kids manage to get themselves into, we have put in some serious miles.
Now they all have cars. Our street looks a little like a used car dealership.
And suddenly, their lives are much more accessible to them. They can get themselves where they need to go. They don't need Mom and Dad in quite the same way.
Have we lost relevance? No.
But something has changed. And the older I get, the more I realize how often life does this to us.
Our kids grow up. Our parents age. A job ends. A leadership role changes hands. The organization we helped build becomes less dependent on us. Someone younger walks into the room with skills we don't have. A health diagnosis changes what we are able to do. Sometimes we choose the transition. Sometimes someone else chooses it for us.
Each time, we have to adjust to a new reality: people may still love us, value us, and want us around, but they don't need us in the same way they once did.
For leaders leaving vocational ministry, that can be one of the hardest parts of the transition.
When being needed becomes normal
Ministry has a way of making relevance part of everyday life.
People call because something matters. A marriage is in trouble. Someone has died. A staff decision has to be made. A younger leader needs perspective. Someone is questioning their faith. Sunday keeps coming whether you are ready or not.
Over enough years, being needed starts to feel normal. Then something changes.
Maybe you retire after decades of ministry. Maybe succession has been planned for years. Maybe your health forces a decision you never wanted to make. Maybe the board decides it is time for a change. Maybe burnout has taken more from you than you realized. Maybe your marriage or family needs your attention. Maybe you simply know you cannot keep doing what you have been doing.
However it happens, the transition can be jarring.
The meetings continue without you. The phone rings less. Someone else gets copied on the email. People who once brought their questions to you begin taking them somewhere else. That may be exactly what should happen. A healthy transition requires room for someone else to lead. It can still hurt.
One of the hardest parts of leaving ministry can be the quiet feeling that you have become less relevant.
Relevance is not the same as worth
This is where an important distinction helps. Your worth is not determined by how many people need you. A changing role cannot make you less valuable as a person. Relevance is different.
Relevance is always connected to someone. You are relevant to someone, for something, at a particular time. It is not something we get to declare about ourselves. It is given by the people whose lives are actually affected by what we bring.
That is why relevance keeps changing throughout life.
My kids still need Marilee and me. They just don't need us to drive them everywhere. The relationship has not become less important. The way we matter in their lives is changing.
Leadership works the same way. The wisdom you carried into one role may still matter tremendously, but the people who need it next may not be the same people who needed it before. That can be difficult to accept when your old role made the answer obvious.
For twenty or thirty years, you knew who you were for. You knew where to go on Monday morning. You knew who called when there was a crisis. You knew the problems you were expected to solve.
Then suddenly the question becomes less clear: Who am I for now?
Maybe that is the better question
When leaders begin thinking about retirement or life after ministry, the question often sounds like, “What am I going to do next?” That's understandable. We are used to defining life through activity. But I wonder if another question gets closer to what we are really looking for:
Who needs what I carry now?
That changes things.
Maybe there is a 35-year-old pastor who doesn't need you to run his church. He needs somebody twenty years ahead of him who will listen, ask good questions, and tell him the truth.
Maybe there is a ministry board facing its first painful staff transition, and you know from experience how quickly a poorly handled decision can divide a community.
Maybe your spouse has been sharing you with an organization for thirty years and would enjoy getting a little more of you back.
Maybe your grown kids need a different kind of parent now, one who has more wisdom and bandwidth as their problems have become bigger.
Maybe there is a nonprofit, neighborhood, younger leader, old friend, or person sitting across the table who could benefit from something you learned the hard way.
Your next place of relevance may be smaller than your last one. It may come without a title, a staff, a microphone, or a reserved parking space.
That does not make it less important.
Relevance is conferred, not claimed
One of the ideas that has stayed with me as I have thought about this is that relevance is conferred, not claimed.
You cannot walk into a room and insist that your thirty years of experience should matter there. The people in the room decide whether what you carry bears any weight in their lives. That can be humbling for leaders who spent decades being sought out for answers. It can also be freeing. You no longer have to work so hard to prove you still matter.
Instead, you can become curious again. What are people wrestling with? What questions are they actually asking? Where are they stuck? What do you know that might help? Where can you serve without needing to be in charge?
The irony is that the harder we fight to prove our relevance, the less relevant we may become. Real relevance tends to grow when we stop asking, “How do I stay important?” and start asking, “Who can I help?”
Organizations have a role in this too
This is one reason we care so much about how ministries handle leadership transitions. A healthy transition makes room for the next leader without acting as though the outgoing leader never mattered. Those are very different things.
Honor says, “What you gave here was real. It mattered. We are grateful.”
Clarity says, “Your role is changing, and we want everyone to understand what that means.”
Care says, “We are thinking about you as a person, not simply the position we need to fill.”
Too many transitions focus almost entirely on getting the organization to the other side. Meanwhile, the outgoing leader walks into Monday morning wondering what happened to the life they had on Friday.
The organization has moved forward. The leader is still trying to figure out who they are for now. That gap is where a lot of unnecessary hurt happens.
Your relevance may not be disappearing
Maybe it is moving. Our family has not stopped needing us because the kids have driver's licenses. They need us differently now, and if we spend all our energy mourning the loss of the carpool years, we might miss what this next part of our relationship has to offer.
The same may be true for leaders in transition. If your ministry role is changing, whether by choice or by circumstances you never would have chosen, you do not have to recreate the importance you once had. You do not have to keep finding ways to sit in rooms you have already left.
Instead, start paying attention.
Who needs what you have learned?
Who asks questions you understand?
Where can your experience be useful?
Where can you contribute without having to control?
It may take some time to answer those questions. That is okay. But losing a role does not mean losing the ability to matter. Sometimes it simply means the people who need you next haven't found you yet.
Matt Davis served as a Teaching and Executive Pastor for more than two decades in Orange County, California. After going through his own pastoral transition out of ministry, Matt learned the difficulty of this season. He helped start Ministry Transitions, a ministry committed to helping ministry leaders navigate transitions with grace. As President, he seeks to bring healing a reconciliation to churches and their people.
