The Time I Got Fired From A Church

I have had many jobs in my life. I have been a professional actor, an award-winning columnist, a produce clerk, a carnival game attendant, a cartoonist, and once, when I was young and needed the money, I worked at a church.

I did video production at this church, which should tell you something about the size of the church because small churches usually don’t have video production departments.

When you do video production at a church it usually means that you’re creating supplemental material for the weekend services. The big guy, the preacher, the senior minister has whatever he’s talking about on a given weekend and it’s your job to create video content to support it.

I figured out pretty early on that my job was a kind of storytelling.

I decided I wanted to get as good as I could get at storytelling. So, I did what most people do when they want to get good at something, I Googled it.

While googling how to tell stories, the first thing I came upon was a name — the name Dan Harmon. Dan Harmon was a TV guy. He created the television show Community, about a group of adults attending a community college. He also created a popular cartoon called Rick and Morty in which a drunk scientist and his grandson go on weird adventures. He ALSO created the story circle. The story circle is a circle with eight points on it. The circle promises that if you line the eight points on the circle up with the events of your story it will create a technically proficient story.

I say “technically proficient” because the story doesn’t necessarily speak to the emotional quality of the story. You can tell a technically proficient story about how auto glass is made or you can tell a technically proficient story about kittens trapped in a burning building. One of them will likely have more emotional punch than the other.

I started applying Harmon’s story circle to everything I created. I got really good at telling stories.

The more I dove into Harmon’s work though, I discovered that he didn’t create the ideas present in the circle. He simply adapted them based on the work of a man named Joseph Campbell. Campbell didn’t actually create the ideas either, he was just the most famous man to talk about them, modernly.

Campbell wasn’t a TV guy, though. He was a comparative religion professor.

Campbell had his own story circle. It was called the Monomyth and it had 17 points. Between Harmon’s 8 and Campbells 17, I got even better at telling stories.

The problem, though, was that, like I said, Campbell was a comparative religion professor, so you really couldn’t study his work on story without also being exposed to his ideas on God and religion. As I was exposed to them, the started making a lot of sense to me. And they didn’t really align with what the church believed.

I found myself having a genuine crisis of faith.

I wanted to be upfront about it, so I went to my bosses and I told them about the doubts I was having. And they said exactly what you would hope they would say. They said, “Take your time and figure it out.”

That’s what they said, it’s not what they meant.

What they meant was, “Figure it out as fast as possible, your job depends on it.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through a crisis of faith, but it’s not the kind of thing you can put a clock on. I didn’t figure it all out in time. I lost my job at the church.

So, the grand Alanis Morisette-style irony of my life is that I started studying story to get better at my job, but as a result of studying story, I lost my job.

I’m not mad about it. I don’t blame the church. They did what they had to do. Literally, the lowest bar you have to get over to work at a church is, “Do you believe what we believe?’’ If you can’t say yes to that, you don’t need to work there.

I’m also not mad because losing that job was a part of my story and lead me to discover my passion and purpose in life — to teach other people how to find their story, and, as a result, their passion.