From the Shadows to the Spotlight: How Kristin Ebanks Built LeadTrue on Faith, Courage, and Refusing to Stay Hidden

For twenty years, Kristin Ebanks was the person behind the person. As a strategic communications director at one of the world's largest Christian humanitarian organizations, she poured her ideas, her instincts, and her voice into executives — lifting them into the light while she stayed comfortably in the shadows. It wasn't just professional humility. It was, she now admits, a kind of hiding.

Today, as founder of LeadTrue, Kristin is doing the very thing she spent decades helping others do: stepping forward, speaking boldly, and letting the world see exactly who she is — faith and all.

And it has cost her something. Which is precisely why her story matters.

A Career Built on Amplifying Others

Kristin's professional home for two decades was World Vision — a $3 billion organization with more than 33,000 staff operating across 100 countries. In her final role there as Director of Leader Communications, she worked directly with the president of the international organization and members of his executive team, building their visibility, shaping their voices, and drawing public attention to the mission through the people leading it.

She was, by every measure, exceptional at it. And deeply hidden by design.

"I was very service-oriented, like a servant leader," she says. "My focus is really on helping everybody else to be successful. I was pouring all of my ideas and my experiences and my thoughts into other people and elevating them. And I was comfortable with that because I personally have never wanted attention."

When widespread layoffs hit the humanitarian sector in 2025 — a sector she describes as having been "hit very hard as resources have dried up" — Kristin found herself at a crossroads. The work she loved hadn't changed. Her heart for leaders hadn't changed. But her circumstances had. And in that disruption, a door opened that she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to walk through.

The Entrepreneur She Never Expected to Become

Kristin will be the first to tell you that entrepreneurship wasn't her plan. She didn't leap toward it with confidence. She stepped toward it carefully, uncertainly, and with a healthy dose of internal resistance.

"I didn't necessarily want to be an entrepreneur," she says plainly. "I didn't even have the confidence to do it, even though other people had a huge belief in me."

But she had something else: a vision. And a conviction that the work she had done for one organization — helping leaders communicate with heart, strength, and faith — could now reach many.

So she founded LeadTrue, a leadership communications practice built around those exact three pillars. Within nine months, she had secured her first consulting client, published multiple books in her Life of Leaders series, launched a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn and Substack, produced more than 60 YouTube videos on leadership, and was finishing a comprehensive online course on how leaders can grow in visibility, trust, and credibility.

When asked about the pace of it all, she responds with the quiet certainty of someone who stopped waiting for permission a long time ago.

"I am a very determined and driven person and I will manifest the reality that I want for myself. I don't wait around for anybody trying to deliver it for me. I'm simply fulfilling a vision that I had."

Coming Home to God

Kristin didn't grow up in a Christian household. Her faith wasn't handed to her — she found it, or rather, was found by it, during a pressure-filled season at university when a campus fellowship called Lighthouse became an unlikely doorway.

"I was under a lot of pressure. It was like a pressure cooker situation," she recalls. "And my friends started to invite me to this fellowship, and that's where I started to just open my heart to the idea of God."

What happened next wasn't a dramatic conversion so much as a quiet arrival. A coming home.

"It wasn't really a revelation. It was more like I'm just coming home to God. I was just off — like I was on a different track — and it was just like God hugging me and saying, just come here, Kristin."

From that moment forward, she never turned back. The burdens she had been carrying — the grades, the performance, the approval — lifted. And she began to understand that some things carry eternal weight and others simply don't.

The Risk of Leading with Faith in Public

One of the most defining decisions Kristin made when launching LeadTrue was also the one that frightened her most: she decided to openly center faith in her brand.

She knew what she was risking. She had just left a Christian organization where faith language was welcome and expected. Now she was stepping into the broader marketplace, where it is often neither.

"I was like, this might actually hurt my business," she says. "This is a risky concept. It potentially may have a direct impact on my ability to provide for my family. Here I had lost my job and I need to make a living."

She put it on her website anyway. She talked about it in her content. She wrote about it in her newsletters. And when secular magazines put her on their covers — not once, but multiple times — she answered their questions with complete transparency, weaving her faith into every response. They printed it all, word for word.

"I said, oh my gosh, God, you did it. You let me speak your truth to the public without being penalized for it, without being filtered. I was blown away."

Each time it happened, her conviction deepened. If God could open those doors, she would walk through every one of them — and use whatever stage she was given to point back to him.

Stepping Out from the Shadows

Perhaps the most personal thread running through Kristin's story is the ongoing tension between her natural instinct to stay hidden and the clear sense that God was calling her forward.

"I sensed God calling me forward into the light," she says. "And I kind of wrestled with that. But I started to realize — if I do this all for God, it makes everything possible, because it isn't about me. I am the vessel through which I point to him."

That realization changed everything. She started making videos — something she says she "absolutely would have hated" before. She showed up on podcasts, in magazines, in interviews. Not because she wanted the spotlight, but because she finally understood that staying hidden wasn't humility. It was withholding.

"For me not to talk about God means I am actually hiding a big part of myself," she says. "I am trying to be a witness. I feel compelled to do that. I'm not trying to preach — I'm simply trying to honor God's spirit in me."

She adds with a laugh that she has prayed the most dangerous prayer she knows — asking God to use her in the biggest way possible — and then immediately wanted to take it back. "I was like, oh no, can I take that back? I'm not sure I'm ready for this." Then, the very next day, an interview request would arrive or an opportunity would open. And she would smile, shake her head, and show up anyway.

What She Tells Leaders Now

Through LeadTrue, Kristin works with humanitarian organizations, faith-based leaders, and executives who want to grow in influence without losing their integrity. The framework she teaches — visibility, trust, and credibility — isn't just strategy. It's the same journey she has lived.

Her advice to other Christian leaders navigating the tension between faith and professional visibility is both disarming and deeply practical.

"Be a witness. Have high hopes but low expectations — high hopes that your words will point people to God, but remove the pressure that you have to do the transformation yourself. God will do the transformation. We simply have to be a witness. It's like blowing on a dandelion. Just blow on it and let the seeds go where they go. God will cultivate the soil and let the plants grow — but they can't grow unless you blow on that dandelion."

She is equally direct about the tendency to calculate the business risk of speaking about faith publicly. "God asks us to be a witness regardless of how it impacts us," she says. "Let everything that you do be for God's glory. Let him shine brightly through you."

A Story That Belongs to God

When Kristin describes herself, she deflects almost every compliment back toward the One she credits for all of it. Asked about her accomplishments, she pauses before answering: "I tend to undervalue my personal story and my achievements because in the glory going to God, I see myself as playing a small role. It's his story."

Nine months into building LeadTrue, with books in print, a course nearly complete, and clients on multiple continents, Kristin Ebanks is doing what she has always done — helping leaders stop hiding, step forward, and lead with their whole selves.

The difference now is that she's doing it out loud. With her name on the cover. And her faith front and center.

For any leader who has ever stayed behind the scenes a little too long, or wondered whether faith is too risky a thing to bring into the marketplace, Kristin's story offers a clear and quietly powerful answer: the world doesn't need more hidden light. It needs leaders willing to blow on the dandelion and trust God with what grows.