I remember standing on the balcony of my hotel room in downtown Oakland during Raiders mini camp. I was 23 at the time, and so many things were happening at once. Joanna and I had just welcomed Alana into the world as our first child a week before. I was given permission to miss the first few days of camp to see my daughter born in Virginia. I had just signed a two-year deal with the team and was in the best shape of my life — 4% body fat, running a 4.27 forty-yard dash. We had just drafted Derek Carr, who was an excellent quarterback and an incredible human being. He, myself, Nick Roach, Jamize Olawale, Rod Streeter, and a few others were experiencing somewhat of a revival led by our chaplain, Napoleon Kauffman. Failed marriages were being restored, drug and alcohol addictions were being overcome, and the overall culture of the team was as warm as any locker room I had ever witnessed. At the same time, I had been getting on planes and traveling the country almost every time we got a break to speak at schools, businesses, and various organizations, promoting what I called the Purpose 6 at the time. It was a six-part self-discovery module that helped people uncover their life's meaning and thrive in their callings. This was the backdrop of my life. So many thoughts were racing in my mind as I leaned against the balcony railing, overlooking Jack London Square.
"What was my true purpose?"
"What was my ultimate goal in this season of my life?"
"Am I ready to be a father?"
I had more questions than answers. The nature of my NFL life had made my circle much smaller than I had previously remembered. My wife and my father were my only confidants. I remember minicamp breaking and getting a few weeks to go back home. I had a strong and successful camp, and I couldn't wait to get back to Virginia to train with my father. It was a supercharge for my athletic career but it was also my therapy. Just his presence soothed my soul and the training was transformative. His training methods demanded EVERYTHING out of me while building up the man in me. I remember getting invited to a conference at my home church called Grace Covenant. I was desperately looking for an answer I could find to help direct my path. Why not consult a higher power for such life-altering decisions? I had reconnected with the pastor of the church. His name was Brett. Around the city people called him the Redskins pastor. He was the spiritual counselor to the players over there and I knew him growing up and often heard him preach.
He had heard that I was in town and requested to meet me for breakfast. Innocently, I shared all of my burdens with him — seeking direction. What I didn't know at the time was that he was burdened too. His church was a thriving, multimillion-dollar operation with a full staff and a mission to expand throughout the DC metropolitan area. They were in the middle of a major building campaign and he was planning the process of his succession. I didn't know anything about church. I just loved the idea that the Creator of all things cared about me and had plans for me. Now, I understand that my problem that we discussed at the table seemed more of a solution to his. He valued my pedigree and recognized my leadership and communication abilities. He used the term "called to ministry" as a response to my desire to find purpose and direction in life.
I attended his conference that spring, and there was a man from Tennessee named Jim that everyone seemed to honor — maybe more than a man should be hoisted up — but he carried himself like an oracle. He seemed to have lots of wisdom, and supposedly he could literally hear God speak. So Brett brought me back in the green room to get a "word" from him. They both came up with this phrase that seemed to loom over my head for the next few months. They both reinforced it collaboratively almost as if they had talked before this quick meeting. It was something like, "your father was a football player that could minister but you are a minister that can play football." I can still feel that strange feeling now when reading those words. They had convinced me that football was virtually in the way of what God intended for my life. Before I'd leave, Jim said that the next time I'd get on the field in training camp, I'd feel a tug on my heart to leave.
Sure enough, upon arriving at training camp, it felt like a spell was on me. My conflict had turned into a guilt trip. I called Brett after practice, and he doubled down on our previous conversations. He said I should be very mindful and sober — not to run from my calling. I went from looking for direction to fearing that I was letting God down. He then had another guy I had never talked to — coincidentally also named Jim, the executive pastor at his church — call my cellphone that same week. He played good cop, telling me that Brett was heavy handed in his approach but the sentiment was indeed true (and from God Himself). He offered to walk me through the process and help me navigate all of my feelings along with the various voices of influence in my life. I didn't know what to think of all this but life was moving faster than I had time to consider.
I remember calling Joanna and Dad on speakerphone. Dad was an elder at the church and after 20 seasons in the NFL, he had mixed feelings about my future in football. He knew I could play but he also knew about the mental and physical dangers of the game. Joanna had become a member at Grace Covenant and she, like many congregants, esteemed Brett and his board of pastors to be the leaders of our lives. I shared with them that I was thinking about leaving football, and we decided to fast together for the first three days of training camp — a crazy thing to do in such a physically demanding environment. My roommate at the time was Jarrod Shaw and he would tell me how impressed he was by my genuine hunger to resolve my internal struggle. I often brought these issues to my teammates who saw that I was making an impact on the world beyond the gridiron and a community began to shape around me in support.
