Stop, Listen, and Hang On

Mike Reid identifies a stint as a racquetball club weekend manager in college as one of the most valuable leadership experiences of his career. When he started, the club stood empty on the weekends, generating almost no income. Mike built a league that attracted hundreds of players on Saturdays and Sundays and generated considerable profit. After a few months, his boss called him into her office and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m making a lot of money for the club,” he answered, expecting her to be impressed.

“This club is a tax write-off,” she retorted. “Stop making money.”

That’s how Mike learned both that he was good at making money and that making money isn’t always the goal. After college, he left racquetball behind and worked his way up the ranks at General Electric, eventually overseeing large engineering projects under a general manager. GE provided extensive management training as he advanced, but Mike realized he didn’t actually want a top executive role at the company. It was time for a change.

So, Mike and his wife, Dorene, took a deep breath and a big risk and started a 3-D printing company with a partner, back when the technology was new and out of the price range of individuals and even most businesses. They invented new tech enabling them to quote, process, and produce parts for clients, sometimes within hours. The business grew quickly, and after 16 years, Mike and Dorene started planning their exit. In 2010, they sold the company for enough money to fund their retirement dream—a nationwide tour of food festivals in a shiny new BMW. Mike expected to work another three years for the buyer, receive a generous bonus, and officially retire at age 53.

“I worked very hard,” Mike explains. “I made a significant amount of money in the process. We thought, God blessed us, so now we’re gonna go live it up.” It was a reasonable plan, but you’ve read enough of these stories to guess that’s not what happened. Missions has a habit of interrupting reasonable plans.

A Less American Dream

Mike says God altered their plans “in a way I think Dorene and I needed to be altered. We had lived the perfect American dream. In God’s grace, He decided, That’s not how I want to end it with you, where you ride off into the sunset. God knew we needed to be shook up a little bit.”

The shaking had actually begun several years earlier when the Reids’ church started sending short-term teams to visit missionaries they supported in West Africa. Mike told his pastor, “I don’t understand why we’re doing this. We’re the church. They’re the missionaries. Let them do their thing. We’ll give them money.” In response, the pastor invited Mike to lead a visiting team and experience it for himself. He agreed, begrudgingly, and almost missed the pivotal moment of the trip because he was busy complaining.

On a hot, dusty afternoon, Mike plunked down on a bench in a West African village, wondering, Why am I here? He resigned himself, Lord, I’ll get through the week and go home, and we’ll call this a day. Then Mike noticed a little girl sharing the bench with him. She held out a bag of M&Ms, which he opened for her. When she looked up and smiled, some kind of switch flipped in his heart, which Mike describes as disorienting, like all the colors around him suddenly changed. He realized, God, you love these people. I guess it’s my job to love them, too. It’s part of my calling as a member of Your kingdom.

Mike made seven more visits to West Africa over the years, each time deepening relationships with local people. Dorene visited as well and came back with a new perspective on global missions. “I’m an analytical person,” Mike explains. “Dorene runs a bit more by emotions. So, she felt it when she went, and loved it.”

Over time, Mike befriended the village chief and enjoyed lengthy conversations sitting under the stars at night. He remembers, “We would sit with a translator and talk about life and what leadership looked like. One of his four wives had died, and he was trying to figure out how to deal with it and how to act around the people he led. We had some fascinating conversations about life and God that I guess a normal person wouldn’t have.”

A Less Reasonable Plan

A second pivotal day for the Reids came right as Mike sold his company in 2010. A missionary friend asked him to come along on a visit to the Pioneers campus in Orlando to learn more about the organization. By dinner time, Mike had a job offer. “I don’t need a job,” he insisted. “I’m getting out of a job and retiring. This is crazy.”

Pioneers had a plan to recruit more businesspeople into missions. When Mike pointed out some concerns with the strategy, we invited him to help us improve it. “They painted a picture of what could be, and it lit me up,” Mike remembers. He called Dorene at dinner to catch her up on his day. “I really think God’s calling us to this,” he told her, “but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sometimes life is simpler than we Christians make it. Sometimes simple obedience is just simple obedience.”
Mike

Dorene asked a logical question, “How much are they going to pay you?”

