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Earlier this month, Habitat for Humanity announced that its new CEO, Jonathan Reckford, would replace fired founder and president Millard Fuller. For the last two years Reckford has served as executive pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church of Edina, Minnesota. Before that, he held senior positions at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Disney.

How did you transition from the business world to the church world?

I would describe it as an evolution. I started about 15 years ago with what grew into an avocation of helping priests and pastors on the management side of church work. Actually the process really started when I was the senior warden at an Episcopal church in Florida while I was working with Disney.

Later, I worked closely with a priest in a mission church in Richmond, Virginia, and we became great friends. The church was growing very fast, and we spent a lot of time praying together and talking about how to handle all that growth. That continued when we moved to Minnesota, and I started as a lay volunteer with the church staff and elders at Christ Presbyterian, a very large Presbyterian church.

On the business side, my company was acquired by Best Buy. After a year of helping with the transition, I came to a crossroads, and we had a sense that God was calling our family to move into some more direct area of ministry, though in an undefined direction. While doing the discernment and listening process, I started doing more and more volunteer work at Christ Presbyterian. And that led to a conversation with the senior pastor, who had become a good friend, and the church created the role of executive pastor and asked if I'd be willing to serve in that role.

I want to be very clear that I'm not an ordained pastor. I came from the marketplace. But they created the role and inserted me between the senior pastor and rest of the staff to help with the day-to-day leadership of the church. It was more of a sense of call than my own plan. It felt as if that's what we were supposed to do.

Your new position at Habitat seems to be the fulfillment of that redirection in your life.

Very much so. I've loved and still love working at Christ Presbyterian and was not looking for a next thing. When Habitat called, I honestly never thought I would be a serious candidate. But it's an organization I have long admired, and we have supported them both from volunteer perspective and a giving perspective for a long time. I love what they do, and so I was just excited about the chance to learn more about the organization. It seemed to combine both the chance to use the skills I acquired in the marketplace with the new skills I learned serving in the church world.

You'll use a lot of the same skills, but I would think there are some significant differences between working in business, Christ Presbyterian, and Habitat?

Both the church and Habitat are ministries and not businesses, and I think it's important always to keep that in mind. That being said, I think the principles of leading an organization are often transferable. So what I tried to do at the church is to transfer the leadership principles but get away from business jargon and speak more in ministry language. I hope to do much the same thing at Habitat. I think there's a stewardship component—whether you're leading a church, a parachurch organization, or a not-for-profit—where we need to be highly accountable and transparent in how we manage both people and all the resources of the ministry. I think my experiences from the marketplace of managing large organizations has been helpful.

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49