The three days was up and I called Dad, Joanna, Mom, my agent Mike Giorgio, and then Brett. They were all thrilled to hear that I had decided to leave the game of football but there was a reluctance in my heart. I spoke to a few of my coaches and teammates and broke the news. Next thing I know I was on a Virgin Airlines flight across the country back to Virginia where I'd officially join the staff of Grace Covenant. Immediately, I was met with turmoil. My family had planned a special vacation for us to spend quality time together after such a major moment in my life. What place could be better than Disney World to escape the noise and be carefree for a week? The following week would kick off my onboarding process at Grace.
While on vacation, I had received a series of emails from the church secretary, Lou, in preparation for me joining their staff. I didn't reply to them because I was on vacation, and I was unaware of the staff's very strict email policy. I woke up to an all-but-threatening email in all caps from her, demanding my reply and the information she needed to set me up as a minister. Immediately I thought to myself, "these people are more tightly wound than I remembered as a churchgoer." But I shrugged it off, calmly replied, and continued to enjoy my vacation. The next week, however, was a pivotal one for me — one I'd never forget.
I reported to 4600 Brookfield Corporate Dr. in Chantilly, Virginia the following Tuesday and attended my first ever staff meeting. There I was assigned a boss. His name was David. Ironically, I had grown up occasionally going to youth group where he was one of the participating kids. I had also volunteered to help him in my off-seasons as he became the men's ministry leader at Grace. I thought he was a quirky but cool dude. I had no problem working under him and learning the whole church thing — but that all changed after the staff meeting concluded and he pulled me to the side. He said these exact words:
"You're my bitch now."
My heart sank, my palms got sweaty, and rage built in my blood. I was beyond confused. How could anyone say something that crazy in the church? That would never fly in the locker room with the guys. I'd never in my wildest dreams think pastors addressed their employees like that. It took everything in me not to swing on him — but it didn't end there. I had an afternoon meeting with Jim, the same guy who played good cop in convincing me to leave football and join the ministry. I closed his door and took a seat. His first words were, "I hear you are David's bitch." He doubled down on the craziest phrase I had ever heard anyone say to me in my life. I stayed quiet, though my mind was racing twenty miles a minute. Regret kicked in. I had been duped, tricked by people who spoke about God on stages but were far from Him behind closed doors. My contract was already voided, and I had instructed my agent to inform every team that called for me that I would never play again.
My first day at Grace Covenant Church began a five-year downward spiral.
For the next two years, I'd be bullied, manipulated, and insulted by the very people who told me that God Himself willed I'd join their prestigious ministry. Every day my spirit died a little more as I pulled up to the church for work. I'd meet numerous staff members over the course of my time there who were being mistreated too. Brett had entrusted his church to what seemed to be spawns of Satan himself, posing as holy counsel. To add insult to injury, they started me off on a salary of $62,000, which was not enough to make ends meet in the long haul. I ended up selling the new home I had bought after my daughter was born with my NFL money, and rapidly emptied my account to supplement my low wages from the church. We moved into an old split-level home in Reston, Virginia, where we could afford to pay the rent. My life had taken a complete 180.
I never lost my heart for people. I was still driven to find my purpose in life. I learned about a young Hebrew boy from the Torah named Joseph. He was a dreamer just like me, and he had an incredible relationship with his father, like Dad and I had. His jealous brothers ripped his clothes and threw him into a ditch, only to later sell him as a slave to Midianite/Ishmaelite traders for twenty pieces of silver. That story resonated with me. He overcame his brothers' hatred, and even as a slave he made his way into the cabinet of Potiphar, one of the most powerful men in Egypt at the time. He was so gifted and disciplined that he attracted even more problems — Potiphar's wife became physically attracted to him and sought to seduce him behind her husband and king's back. Yet he refused. He literally ran out of his clothes to avoid her, but he was still a slave, and his word held no weight against her accusations. He ended up going to jail for that encounter, but even behind bars he found favor with God and the wardens. I wasn't in a physical jail, but my church became a modern version of Potiphar's kingdom.
Looking back on it, this is where my devotion to God was birthed. I was desperate, broke, trying to lead a growing family and make an impact on the city of my youth, where my father had built a spiritual and literal inheritance for me. The interference and friction in my life came solely from those you'd expect to treat me like a brother. I developed a contrarian attitude toward the church leaders and used my competitive nature to combat their darkness with light. For example, David once told me that I should expect my personal prayer life and time reading scripture to naturally minimize due to the busyness of our ministry work. That made me pray more, fast more, and literally dig my face into the ancient texts.
I remember playing basketball with my Dad and one of the worship leaders, named JC. My Dad had called him out on his conduct while we were trying to set a good example for the young men we were playing with — JC was a leader from the front, singing each week. He replied to Dad, "It's just a stage, I can say what I want to say out here." That drove me to live more consciously of my calling. Anything they said that was contrary to righteousness led me to live with more purpose.