“They’re not going to pay me anything,” he answered. “I still feel like I need to look at some houses while I’m here.”

Mike reflects, “I’m an all-in kind of guy. So, I was 100%, we’re going to Orlando.” Nothing quite tied up with a bow that day, however. The Reids took a month to pray and talk to people they trusted. Everyone agreed it was a crazy idea. Unexpectedly, their pastor voiced the strongest objection. “You can’t help a missions agency,” he told Mike. “You’re a business guy.” But later, he asked, “Will you ever be happy if you don’t do this?”

“No,” Mike responded. “I’ll never be happy unless I do this, because I feel like God’s calling us to do it.”

“Okay,” his pastor answered. “Then I support you.”

From that point on, he advocated for the Reids, which included encouraging the church to give to their ministry. Mike and Dorene felt that if they wanted to work alongside missionaries who relied on donors, they needed to experience it for themselves. They put the proceeds from their business sale into annuities they couldn’t easily access and committed to living on the funds they raised. Mike describes the process as “profoundly uncomfortable. When we owned a company, people came to us to ask for money, and we were the givers. All of a sudden, I was in ask mode. In all fairness, we had a safety net when a lot of missionaries don’t. We could have cashed out the annuity. But God never made us do that.”

The Reids flew back to Orlando for a formal interview in November, closed their business sale in December, and Mike started at the Pioneers office on January 1. In the meantime, they traded their vacation home in the Adirondacks for a house in Orlando. The buyers of their company tried to convince Mike to still take the three-year deal, saying he could work part time for them and part time for Pioneers and look forward to a nice bonus at the end. Dorene drew the line: “Either we’re going to be obedient or we’re not. We can’t just kind of play.”

Learning to Swim

In the Reids’ early days at Pioneers, I appreciated their willingness to serve where needed. Dorene worked in the cafeteria. Mike started with a background role, helping on the mobilization team and sharing a 10-by-10-foot office with three other people. You would expect a successful businessperson to require more authority and amenities.

From Mike’s perspective, “We were like fish out of water. We had no clue what was going on. I spent the first year interviewing everybody in the building.” He maintained a learning posture for years, traveling the world to every possible field conference just to meet more missionaries and learn about their lives, ministries, and motivations. “There is no way to learn that world unless you immerse yourself in it. I kept asking questions because I didn’t understand why people did what they did.”

Mike remembers a particularly poignant moment with a couple working in Southeast Asia. They told the Reids over breakfast, “We have little hope we’re going to have many converts. This is a long road. We’re just planting. Eventually, there will be a church.” Mike and Dorene couldn’t get over that statement. “A business guy asks, How do I make money on my investment? These guys were thinking of an eternal investment. Someday, they’ll meet people from their unreached people group in heaven. That’s how they viewed the world, and it stunned us.”

Even outside of conferences, the Reids visited missionaries in their places of ministry, stayed in their homes, and played with their kids. Their world expanded as they wandered through Asian night markets and rode trains across the North African desert. “Why do people do this?” they asked each other. “This is crazy.” But Mike came to see, “When you sit and talk to the missionaries, you get a sense of why they do what they do. You may have ideas of how they can do it better, but they sure are dedicated to it. I thought, I can learn from you because you’re dedicated.”

Dorene’s presence on those trips was a special gift, not only to share the experience with her husband, but also to minister to the missionary women. According to Mike, “Her ministry was more important because the people struggling are often the single women and wives who have husbands like me who want to go conquer the world. She would sit and talk with them for hours and hours.”

Back in his corner of the tiny office, God used Mike to sharpen Pioneers’ mobilization strategies and help us better integrate business and ministry. Because of his intentionality, those early years also helped Mike understand the organization as a whole. In 2018, we asked him to become our Chief Operating Officer and run day-to-day operations. Through his early humility and openness to learn, he had built the relationships necessary for a role of greater influence.

Operating the Office

Mike originally agreed to be COO of Pioneers for 18 months. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he agreed to stay longer for stability. In the end, he served for 5 years.

Even though he had been intentional about learning the missions world, Mike still had some adjusting to do once he took the reins of office operations. He relied on co-workers with stronger missions backgrounds to coach him. “You’re using words differently than we do,” they sometimes told him after meetings. “Here’s what we’re hearing you say.”

