A Founder’s Honest Reflection on Faith, Friendship, and Trusting in the Unexpected Grace of God
By Jim Lane, Founder of the New Canaan Society
April 2026
The mid-late 1990s marked a profound turning point in my life that would ultimately lead to the founding of the New Canaan Society. To the outside world, my life at Goldman Sachs during the booming 80s was the epitome of success. As one of the architects of the firm’s rapidly expanding private equity business, I was deeply immersed in high-stakes deals, taking retail giants like Macy’s and ubiquitous brands like 7-Eleven private. We made early investments in Qualcomm, riding the wave to its eventual public offering. I experienced great success in that world, with all the influence, ego satisfaction, and financial rewards that came with it.
Yet, behind the glittering façade of Wall Street triumphs, my personal life was filled with conflict. When money started pouring my way, I did not handle success particularly well. I started believing my own B.S. – You’ve made partner at thirty-four. Pretty damn good, Jim. This new world encouraged a lifestyle that said I could do just about anything and get away with it. I sometimes believed that I needed and deserved some “release” from the pressures I was carrying. This environment, stress and my inner conflict created a vicious cycle that exacerbated my personal struggles: my marriage was under pressure, there was emotional chaos at home, and my drinking was spiraling into a dangerous pattern.
I was a functioning alcoholic, navigating the demanding world of finance while battling inner demons that threatened to consume me. I can trace almost all of my destructive personal behavior directly to alcohol, a crutch I leaned on after years of previously abstaining, and what would develop into addiction.
The profound irony was that while I commanded respect and influence in the marketplace, I found myself in a place of crushing personal isolation. I had achieved what so many men strive for, yet I had no one—truly no one—to turn to when the weight of my struggles became too much to bear.
I had no deep, authentic relationships where I felt safe enough to be honest about the turmoil and distress in my life. This was, I later realized, far too common for many successful marketplace men: they climbed the ladder of success only to find themselves utterly alone at the top.
A Lifeline in Friendship: BJ Weber Enters the Picture
My “salvation”, and ultimately the beginnings of NCS, began with an unlikely friendship.
In the early 80s, my wife, Susie, and I moved with our children to Chatham, New Jersey, and attended the Presbyterian Church in New Providence. It was there I first learned about BJ Weber, a street pastor ministering to and caring for pimps and prostitutes in Times Square. I heard him speak, and something in his message resonated with me. I felt an immediate connection. I looked for him after the service, but he was gone.
Six months later, the church announced that BJ Weber was moving his ministry office from Times Square to Wall Street, one block from Goldman Sachs. He would now be ministering to the “pimps and prostitutes” of Wall Street. I cold called him, explaining that I had heard him speak and the impact it had on me. We met for lunch, and in that hour or two, we discovered two critical commonalities: we both loved Jesus and we both loved the Chicago Cubs (and not necessarily in that order 😉). We became fast friends.
BJ became my lifeline. When Goldman Sachs moved into its new office building, he would visit so often that the security guards assumed he was an employee. We would walk and talk in Battery Park, overlooking New York Harbor — a small oasis amid the noise and demands of the city. It was our friendship that formed the idea and the foundation of NCS. He was that “friend who sticks closer than a brother,” helping me navigate through the stumbles, the failures, and the constant temptations that came with my high-pressure career. He didn’t judge; he simply walked with me when I faced my drinking problems, when I made mistakes. He was the one who offered me grace and mercy through it all, even as I continued to stumble along the way.
“Love and relationship are more important than success and career. We are trained by the culture that your career is more important than your marriage, that your career and success are more important than your family, that career and success are more important than maintaining friendships. In other words, the most important thing is what you accomplish. And yet, nobody who is dying ever said, I wish I spent more time at the office, or I wish I accomplished more. Generally, what they say is, I wish I spent more time with my friends and my family. Relationship is at the heart of everything.” ~ Tim Keller
My career took a turn when Goldman Sachs sent me to London to establish their private equity business in Europe. Though a professionally challenging time, I was more available for my family and could see the positive impact of this time on each of them. BJ flew over for my 40th birthday; our friendship had continued to strengthen and deepen during those years.
