My conversation with Mark Galli opened up several possible paths for reflection.
I could have written about what happens when conscience outgrows the tribe that formed it. I could have written about the strange way the search for truth sometimes circles back toward home. I could have written about why the center does not hold, and what happens when institutions drift while people cling to old names for new realities. I could have written about Mark’s closing turn toward truth, goodness, and beauty, and why beauty so often gets postponed until late in life, if it is recovered at all.
All of those are worth writing about, and perhaps I still will.
But the deepest seam in this conversation, to my mind, was something else: calling, mandate, and the danger of certainty.
That is not because calling is unreal. Quite the opposite. It is because calling is real, and precisely because it is real it can become one of the most difficult things to carry rightly.
Mark spoke several times about moments in his life when he simply knew what he was to do next. He knew he was to go to seminary. He knew he was to move into journalism. He knew, at key junctures, that some path had opened before him and that to refuse it would have been disobedience. I understand that language very well.
There are people for whom such talk sounds mystical or inflated. I do not fault them. If they have not had that experience, then they have not had it. But I have. And I know many others who have.
The problem is not that such callings are imaginary. The problem is that they are carried by human beings.
And human beings, even sincere ones, are capable of confusing obedience with self-certainty.
That is where things get dangerous.
One of the things that struck me in speaking with Mark was his honesty. He did not present his own life as a triumphal march from one clear instruction to another. He spoke, rather, as someone who had often felt led, sometimes strongly led, and who still looks back with a mixture of gratitude, puzzlement, and humility. At one point he all but said: perhaps I will meet the Lord and find out I was mistaken in some of what I took for divine leading.
That is a healthy sentence.
It is healthy because it leaves room for both providence and fallibility.
Too often, especially in strongly religious settings, people speak of calling as though it exempts them from self-examination. “God told me” becomes a kind of shield. A man may be perfectly sincere when he says it. In fact, the sincerity may be the problem. He believes so deeply that he has been chosen for a task that he loses the capacity to see what his certainty is doing to others.
I have seen this up close. I have lived it from the inside.
Anyone who knows my own story knows that I came out of a world shaped by mandate, chosenness, and divine commission. Not in a cynical way. Not in a manipulative way, at least not always consciously. Most of the people involved were earnest, sacrificial, serious, and deeply convinced that they were obeying God. And yet that did not prevent fracture. It did not prevent blindness. It did not prevent people from harming one another while believing themselves faithful. In some ways, it caused it.
That is one of the hardest truths to learn: good motives do not sanctify inaccurate interpretation or understanding. And certainly not ill-advised methods. A real sense of calling does not guarantee clarity in understanding or execution.
This is one reason I was struck by something Mark said about his time as a Presbyterian pastor. He had reached a point at which he no longer fully agreed with parts of what Calvin or the Presbyterian system taught. Yet when teaching new members, he did not decide that his task was to smuggle in his private revisions. He told them plainly: this is what Presbyterians believe; this is what Calvin taught. That, to him, was the thing to do with integrity.
There is a great deal of maturity in that.
Many people, once their conscience begins to diverge from the institution they serve, turn immediately into saboteurs or iconoclasts. Sometimes there is a place for prophetic confrontation. But there is also a place for restraint, honesty, and the recognition that one’s private certainty is not automatically a warrant to tear at every inherited fabric.
That distinction matters.
It matters because Christian history is littered with schisms, splinters, and mutually assured righteousness. Everyone thinks his understanding of the truth is the truth. Many believe they have a mandate. We all tend to have our proof texts, our story of prayer, our reasons, our wounds, our logic, our necessity. And if you talk to us individually, many of us sound entirely reasonable.
But step back, and the collective picture is often tragic.
This is why I brought into the conversation my own experience of schism and splintering. I have lived through a world in which people with sincere convictions, fervent prayer, and an unshakable belief in divine leading managed nonetheless to divide, wound, isolate, and confuse one another. Not because God was absent, but because human beings are capable of carrying even sacred things in destructive ways.
The Apostle Paul’s instruction remains as necessary as ever: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
Not with swagger. Not with ideological certainty. Not with the assumption that because one feels called, one is therefore incapable of self-deception. Fear and trembling is the right posture because the stakes are high and the human heart is not simple.
Mark’s story about Christianity Today also illustrates this.
He did not seek promotion after promotion. The path kept opening. Responsibility kept finding him. He stepped into those roles with a sense that this was what he was supposed to do. Then, near the end, came the Trump editorial that exploded far beyond the magazine’s own readership. He described writing it not as a theatrical swan song but as a responsibility. The magazine had spoken in earlier impeachment crises; to remain silent now felt cowardly. So he wrote.
