A leadership transition at PassionLife, and the secret to handing off a ministry well
There are too many bad examples of why people leave ministry. Leaders burn out, fall out, or hold on so long that the work they built falls apart when they finally let go. By God’s grace, that is not our story.
On this week’s episode of the PassionLife Podcast, we have a big announcement to make. And because we would rather you hear it from us than from a rumor, we want to share it plainly and then talk about how ministries like ours go through transitions, and what it takes to lead well and leave satisfied.
The Announcement
Here it is, straight up.
Effective December 31 of this year, John Ensor, our founder, will step aside as president of PassionLife. Effective January 1, 2027, Mark Nicholson, who has served alongside John for years, will assume the responsibility of president and carry this work forward all over the world.
Hallelujah.
For Mark, the news brings sorrow and happiness, weeping and dancing, rejoicing and mourning, all at once. It is a bittersweet thing to see John step back. But it is a good thing, and we want everyone to hear it at the same time. Letters are going out to the members of the PassionLife Fellowship, the friends who know us best, and we are sharing it here on every channel at once, because nobody needs rumors when someone steps back from ministry.
A Plan Years in the Making
This is not a sudden decision. It is God’s story of his grace, leading us to think this through, starting several years ago.
John is now 71 years old, and anyone trying to be responsible with a ministry needs to think about transition. John and Mark began talking about it and planning for it a couple of years ago. What is happening now is simply the fulfillment of that plan, as the Lord has led.
Many ministry leaders, and especially many ministry founders, allow themselves to become so fulfilled by the work, and so personally excited about it, that the ministry gets wrapped around their personality. They have a hard time letting go. And when the time comes to hand leadership to the next generation, there is often a mess.
That is not the case here, and the reason is John himself. He is a strategic thinker and a humble man who wants to see the ministry flourish and the name of the Lord honored more than his own name, his own legacy, or his own desires. From the beginning of these conversations, the question was how to make the transition effectively and at the right time. If certain qualifications and benchmarks were met, that would be a sign that PassionLife was healthy and in the right place for it to happen.
Holding On or Handing Off
That temptation, to let a ministry become wrapped around one person, is real for many people in leadership. Mark will face it in his own time. The most succinct way to put it is this: it is the difference between holding on and handing off.
When you are young, in your twenties and thirties, forties, even fifties, there is tremendous satisfaction in the work itself, the good works God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in, as Ephesians 2:10 puts it. He has reserved them for us to be a part of.
But there is both a biblical admonition and a wisdom that comes with years. Your sense of satisfaction begins to move from doing the work to seeing others do the work you poured yourself into. That is the discipling aspect of all Christian ministry: to reproduce yourself in other people.
It is the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2:
What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.
That is the DNA of PassionLife. We are constantly training pastors to train other pastors, who will then train their people. We train leaders to think about carrying this work nationwide in whatever country they are in. Even internally, everyone on our staff is trained to start preparing others to do what they do.
A Greater Joy
The great discovery of maturity is that there is an even greater joy in seeing others do well.
Think of it this way. When you are a kid, you want to be great at baseball. You want to hit the ball. But when you become a parent, there is something even deeper about watching your own child hit the ball. You want those you love to do well, and there is something profoundly and deeply satisfying when that happens.
The opposite is true as well. When a ministry, or any constructive work, gets tied up in the personality of one person, and that person cannot let go or trust anyone else to take over, it rips the rug out from under the ministry’s legacy and everything the Lord has been doing through it. It cuts the work off at the knees.
John has given something to the world in his study and his theology on the value of human life and the shedding of innocent blood, and in the materials he has refined over the years. That work will speak for a long time, and it will likely leave a legacy that outlives him. Mark loves that John is willing to let it go on beyond him, without having to burn it down simply because he is no longer the one at the center.
Founder’s Syndrome
There is a name for the alternative. It is called founder’s syndrome.
It is a way of thinking in which your sense of purpose, your identity, and your self-worth are wrapped up in your role: in the title you hold, whether pastor or president or anything else. And that is when your ministry becomes a form of idolatry.
John does not want to be identified by that title. He wants to be identified as a follower of Jesus, a child of the King, doing what God has called him to do until God no longer calls him to do it. That is the model we want to set.