Some things that occurred were so audacious that I knew it wasn't man at enmity with the God in me — it was dark spirits attempting to choke my identity and purpose out. Our church was thriving, and Brett, as a black man in the affluent greater DC community, began something of a campaign to be the most multicultural church in the area. "A church that looked like heaven," he'd call it. To accomplish this, he appointed an all-white committee of four leaders to oversee the entire church staff and its ministries: Andrew (Jim's nephew), Eddy (Jim's son-in-law), David (Jim's mentee), and Tifani, the lead singer of the worship team. They ran a very tight ship based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):
- How much money we were bringing in.
- How many people were in attendance each service.
- How many people raised their hand each service to say they wanted to become Christian.
- How many people were baptized each month.
What was once a labor of love became a corporate exercise for the sake of quality assurance and expansion. I thought nothing of it because most of the ministry work I was doing graded out well according to their metrics — but the sweet, grandpa-like expression from Brett on stage was followed by a cold wind of judgment and criticism from the four leaders. The church had traded passion for performance, which caused staff members to fear losing their jobs before each performance review. It became an every-man-for-himself scenario, which I was used to from my time playing ball. They had also promoted me to college campus pastor at George Mason University, where I was detached enough from Brett and Jim's core four.
I remember Tifani meeting with me in preparation for our big college campus conference at the church, when she told me that she "cracks the whip" when it comes to being organized and maintaining order during worship. I thought to myself, "Wow — this white lady just tried to intimidate me with a whip analogy. There goes what I remembered to be my home church." In a way, all of these demonstrations of bad character inspired me to live better. Many of my friends, including almost every son and daughter of church staff, had left because of the hypocrisy — but I remained in the spiritual trenches. The longer I stayed, the more the spiritual warfare intensified, and yet I began to find my groove. Until two defining moments would trump everything I'd experienced leading up to them.
I rarely brought the drama from the church home to my family. My father raised me to keep work at work. Combine that with my desire not to taint a family of growing believers' faith by exposing them to what I believed was not a direct reflection of the Body of Christ — and the adverse effect was that I bottled things up. The depression, the anger, and the constant mood swings associated with the confusion, disappointment, and regret of leaving what now seemed to be a more holy environment in the NFL locker room caused me to act differently around my wife. I closed myself off and became numb at home. It was like coming home from a loss every single day and not knowing how to handle my frustration. This caused a wedge in our relationship. I struggled to be present with my children and found it very hard to connect with Joanna — especially with her continuing to view my coworkers as God's chosen. I remember standing in my garage, seemingly starting to crack from the weight of my reality. I decided to call Brett and ask him for marital guidance. When I told him about our struggles, his response was "If you want this church from me you better fix that." I had no idea what to do with that advice. The man that I had looked to as a counselor became nothing more than my cold boss, dangling an inheritance in front of me instead of shepherding my soul. Time went on and our marriage continued to take a hit. That was difficult, but what would happen soon after was the nail in the coffin for me.
All my life I've been a dreamer. Not just a man with an imagination, but someone who has the most vivid dreams that seem so real I'd literally be woken up by what I had witnessed in my sleep. This particular time I dreamed I was hosting a major event in Washington, DC with a number of dignitaries. We were in a large house in Georgetown with a very long table where many sat down to eat. I stood at the head of the table to make a special announcement, and while I was speaking, a lady noticed my catering team in the back. All four of Grace's leadership were serving alongside my good friend and ministry partner Stephen Law. A woman at the table saw them and began to scream and curse loudly. She demanded that they be sent away immediately. I walked over to relieve them, assuring them that I had everything under control and it would all be okay. It was the strangest dream. Early that morning, around 5 AM, I called Brett and told him about it. Though I thought he was going to discredit the dream or say it was inaccurate, he told me he believed God gave it to me. He followed up by saying, "Don't tell anybody the dream." I told him I only had plans to tell him and my father. His reply changed my perception of him forever.
"Do not tell Darrell!"
"…this is a governmental dream, and he is unable to understand these things."
My jaw dropped. The Earth stood still. I felt violated for a few reasons. One, my father is the most exceptional believer of God that I know, and his understanding of the spiritual realm far exceeds that of most pastors I've worked with. But more critically, I don't believe in keeping secrets. No one has ever told me in my entire life to keep a secret from my father. We are literally one. That was the moment I knew it was time to go.
