Kingdom At Work
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Leadership can look linear from the outside. You start in one role. You perform well. You earn more responsibility. You move up. Eventually, perhaps, you arrive at the position you were working toward all along.
But that isn’t how Jeanna Roach’s story unfolded.
When Jeanna, now CEO of Betenbough Companies, graduated from Texas Tech University, she didn’t have a carefully mapped-out career plan. As the first person in her family to graduate from college, she wasn’t even sure what she wanted to do.
A recruiter landed her a job in public relations in Dallas, where she worked with clients ranging from Starbucks and la Madeleine to KB Home and the Dallas Museum of Art. Then life took an unexpected turn. Her now-husband, Andrew, proposed two days before moving back to Lubbock, Texas.
Betenbough Homes happened to be hiring in Lubbock, Texas.
Jeanna joined the company as a public relations coordinator in October 2006. Twenty years later, she leads a family of businesses spanning homebuilding, title, mortgage, building supply, and hospitality.
Looking backward, the path may appear fairly straight. Living it was anything but.
Formation, Not a Formula
Over the years, Jeanna moved between marketing and sales. She was asked to help restore health to a struggling Impact Title team. She stewarded two businesses that were operating in the red and saw them move into the black. Each assignment exposed her to another part of business and developed skills she hadn’t possessed when she arrived.
But some of the most important preparation had nothing to do with business acumen. It had to do with humility.
“I came with a lot of pride,” Jeanna says. She felt the need to have the answers and keep everything together. She wasn’t particularly interested in faith when she joined Betenbough and didn’t understand much of the language around a Kingdom-minded workplace. When she heard the word “ministry,” she had to look it up.
Over time, the culture around her challenged more than how she worked. It challenged who she was becoming.
One pivotal moment came during a conversation with then-CEO Rick Betenbough. Jeanna was struggling with changes in leadership, and Rick asked whether she was submitted to the new leadership team.
Her answer was honest: about 50%.
Rick listened as she explained. Then he told her that by the next day, it needed to be 100% or she couldn’t stay.
It was painful. It was also the beginning of a journey toward humility that would shape the way Jeanna leads today. That’s one of the paradoxes of Kingdom leadership: God may be preparing you for greater influence by confronting the very things in you that could make that influence dangerous.
The next step isn’t always up. Sometimes it’s deeper.
God Is More Concerned With Who You’re Becoming
A career can, on the surface, be evaluated by titles, compensation, influence, or accomplishments. But Kingdom leadership asks a different question: Who are you becoming?
“God is so much more concerned about who we’re becoming instead of what we’re doing,” Jeanna says. That changes the way we interpret the detours, difficult assignments, humbling conversations, and seasons that don’t seem to fit our plans.
The assignment in front of you may be about more than the results you’re producing. God may be teaching you how to collaborate when you’d rather take control. How to submit when you’d rather lead. How to listen when you’d rather have the answer. How to trust Him instead of relying on the natural strengths that have always worked before.
Jeanna didn’t know as a public relations coordinator that the Lord would one day ask her to lead Betenbough Companies. But through every role, every assignment, every restructure, every demotion, and every difficult lesson, He was building something she couldn’t yet see.
He was building the leader before revealing the assignment.
The Assignment May Change With the Season
That formation became especially important when Jeanna was asked to step into the CEO role.
The people she would now directly lead weren’t strangers. Every board member had, at some point, been one of her leaders. Some had mentored her. Some had worked alongside her for nearly two decades.
Suddenly, the relationships looked different.
Jeanna says one of the hardest parts was learning to trust that she was the person God had chosen for that season. But the evidence of His preparation was already there.
She had watched the Lord produce fruit in the teams and businesses she’d been given the opportunity to steward. She had developed relationships built on years of trust, honesty and honor. She had learned business acumen across multiple areas of the company.
And, perhaps most importantly, she had learned that leadership wasn’t about having all the answers.
“Different seasons require different leaders,” Jeanna says. Kingdom leaders can easily charge ahead using their natural strengths, forgetting that the business they’re leading ultimately isn’t theirs. We are stewards.
That means the question isn’t simply, What am I capable of doing? It’s God, what are You asking of me in this season?
You Don’t Have to Become Someone Else
When Jeanna became CEO, a prophetic word reinforced that lesson: God hadn’t put her there to become another Rick Betenbough. He had put her there to be Jeanna.
That statement sounds simple, but for leaders, it can be profoundly freeing.
Jeanna had already wrestled with this years earlier while watching Holly Betenbough lead. Their personalities were nothing alike. If effective Kingdom leadership meant becoming someone like Holly, Jeanna thought she had no hope.
But God didn’t design Jeanna to lead like Holly, or Rick, or anyone else. He designed her to lead as herself, submitted to Him. “God reminded me that He made Jeanna to be Jeanna,” she says.
When leaders don’t know who they are, leadership can quickly become performance. We imitate someone else’s strengths. Chase someone else’s definition of success. Try to prove that we’re capable enough, spiritual enough, or accomplished enough.
But authenticity begins with agreeing with God’s design.
Jeanna admits there are still days when she slips back into performance and needs the people around her to remind her who she is.
Kingdom leadership isn’t linear, and neither is our growth. Sometimes we revisit lessons we thought we’d already learned. Sometimes God asks us to lead differently in a new season. Sometimes obedience takes us somewhere we never expected.
The goal isn’t to construct the perfect trajectory. It’s to stay close enough to the King to hear what He’s saying next.
Let the King Lead the Leader
For leaders who want to integrate their faith into their work, Jeanna’s advice starts with authenticity and identity. But neither can be separated from relationship with God.
You cannot be led by God while leading others if you aren’t spending time with Him. Scripture. Prayer. Holy Spirit. Stillness. Listening.
At Betenbough, leaders are trained to hear from Holy Spirit because the strategy of a Kingdom business ultimately begins with a simple question: What is God saying?
That doesn’t make financials, strategy, or execution irrelevant. Stewardship matters. Results matter. But they aren’t the highest thing.
When prestige, power, pay, profit, or strategy becomes the primary pursuit, things can quickly fall out of order. Leaders place burdens on themselves that God never asked them to carry.
When the King is first, everything else begins to find its proper place.
That’s why Kingdom leadership rarely resembles a perfectly straight climb toward success. Following God may lead you through an assignment you didn’t expect, a humbling you didn’t want, a responsibility you don’t feel ready for, or a season that seems unrelated to where you thought you were going.
Don’t discount those places. God may be doing some of His most important leadership work there.
Because in the Kingdom, the path isn’t ultimately about getting you to the next position. It’s about forming you into the person He created you to be.