Mike laughs looking back on an early conversation about a partner ministry. The relationship had grown complex, so Mike threw out the obvious solution: “Let’s just buy them.” After a moment of shocked silence, someone responded, “You can’t do that in this world. You can’t go buy other organizations.” But in Mike’s world, you could. “If a troublesome competitor was small enough, I’d buy them. Problem solved.”

The other paradigm shift from business leadership was realizing that at a missions organization, everyone’s essentially a volunteer. “Whether they’re a leader, a peer, or they report to you, they’re a volunteer. They can get a job with better pay somewhere else. They don’t have to do a thing you say. This isn’t a career. This is a calling. That really rocked my world.”

As Mike made the mental shifts to a new context of leadership, the training provided by GE earlier in his career became more and more valuable. He understood the importance of alignment in an organization. During the pandemic, when waves of uncertainty seemed to come from every direction, Mike helped Pioneers hold a stable course, focusing on the unchanging core of our mission. “GE taught me presentation skills,” he says, “and I did a ton of presenting, especially during the hard times where I would give pep talks to the team.” He also understood the tech world and the basics of financial management and investments. “I could talk to the CFO using a common language. I knew how to drive revenue and lower expenses. I understood job descriptions and had insight into who was performing well and who wasn’t.”

“There was a ton of frustration, a ton of pain, a ton of God’s faithfulness, and a ton of joy that you can’t get any other way. It was all over the map.”
Mike

Dorene stayed involved by organizing social events for the team, like Christmas parties. She became a friend to many of the women and still maintains close relationships with some of them.

After 12 years at Pioneers, five in a high-pressure leadership role, Mike and Dorene decided it was, truly, time to retire. “My job had a life cycle to it,” Mike says, “because you only need one skillset for so long.”

Marks on the Soul

If you ask Mike how he finished his time as COO, he’ll tell you he was exhausted— “Physically, spiritually, mentally. I had nothing left. But that’s okay. You’re supposed to leave it on the field, aren’t you? We slept for days.”

Over the next few months, Mike experienced a full grief cycle:

When you’re the COO during a pandemic, you’re like a campus pastor. I was on the phone with everybody, having conversations about how God would get us through this. After a while, it became exhausting. But then God re-energizes you and recreates things in you that you didn’t think you had. And then you’re angry for a couple of months, and realize the anger is really disappointment that you don’t get to do it anymore. And then you realize God has a new mission for you, and you’ve got to find it.

After more than a decade immersed in an intense missions environment, traveling extensively and leading a ministry touching every corner of the world, there was no slipping back into their old life and relationships. While some of those relational losses hurt, in the same season, the Reids had built deep friendships with missionaries all over the world. “People we love and spent a lot of time with came over for dinner and bared their souls about being thrown in jail for sharing their faith. You don’t get over that. It’s a forever mark on your soul.”

The Reids’ pastor used to say, “Everything’s an exchange, and you’re just deciding what you’re going to exchange.” Overall, Mike is pretty happy with the exchange they made, despite trading the BMW for a decade of jetlag, budget meetings, and living far from family. Instead of food festivals across the U.S., God took them on a tour of restaurants all over the world. Mike says,

We got healing in some ways we needed healing in. We grew our faith in ways we never thought we needed to grow our faith. We thought we were faithful people, but we didn’t have a clue what faith means until we had dinner with some of these people, heard their stories, and saw how they lived. I learned about myself, and I learned about God in ways I never would have.

For people considering making a similar exchange, Mike has some advice. For a lot of businesspeople, stepping into the missions world will be disorienting, as it was for him.

When you work in the corporate world, everyone has a personal agenda. The game was to get people out of your way so you could get promoted. In missions—while all people have their human junk—the motivation is so dramatically different. Businesspeople have a really hard time with that.

The Reids encourage others to serve with confidence that God will work through them, but with wide-open hands as to what He might do. “You’re a baby in these waters. You know a lot, but the application is so dramatically different. Please don’t try to put your existing framework around what you see because it won’t work. Stop, ask questions, listen, and learn. Then hang on.”

“Listen to God’s voice and then be quiet. Stop that voice in your head telling you you’re gonna fix something.”
Mike