A Good Second Fiddle
For Mark, this is exciting, and it is also daunting. John has been a great leader for PassionLife as its founder and president. This ministry was his idea in the first place.
Mark has been told all his life that he has leadership skills, and he has led plenty of things. But he plays a good second fiddle. It is where he is most comfortable: helping the lead man do well from the sidecar. So this will be a new challenge. He would be perfectly content if John lived to be 150 years old and the two of them kept doing this together. There is nothing in him that needs the president’s role.
John knows that. And he wants everyone to understand: he was in no hurry to leave, and Mark was in no hurry to take over. It has simply been a matter of discerning what is best for both of them and for the mission God has called PassionLife to.
Two Faces, on Purpose
When our board began this conversation a couple of years ago, we took a few intentional steps.
The first was this program. John and Mark began hosting it together, so that the people who support us financially and pray for us would grow comfortable with both of them, not just with the usual single face of the organization.
The second was at our banquets and dinners. Wherever we spoke and raised support, John and Mark did it together.
That is untraditional. Most organizations have one face, and that makes transition very hard. This way, when people hear the news, they can say, Oh, Mark’s taking over. We know Mark. He’s been there all along. Let’s get going.
Leaving After a Winning Season
So why now? Part of the answer is that PassionLife is in a healthy place.
Any kingdom-oriented mission is hard, no matter what stage of development it is in. It is hard at the beginning, when you are doing everything yourself. You wear fifteen different hats. You have no money, no prayer team, and no staff. Slowly you begin to pick up steam. Mark was the first real full-time employee PassionLife hired beyond John himself, about fourteen years ago, and the two have known each other for around fifteen.
It is hard when you are small, running on a budget of $75,000 a year. And it is hard in a different way when you grow. Today we need to raise $1.6 million every year from generous, prayerful donors. We work in 43 or 44 countries, with staff all over the world, and that means managing many more people.
But here is the beauty of where we are now, and why our board, John, and Mark all believe this is the right time. We hope our broader community agrees. By God’s grace, we have a wonderful team. We have a clear strategy for some of the neediest places in the world. We know what we are trying to accomplish. We know what is going well, what is not, and what needs to be fixed or built upon. And we have generous donors who have helped us succeed over the last several years.
When you are in a good place, the question becomes simple: do you want to go out after losing a hundred games in a season, or after winning a hundred?
The Lord has blessed us with a great group of people to work with. If we were bickering, if there were all kinds of problems in the background, it would be very hard for John to leave. It would be a mess. Making sure a team is built well is the responsibility of a board, and that is what we have been trying to do.
Finishing the Race at Home
There is a second reason the timing is right.
Kristen, John’s wife of 48 years, has Parkinson’s disease, which John has mentioned on this program before. There is no cure. The symptoms can be treated, but the disease progresses slowly, and it affects each person in its own particular way.
Because of her health, the travel has become very difficult: India, Cuba, Uganda, the Czech Republic, Romania, all the places John and Mark have gone together. If John is going to finish his race well in his marriage, this is the new season he needs to acknowledge, and that means letting go of all that travel.
What Comes Next
Many people will wonder what is next for John and how he will stay connected to PassionLife and the Fellowship.
There is one project, a sensitive one we don’t talk about publicly, that John will stay involved with as a volunteer. Beyond that, he plans to wait on the Lord and see what this next season of life at 71 holds.
He has written six books, though he admits he is not a fan of writing; he loves having written more than writing itself. He is part of a local church he would like to be more involved with, something all that travel has made difficult. He does not know yet what comes next, and he is content to let the Lord unfold it over time.
People can take comfort in knowing that John will still be there in the background when we need to call on him. He won’t be interfering, and he won’t be disappearing. He will keep an active hand in the ministry, in a limited scope.
Fifteen Years of Stories
John and Mark first met in the Far East in 2011 or 2012, and they have traveled all over the world together since. Marking a transition like this calls for a walk down memory lane.
Vietnam. One of Mark’s favorite memories is walking around a lake in Vietnam with their hosts, when a group of Vietnamese women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties spotted John. They thought he was the bee’s knees. They wanted to talk to him and bat their eyes at him. They thought he was the cutest thing.