The Connecticut Connection and the Seeds of a Movement
After returning from London in 1993, Susie and I decided against moving back to New Jersey and instead sought a fresh start in New Canaan, Connecticut, near where her parents had settled. Our new home, built in 1910, was a sizable house that would prove to be perfect for hosting. The living room, expansive enough to eventually hold over a hundred people, became the future home and gathering place of NCS. New Canaan was also one town over from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Darien, where a group of women – including Susie’s mom – had been praying for the men of New Canaan for fifteen years!
The actual inception of NCS began in late 1994. I had dinner and a long conversation with my new friend, writer and commentator Eric Metaxas. I shared my deep personal need for authentic male friendship, a space where men could be truly vulnerable, where the superficial trappings of life and success could be set aside. From my friendship with BJ, I knew that Jesus needed to be at the center of these kinds of relationships.
I had been a Christian since I was five. I grew up going to church and went to Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in Illinois. The world of Wall Street was a stark contrast to all of that. I was acutely aware that people from my evangelical upbringing did not understand my career choice and quite possibly judged this world. The three pillars of my life: church, work and family all left me feeling alone and not really at home anywhere.
I needed to reconcile my faith, which I never lost, with my career and how I was living my life. And I needed real friendships to do it. My way of reconciling the faith of my upbringing was to compartmentalize it for a while. Thank goodness our all-loving God does not forget us. I had no idea how life would unfold before me and how God would bring me home to Him.
I was constantly told that “guys don’t want to talk about their feelings.” And typical male interactions certainly seemed to confirm that. But beneath that exterior, so many of us continue to have a profound hunger for connection. I realized that the conventional “churchy” gatherings, Bible studies, or prayer meetings, weren’t reaching men like me. The guys I was around, especially marketplace men, were information overloaded and bored by content-driven meetings that failed to address their deeper needs. We just need to be together, I told myself, and we’ll figure it out.
But what did it mean to “be together”?
It wasn’t about building a new organization or writing a book. It was about facing my desperate, personal needs, and in friendship with other marketplace men who were willing to admit their own brokenness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer best described the loneliness caused by lack of deep connection within the church:
“He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final breakthrough does not occur because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So, everyone must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So, we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are all sinners.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
From My Living Room to a National Movement: ‘The Power of Vulnerability’
Two weeks after my conversation with Eric Metaxas, the first NCS gathering took place. We would meet for breakfast once a week at my house, starting with a core group of ten to fifteen men. For the first several years, my living room was the home of NCS as it grew steadily to fifty or sixty guys. These were men like Eric Metaxas, Bill Jolly, Wiley Mullins, Dave Swanson and a bunch of marketplace guys gathering weekly for connection, conversation, and a full breakfast. A place where humor, camaraderie, and honest sharing flourished. We could relax and be ourselves. That also allowed us to be honest with each other, because we realized, hey, we’re friends. We all had our own unique stories, hopes and struggles. No judgment here.
Initially, we shared our stories, learning from one another. About four years in, we began inviting speakers who could really speak to the men and offer a powerful spiritual message. The same women that had been praying for us at St. Paul’s were now praying on Friday mornings, with one volunteering to drive past my home each week and pray for us.
The movement gained significant momentum in 2000-2001 when the renowned evangelist Luis Palau, doing a festival in Connecticut, heard about our little gathering and asked if he could come and speak. When he arrived, the house was jammed with over 100 guys, many of whom I didn’t even know.
One of our core values was that NCS needed to be a safe place for men who were accustomed to transactional, money-centered conversations nearly every place they went. In the first 12-13 years of NCS, I covered all costs of our weekly meetings, including the food and catering costs, speakers’ fees and travel expenses, and all annual retreat deficits. In addition to being a safe place financially and for men to share their stories confidentially, some of the other core principles that built the NCS culture ironically came from my time at Goldman Sachs. Things were done with excellence, we used humor to balance the intensity, and there was a great spirit of partnership, teamwork and ownership – this was our movement! Everyone was working together from a shared vision. Now the compensation wasn’t monetary; it was the joy and deep connection that comes from spiritual friendship and living life together.
