Katherine Alsdorf spent 20 years running from God while rising to become a Silicon Valley CEO. Her stunning journey back — and the groundbreaking book she co-wrote with Tim Keller — is reshaping how Christians think about faith, work, and purpose.
The Woman Who Didn’t Want It to Be True
She knew it was true. That was the hardest part.
Katherine Alsdorf would sit in a church in New York City — a city she had moved to chasing ambition and a corner office — and listen to a young pastor named Tim Keller preach. Something would stir inside her. Nevertheless, she would get up, leave before anyone could talk to her, and walk out into the Manhattan air still angry at what she’d heard.
“I would stomp out,” she told Bob Varney on the Intersection Faith, Work and Life podcast. “I would leave not wanting to talk to anyone the whole time and just be angry at what I was hearing. And yet, in my deepest heart, I think I knew it was true. I just didn’t want it to be true.”
That tension — knowing something to be real but desperately not wanting it — is one of the most honest things a person can say about coming to faith. Furthermore, it’s exactly why Katherine Alsdorf’s story matters so much to every Christian leader who has ever felt the weight of two worlds: the board room and the pew, the quarterly report and the Sunday sermon, the resume and the soul.
Because Katherine eventually surrendered. As a result, what happened next changed not just her life, but the faith and work landscape for hundreds of thousands of believers worldwide.
A Free-Range Kid Who Would One Day Run Companies
Long before she was co-authoring books with Tim Keller, Katherine Leary was a kid in rural New Jersey, growing up in a home full of church attendance, Sunday school perfect-attendance pins, and a family helping plant new congregations in the suburbs.
She was the oldest of four, and she took her faith seriously — until she was seventeen. That’s when she decided she’d been “brainwashed” and needed to test God. So she walked away. Not in anger, not in crisis — just in the cool, rational confidence of a young woman who had better things to do. California called. A job appeared. Meanwhile, her three younger brothers became born-again Christians, and then her parents followed. Consequently, she would go home for visits and sneak out to the back porch to smoke cigarettes while the rest of her family prayed at the dinner table.
Twenty years passed.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder While Running From God
In those two decades, Katherine climbed relentlessly. She earned an MBA from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and rose through the tech sector — consulting, sales, marketing. She became President of Private Satellite Network in New York City, then CEO of One Touch Systems, then CEO of Pensare, Inc., an online management education company in Silicon Valley. Sharp, credible, driven — she impressed by any professional measure.
But something lingered underneath all of it.
“It was not until my late 30s,” she told Bob, “that I think the combination of not being married and having a job that just took all of my life… I thought, God’s sort of my last chance. Praying is my last chance.”
In other words, she came back to God for utilitarian reasons. A quick fix. Lonely and overworked, she had simply run out of options.
“God is quite wide in his embrace of prayers,” she says with the quiet humor of someone who has been lovingly outmaneuvered. “While I was seeking just to make my life better, God made my life better — but it was a totally entirely different track than I was looking for.”
The Surrender That Didn’t Feel Like Joy
Here is something Katherine says that the Church rarely says out loud, and it’s worth stopping on.
She did not experience a lightning-bolt conversion. No tears of joy, no flood of peace, no dramatic moment of blinding certainty.
“I viewed it as succumbing or surrendering,” she said. “Not some miraculous see the light — but a surrender. And it was a time before I felt the joy or the peace.”
The surrender, moreover, cost her things. Friends. Social currency. A version of herself she had carefully constructed over two decades — the sarcastic, cool, quick-mouthed New York professional who didn’t need anyone, especially not God.
“It involved a personality shift from being the sarcastic, cool, sort of fresh-mouthed young woman with lots of behaviors that were no longer appropriate. And it involved giving up Sunday mornings and reading the paper and having finally a time to relax. There were real losses involved. And yet I knew it was true.”
Flooded With Truth, Not Joy
She calls her experience being “flooded with truth” — not flooded with joy. That distinction, notably, opens a door for every skeptical, analytical, high-achieving professional who has sat in the back of a church and felt something stir but couldn’t bring themselves to call it conversion.
Faith is not always an emotion. Sometimes it is simply a recognition.