And fallout followed.
Now, one can agree or disagree with the editorial. That is not my point here. My point is that this is often how calling works in public life. A person acts from conscience and perceived duty, and the act enters a world already overheated by faction, projection, and grievance. Suddenly the person becomes a symbol in other people’s dramas. Their act is interpreted, misinterpreted, celebrated, weaponized, and despised all at once.
This does not mean they should have remained silent. It does mean that obedience does not protect one from consequence.
Nor does consequence prove disobedience.
That, too, is hard for people to grasp.
We often want a cleaner moral arithmetic than life permits. If I am called and faithful, then things should go well. If the result is division, misunderstanding, backlash, or pain, then perhaps I must have erred. But scripture does not support so simple a formula. Nathan confronted David and spoke truly, yet prophetic truth often does not land in tidy ways. Jeremiah was faithful and suffered for it. The apostles obeyed and were scattered. Christ himself was rejected by those most certain they were defending God.
So yes, calling is real. But it does not spare us ambiguity.
In fact, real calling may require us to endure ambiguity without surrendering either humility or obedience.
That is the difficult middle.
On one side is paralysis: I might be wrong, therefore I should do nothing. On the other side is arrogance: I feel called, therefore I cannot be wrong. Neither is faithful. The first refuses responsibility. The second refuses creatureliness.
We are not God. We do not see the whole. We are not pure instruments passing divine intention into history without distortion. We are creatures, and fallen ones at that, trying to respond to grace, revelation, conscience, scripture, circumstance, and duty all at once.
That is why judgment must begin close to home.
Jesus warns repeatedly against hypocrisy, and not because rules do not matter, but because self-exemption is the deepest corruption of moral life. The Pharisees “say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). In Matthew 7, the warning against judgment is not a prohibition on moral discernment but a warning that the standard we apply outwardly will return inwardly. The beam in one’s own eye matters because certainty about others comes so easily to the unexamined soul.
And yet this does not mean we are excused from making judgments. In a democracy, as I said in the conversation, each of us casts a vote. In a church, each of us makes decisions. In families, institutions, and communities, we are constantly called to act. We cannot escape judgment. We can only try to make it under God, with humility, and with awareness of our own say-do ratio.
Did what I claimed to stand for actually govern how I acted?
That question is more searching than many doctrinal tests.
I think this is why the subject of calling needs to be handled so carefully. A sense of mandate can strengthen courage, stabilize sacrifice, and carry a person through years of difficulty. Mark spoke powerfully about staying in a role he had come to hate because he believed he had not yet been released from it. I understand that. Many faithful lives include such seasons.
But the same sense of mandate, mishandled, can harden into spiritual ego. It can become the invisible engine of division. It can produce the very opposite of what it imagines itself serving.
So what, then, are we to do?
We honor calling. We do not mock it. We do not reduce every strong conviction to psychology or tribal conditioning. God does call people. God does direct lives. God does place burdens, responsibilities, and tasks before particular people.
But we carry those callings under judgment, not above it.
We test them against scripture. We test them against fruit. We test them against whether love is actually being increased or merely invoked. We test them in community, imperfect though community is. And above all, we carry them with enough modesty to say: I believe this is what I am to do, but I remain a human being capable of error.
That is not weakness.
That is wisdom.
If anything has shattered the credibility of Christians in public and ecclesial life, it is not conviction as such. It is conviction without humility. Certainty without charity. Mandate without self-suspicion. Calling without fear and trembling.
Mark’s interview touched many themes, and some of them I may come back to. But this one seemed to me the richest mine to work because it cuts so close to the bone. Not just for him. Not just for me. For many of us.
We want to be faithful. We want to obey. We want to answer what we believe God has put before us.
Good.
But let us do so remembering that the one who calls us is God, and we are not.
Sneak Peek
Because I am still a bit behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek here refers to the next essays, not to upcoming broadcasts. The shows themselves have already aired, and you can find them on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.
Next up is my conversation with Mandy Smith, pastor, author, and ministry leader, reflecting on human limitation, vulnerability, weakness, and the strange strength that can arise when we stop pretending to be self-sufficient. That is not a small theme. It goes very near the heart of discipleship, leadership, and what it means to live truthfully before God.
After that comes my tribute to John L. Esposito, whose life and work shaped modern understanding of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. That reflection will turn toward pluralism, public witness, scholarship, peace, and the difficult but necessary work of understanding those with whom we do not fully agree.
So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.
And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