There was a reason. Years earlier, when John was a pastor in Boston, his church started an evening English-as-a-second-language ministry, and most of the students were Vietnamese. John learned to greet people in Vietnamese. So when those ladies came up to him, he greeted them in their own language, and it threw them all into a tizzy. He had acknowledged them, shown them respect, and spoken their language, and they all wanted their picture taken with him.
On that same trip, Mark went off to get a haircut. John is a little cautious about walking into a place where he doesn’t know the language. Mark loves it. He walks in, points, smiles, laughs, and everyone laughs with him. He comes out with a nice haircut and, more often than not, an opening to witness to the gospel.
But the really big memory came one evening, after a day of teaching pastors the biblical ethic of life, when Mark went off to eat duck eggs. This was a delicacy in that part of Vietnam: a duck egg incubated until the bird is almost ready to hatch, then boiled with spices. You crack open the shell, and there is the whole duck, feathers, beak, bones and all, and you eat the whole thing out of the shell with a spoon.
John could not do it. Mark found it delicious. It was a bridge too far for John, and it is exactly why we love Mark as a missionary. He lives by the missionary’s prayer: Where you lead me, I will follow. What you feed me, I will swallow. He brings missionary zeal to our work.
Kazakhstan and Namibia. Early on, John and Mark went to Kazakhstan together. What was remarkable there is that our entry point did not come through church leaders at all, but through a business couple who began to organize the work and take the lead.
After we taught in Almaty and a few other cities, COVID came. This couple, he South African and she Kazakh, had gone home to South Africa for Christmas and taken a two-week holiday in Namibia, and there they got stuck. They could not leave for months. So they started teaching the four questions we teach all over Namibia. Soon we were receiving pictures and stories of churches being trained, pastors taking up the work, and believers learning to counsel women and rescue babies. We had never set foot in Namibia as a ministry. Those four questions are probably still being taught there.
Mark also remembers a Chinese brother who came to share some things he had learned. The only person who could translate his Chinese was a woman who spoke Kazakh, and the only person who could translate her Kazakh was a man who also spoke Russian. So the message went down the line from Chinese to Kazakh to Russian, three people standing up front, falling into a rhythm. There was no English at all. Mark, who has lived in China, could at least follow a little of the Chinese. John was the only person in the room who could not understand a word in any of the three languages. Still, he knew the drift, and it was a beautiful thing to watch.
The Czech Republic. That trip was untraditional for us too. We work through church relationships to speak about the sanctity of life and to reach out to women and families in need. But in the Czech Republic the church is almost nonexistent. We found wonderful pastors and missionaries there who are doing great work to this day, but the church was struggling to keep its head above water. The missionaries there are church planters and evangelists, bringing the gospel to a country with little gospel witness and only a few small churches. Because our strategy is to equip the existing church for the work of rescue, there was little we could do there. That is a part of the world where the first need is the gospel itself. God bless those who are bringing it.
Romania. John and Mark made an exploratory trip to Romania with Jeannie Pernia, a member of our staff. One of the opportunities that trip gave us was to sit down over lunch with an abortion doctor and talk about our different views of life and the abortion issue.
Jeannie had worked in the abortion business in her twenties. She had an abortion herself, and then came to know Christ and his forgiveness. As the doctor listened, she began to witness to him and handed him a fetal model of a baby. You could see the scales beginning to fall from his eyes, as he began to sense the reality of what he was dealing with, and all the lies about I’m here to help women started to fall apart.
And so many more. There are stories of riding over the mountains from Uganda into Kenya and eating fried grasshoppers on the side of the road. Stories of Cuba, where Mark and Jeannie had been many times and the church had really taken off, and where, on John’s first visit, the believers were so excited to honor him as president that they wanted him to meet all the women and all the babies, and to take pictures in front of the church holding the babies. Stories of Hong Kong, where Mark’s friend Alex took them one night to a street where you buy live fish, crabs, and other seafood on one side, then carry it across to the restaurants on the other side, where they will cook it any way you like.
We tell these stories for a reason. John and Mark have been many places and done many things together. They have been in this ministry together for a long time. And now the Lord is moving us on. Mark’s hope is that you will be able to trust him in leadership the way you have trusted John.
Pray With Us
We invite you to pray for us as we complete this transition by the end of the year, and to pray God’s rich blessing on our work going forward.
Thank you for being a part of it.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.