One Month After Surrendering, She Was Asked to Run a Company
This is where Katherine’s story takes a turn that sounds almost scripted.
One month after surrendering to faith — still figuring out what it even meant to be a Christian, still unfamiliar with the terrain of prayer and scripture — her boss walked into her office. He had been at the doctor the night before. A serious brain tumor. Surgery the next day. At minimum, nine months away.
“Will you take over the company?”
Katherine told Bob: “I’m there going, ‘All right, God, I know that you call people into positions of leadership — I had good teaching from Tim Keller — but it’s a little soon. And I don’t know how to be a Christian and I don’t know how to be a CEO.'”
She took the job. Over the next ten years, as she moved through three different companies as CEO, she began wrestling with a question that would eventually become the heartbeat of her life’s work:
What difference does it make if I’m a Christian?
Not in theory. Not on Sundays. Rather, on a Tuesday at 9 AM — when a decision needed to be made, when a team was watching, when the world pressed in with all its demands and brokenness.
“Gospel transformation isn’t overnight,” she said. “Over the course of the next ten years, each time I was more dependent on Christ and each time I saw a little different fruit in terms of my behavior and my impact.”
The Dot-Com Collapse and a Six-Month Conversation With God
By the late 1990s, Katherine served as CEO of a pre-IPO company with extraordinary valuations. The dot-com boom was roaring, and she had prayed earnestly before taking the job. She was “all in” for God with this one.
Then the dot-com collapse hit.
The company went from darling to disaster in twelve months. Katherine shut it down and found herself — for the first time in her adult life — unable to simply move on to the next thing.
“I felt like Jacob on the return to meet his disaffected brother,” she told Bob. “I had to really spend some time.”
When God Uses Failure as a Classroom
Therefore, she gave herself six months to do nothing but wrestle with God. No job search, no networking, no new CEO position to chase. Just Katherine, the wreckage of a failed company, and the quiet.
What she discovered in that time was that her formula of pray → take the job → success was, as she named it with characteristic precision, “rather immature.” It was a deep recalibration. And it was still happening at the seven-month mark when Redeemer Presbyterian Church called and asked whether she would consider moving back to New York to start something brand new: a ministry to marketplace professionals.
Her first answer was no.
“I complained enough that churches weren’t really meeting my needs as a business executive,” she said. “And that complaint turned into — well, then do something about it.”
An R&D Lab Inside a Church
In 2002, Katherine Leary Alsdorf walked into Redeemer Presbyterian Church with a blank sheet of paper and a mandate to build something that had never really existed before: a center to help people integrate their faith and their professional lives.
She called it an R&D lab.
“Gospel change is always innovative,” she told Bob. “When you’re doing something as dramatic as the change from living a secular life to living as God would have you live — that’s not a simple change. And what works for one person is not going to work for another person.”
Building What No One Had Built Before
Over ten years at the Center for Faith and Work, she built something remarkable — vocation groups for lawyers, educators, finance professionals, and artists. An Entrepreneurship Initiative. Arts Ministries. A rigorous discipleship program called Gotham Fellows, which eventually spawned faith-and-work fellows programs in twenty cities around the world.
Her guiding DNA — borrowed from Redeemer’s theological heartbeat — was simple and radical: The gospel changes everything. Not just salvation, not just Sunday mornings, but everything. It transforms your heart, reshapes your relationships, and renews the city around you.
“We’re not the saviors of our workplaces,” she said. “And we’re not apathetic about them either. The gospel changes our relationships and it changes the world. It can change our workplace, our industry, and our city.”
Every Good Endeavor: Half a Million Copies in 17 Languages
After a decade of watching God work in the lives of New York City professionals — lawyers, actors, hedge fund managers, and baristas — Katherine helped Tim Keller capture it all in a book.
What the Book Actually Argues
Together, they published Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work in 2012. The book follows the biblical arc of creation, fall, and redemption — not to make a devotional argument, but to demonstrate that work itself is embedded in the DNA of what it means to be human.