Shortly after, I left the church. I founded a company called Engage 365, whose namesake was inspired by how disengaged I had been while working at the church. I took the teachings and principles of the holy scriptures and transformed them into coaching points and leadership workshops. I began working with business owners, sports teams, and Chick-fil-A restaurants to impact them with what I had learned thus far in life. Most importantly, it became a financial parachute for me to jump out of what I believed was a falling plane. My departure came with much scrutiny and judgment, in addition to seemingly endless gossip about why I left. People on the church staff I once considered friends began spreading lies about me to other staff members and congregants to protect the church from being seen as at fault for my departure. The silver lining came when Joanna and I decided to move to Nashville to seek marital counseling from an amazing duo, Daryl and Stephanie Fitzgerald. We had been restored completely by the grace of The Most High.
At that point, I figured I had left the church and all of that mess to rebuild my life. But one night I got a random call from a man named Tim Johnson, who at one point had been considered my dad's best friend. He had planted a church in Orlando, Florida that was struggling. He needed a dynamic young person to help him engage a younger generation at his church. At the time, my brother-in-law Sam was making a major impact in the DC area when it came to ministry — not as his profession, just a passion. Word had gotten all the way down to Orlando about how special and gifted Sam was. Tim called me to influence Sam and my sister Jerrell to move to Orlando. To this day, the guilt of having blood on my hands for making that call to Sam and encouraging him to go lives in my mind. I vouched for a man I did not know personally. All I knew was that he had played in the 1991 Super Bowl with my father, and that a lot of church people liked him. Unfortunately, Sam would soon have a similar story to mine at Grace Covenant — but at a place called Orlando World Outreach Center. They put Sam through the wringer, but the worst part was that Tim asked my dad to supplement Sam's salary for the first year. Tim only offered to pay Sam $30,000 and have my dad match him. After the first year, my dad called Tim to ask him to bump Sam's pay up and relieve my dad of a responsibility that wasn't really his. That's when Tim responded that they had not made such a deal and that Sam needed to figure things out on his own. As a son watching my father get betrayed by a man who had used him for free or highly discounted appearances countless times, it broke me. But it doesn't end there.
During the pandemic, I got another call from Tim in Orlando. This time he was offering me an opportunity to meet some of the executive leaders at Full Sail University. He claimed they could help me grow my business. I agreed to take a trip to Orlando to meet with the group, and somehow ended up in writing sessions to help him write a book called "Fatherless No More." I'll never forget that first writing session in one of the executives' offices at the university. There were about four of us in the room — a mix of writers and strategists. Tim kicked off the session with a monologue, explaining the direction he wanted us to take in articulating his vision for the book. He started with the human condition: that all of humanity possessed a God-sized hole in their heart that only a father could fill. He introduced the concept that the primary purpose of a biological father was to be an access point to guide his children to a Father in Heaven. But things took a strange turn when he began to use my father as a reference point for the group. He started to analyze my father's upbringing and the way he fathered me and my siblings. He claimed that my dad over-indexed with me as a byproduct of the relationship he had with his own dad. He claimed that my dad had missed the mark in certain areas with my mom, and then went on to speculate about the relationship between my mother and me. He claimed that almost all of our family issues stemmed from my father — and his father.
I didn't know what to do at that moment. I felt embarrassed and emasculated in front of a group of men I had never met. I thought to myself, "Why would he use this setting to speculate publicly about my family?"
Despite the public humiliation, I gave him my best and sincerely tried to turn a new leaf. But soon after, he took my ideas and the core principles I had written as the foundation of his book and ran with them — publishing without ever mentioning me or even letting me know the book was coming out. To this day, I still have the writing sessions in my notepad about his book and the recordings of focus group sessions I conducted on his behalf with professional athletes in my community for research and development. I'd be surprised if he wrote more than ten paragraphs on his own.
The final straw between me and the western evangelical church came when I moved back home to Virginia to help another ministry just five miles down the street from Grace Covenant Church — a place called New Life Community Church. I was willing to work there because they were more than a church; they owned and operated a state-of-the-art sports and fitness facility called the Nzone. I figured that would be a good place to ease my way back into the ministry world while working in a field I was familiar with. Coincidentally, their head pastor's name was Brett as well — a Brett who seemed to run his church and staff just like the staff at Grace down the street. He dictated almost every decision, and very few would ever dare challenge him. Since I was making money and wasn't beholden to the salary they paid me, I was comfortable speaking up and calling unholy things out. I saw how he treated his staff, and how manipulation was the culture there. There were some wonderful people with a deep passion for ministry who were treated so badly at New Life that I just couldn't continue.
This is when I discovered the passage in Matthew, chapter seven, verse six, that said: "Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces." That's when it hit me. I was not running from ministry when I was on the Raiders. I ran from ministry when I left the NFL, giving the so-called church the best of my passions and talents only to be trampled and torn to pieces. But Psalm 37:12-13 reminds us that the wicked may plot and scheme — yet God's truth will always prevail. I am living proof that if you are called according to His purposes, there is nothing that can stop you from reaching your destiny and accomplishing your life's calling by the grace of God.