But the real secret to NCS’s growth, and its enduring power, wasn’t just the compelling speakers or the free breakfasts. It was something far more profound: vulnerability. Sharing my own journey, with stories of personal failings and God’s grace, became an unexpected catalyst for NCS’s growth. In early 2004, we finally moved the meetings out of my house (when numbers averaged 125-150), relocating to St. Paul’s in Darien, which had ample parking but didn’t seem too “churchy.” Later in that year, with the encouragement of a few of my NCS brothers, I went to rehab for my alcohol addiction.
When I returned a month later, I was scheduled to be the speaker. Sharing my story with over 400 men packed into that space, many of them good friends, was terrifying. Yet the response was overwhelming. Holy s***, I remember thinking, as people listened intently.
In fact, every time I got honest and more open and vulnerable – because I knew I had to – everything grew. Two years later, at an NCS retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, I took another bold step, sharing for the first time with the larger group about my infidelity. My closest friends already knew, but this was very public. Again, the profound impact was undeniable. The more honest I (and others) became, the more NCS grew to another level.
Tim Keller, the esteemed pastor and theologian, became a friend and mentor, eventually joining our nonprofit board. He witnessed the growth firsthand and famously made NCS one of the few exceptions to his rule against speaking outside of New York City during the early years of Redeemer’s growth. I believe he saw that our unique blend of humor, genuine friendship, and raw honesty—my own included—was touching lives in a way he hadn’t seen elsewhere. After my time in rehab, he reached out to mentor me personally, meeting several times a year for one-on-one sessions.
The Enduring Legacy of NCS
The vision for NCS, born out of my personal brokenness and a deep hunger for valued and trusted friendships, scaled into a vibrant, relational, multi-generational network. It became a “safe place” where men, especially those in the marketplace, could get rid of their masks, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and experience grace through abiding friendship with Jesus and with each other. It’s a place where humor keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously, and where the most honest conversations allow for God’s grace to work and unlock deep growth and transformation.
Looking back, I believe that God wanted me to lead NCS not because I was “qualified”, but because I was a successful man (in the marketplace) and a deeply flawed one, yet who through it all, loved and was willing to trust Jesus! My journey of transparency, however difficult, became a beacon of hope to others. The relationships that grew over time as we shared our stories with each other on a weekly basis became the engine of growth that has resulted in NCS spreading throughout the country, and now even the world.
It proved that real strength isn’t about standing alone; it’s about standing together, supported by true brothers, in real faith, alongside our loving friend Jesus. I am eternally grateful for what God has done in my life through NCS and humbled by what God has done in the lives of countless other men (and their families) who have become part of the NCS “brudderhood”.
Through NCS, I have come to understand and accept the paradox of faith, most eloquently written about in one of my favorite books, Breathing Underwater, Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, by Richard Rohr:
“We suffer to get well,
We surrender to win,
We die to live,
We give it away to keep it.
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted, denied, and avoided, until it’s forced upon us by some reality over which we are powerless – and, if we’re honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.”
I now want to live my life accepting and living this wisdom. The paradox for me is that I cannot fix myself or control anything at all; I can only choose to cooperate with grace. Thomas Merton taps into this understanding, revealing that it is not granted through our own limited attempts, but through “some special mercy”:
“I have had to accept the fact that my life is almost totally paradoxical. I have also had to learn gradually to get along without apologizing for the fact, even to myself. It is in the paradox itself, the paradox which was and is still a source of insecurity for me that I have strangely come to find the greatest security. I have become convinced that the contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God’s mercy to me. If only because someone so complicated, and so prone to confusion and self-defeat as myself, could hardly survive for long without some special mercy.” ~ Thomas Merton