“We were made to work,” Katherine has said in other interviews. “And the reason we’re made to work is to do the work that God would have us do to help the world flourish. Apart from doing that kind of work, we’re not fully human — we’re not living the lives that God meant us to live.”
The book answers the question Katherine had been living for a decade: What difference does faith make at work?
What Faith at Work Actually Looks Like
It does not make you a spiritual supervisor over your colleagues. It does not guarantee success. Nor does it mean your job will feel meaningful every day.
What it does, however, is reframe the entire story.
Work isn’t a result of the Fall — it’s part of the original design. Your job, whatever it is, exists inside God’s purposes for the world. The broken parts of your workplace aren’t a reason to give up; they’re a reason to show up differently.
As Katherine frames it: we’re “broken people that he is offering an opportunity to participate in his work.”
Today, Every Good Endeavor has sold over half a million copies in seventeen languages. Notably, when Katherine sat down with Bob Varney before her trip to South Africa, she observed that readers there had already moved past the basics — asking sophisticated follow-up questions and building on the foundation the book had laid.
What She Told Pastors Who Said “I Don’t Know Anything About Being a Lawyer”
One of the most practical moments in Katherine’s conversation with Bob comes when she addresses the reason most churches still haven’t made faith-and-work a central ministry focus.
Pastors often raise the same objection: “I don’t know anything about being a lawyer. I don’t know anything about being in finance.”
Katherine’s response cuts right through it:
“But you do know about working. And you have the same need for gospel transformation in your heart. You have the same need for gospel transformation in your relationships through work and in your world — in your entity, which is the church. There might be ten percent of this discipleship that you can’t directly relate to. But the rest — we all share.”
Three Reasons This Belongs in the Church
This isn’t a ministry for a specific professional class — it’s discipleship for everyone. In fact, she makes the case for why it belongs inside the church on three distinct levels: it’s core to any meaningful discipleship, it’s one of the most powerful evangelistic draws a church can have, and it represents the most effective mobilization tool available to a congregation.
“There’s nothing more powerful,” she said, “than empowering everyone to live out their faith in the job that they’re in, in the city that they’re in.”
The Woman Cities Project Global Is Glad You Got to Hear
Bob Varney first met Katherine through her brother, Rich Leary. At that time, she wasn’t yet married. In the years since, however, she married John Alsdorf, started New City Fellows in Raleigh, North Carolina, joined the faculty at Regent College in Vancouver, and has continued speaking and writing at the intersection of gospel and vocation.
When Bob asked her what she was doing now, Katherine described the upcoming South Africa trip — speaking to entrepreneurs, investors, pastors, and faith-and-work communities. She also talked about teaching seminary and hosting waves of three-to-eight-year-olds at her home at the Jersey Shore every summer.
“If you have a definition of work that includes parenting or grandparenting or hospitality, all those things fit,” she said, smiling.
Reflecting on still being changed by the gospel in her mid-70s, she added: “What a blessing. At 74, we’re still changing. The gospel is still renewing us, the gospel is still redeeming our failures. I mean, that’s awesome.”
What Katherine’s Story Means for You
Here is the thread running through Katherine Alsdorf’s life that Cities Project Global knows intimately: you don’t have to have it together to be called.
Katherine walked away from God for twenty years, came back for the wrong reasons, and surrendered without joy. She accepted a CEO job one month after becoming a Christian, watched a company collapse, and wrestled with God for six months in a spiritual desert. Through all of it, however, God was working.
And out of every failure, every fractured formula, every loss — came a decade of ministry, a book that has reached half a million people, and a movement now touching twenty cities around the world.
The Gospel changes everything.
Including the woman smoking cigarettes on the back porch while her family prayed inside.
Listen to Katherine Alsdorf’s full conversation with Bob Varney on the Intersection Faith, Work and Life podcast — available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Are you a leader who senses that your faith and your work were meant to be connected — not compartmentalized? Cities Project Global’s Leadership Circle is designed exactly for you. Learn more at Leadership Circle.
Cities Project Global is an international, faith-based organization dedicated to awakening Christian leaders to their God-given purpose in every sphere of society. Through the Leadership Circle and related programs, CPG equips men and women to live integrated lives of faith, work, and service in their cities.