On Calling, Cost, and the Living God: A Conversation with Jacob Smith

I have a habit of calling pastors I admire and asking them questions. I have found that continuing to learn is  less about intelligence or intellectual faculties, and more often the consequence of asking questions that lead to wisdom. So I like to ask questions. 

I do it because I want to hear how people who have actually stayed in this vocation talk about it. Not the conference version. Not the green-room version where everyone has a tight three-point framework and a compelling personal brand. I want the honest version. The one that shows the seams and the wear and tear.

Rev. Jacob Smith is the Rector of the Parish of Calvary-St. George's, an historic Episcopal parish consisting of two churches in New York City. He's been in this work long enough to know what it actually costs, and he's still in it — which is itself a kind of testimony. When we had our call, he was leaving for Turkey the next morning, leading a nineteen-day pilgrimage through Istanbul, Aleppo, Tarsus, and the old apostolic roads of the first century. The man had envelopes of tip money to sort, a congregation to leave, and a family to say goodbye to. He still made time for the conversation.

That's a true pastor.

On how a call actually sounds

I asked Jacob to take me back to the beginning — to the moment when he first thought he might be called to ministry. What he described was a junior high school kid serving as an acolyte in Yuma, Arizona, in the dead of summer. Half the congregation had fled the heat. He and his brother were at the table almost every Sunday, and somewhere in that ordinary, understaffed faithfulness, he heard something.

"That still, small voice," he said, "that you know is not your own."

He went to the interim priest and told him. The priest gave him the full checklist — finish junior high, finish high school, college, the bishop will want you to work, then seminary — which is the ecclesiastical equivalent of bless your heart. Jacob knew he was being blown off. And something in him went quiet about it.

That didn't surprise me. I had nearly the same experience. I went to my pastor — young, confused, no ministry pedigree, no one in my family who had ever done anything like this — and he handed me the same list. What was left unspoken was: I'm not sure you're the type. It's a strange thing, to carry a call that no one around you can quite see yet.

Years passed. Jacob drifted. He ended up in Tucson in the summer after his sophomore year of college, sitting in a pool with a friend who said, out of nowhere, I'm going back to church tomorrow. Jacob went with him — a dust-bowl Pentecostal congregation, good band, real energy — and gave his life to Christ again, this time with his eyes open.

But something about that expression of faith didn't quite fit either. He was dragged along on an open-air preaching trip to San Diego State, and found himself lying on the floor of College Avenue Baptist Church asking the ceiling: What am I doing here?

"It was like an instinct," he said. "You're not supposed to be here. There's a different type of ministry — one that takes people seriously, not just as objects."

And then the call came back, clearer this time. I'm calling you to be a priest.

"When you hear God speak," he said, "you know what that means."

I pressed him on this — what does it actually feel like, this call? For anyone in the room who has wondered if they've imagined it, who can't quite separate their own ambition from something more. Jacob's answer was precise: "It manifested itself in an instinct. Like, there's nothing else I want to do. I can do a lot of other things. But there's nothing else I want to do."

That's the distinction. Not I can do no other in the Lutheran sense of impossible compulsion. More like: I could. But why? Everything else just looks less true.

On what a flourishing church actually looks like

We talked about the difference between a church that's alive and one that's going through the motions, and Jacob reached for an image I haven't been able to shake.

"Churches should be like running water," he said. "They're either puddles or rivers."

He was careful to separate size from health. An unhealthy church can be enormous — riding an old wave, busy, well-programmed, full of activity, and completely static. A healthy church can have thirty people in the room, he said, and if the Word and sacraments are being administered and the living God is being proclaimed, that is a healthy church.

The marker he kept returning to was whether the gospel was actually at the center, or whether the church had quietly slid into being a life-improvement center — offering good advice, social programs, and a sense of community, but without the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for sinners. "The living God," he said, "isn't proclaimed from the pulpit."

What happens when the gospel is actually preached, Jacob argued, is that it creates the diversity everyone claims to want, because the good news is genuinely for everybody. It begins to dissolve the insider/outsider logic. People start showing up to serve not out of obligation — not doing something for the baby Jesus — but because they're moved by grace. Leadership rotates. Gifts emerge. There's fluidity.

The failure mode he was most alert to is what he called starting at the horizontal. "We're always trying to get people focused on each other, on social causes, on the next thing — and it wears people out. But when you get people focused on the vertical first, the relationship with God, it flows naturally out to the horizontal. If you start at the horizontal, it's awfully hard to get back to the vertical."

He's right, and the pattern is everywhere. Institutions built on vision and program and cause eventually hollow out because there's no living source to keep them going. The river metaphor is exactly right. You can't sustain movement from a puddle.

On what the next generation is walking into

I asked Jacob what world these young men and women entering ministry are actually stepping into — because I think we do them a disservice when we hand them a romantic version of vocation without also handing them a map of the actual terrain.

His answer was immediate: "Everyone is an expert."

He'd had a man come into his office that week who had fed Jacob's sermon into an AI chatbot and returned with ten points of disagreement. "Twenty-five years ago," Jacob said, "I would have never had the audacity to walk into anyone's office and say, let me tell you where you're wrong." It's not that people shouldn't engage critically with sermons — they absolutely should. It's that we've entered a moment where the pretense of expertise is instantaneous and costless, and the pastor has to absorb all of it with patience and without losing the plot.

Nobody, he pointed out, would say: I read a couple books on dentistry, so let me do your root canal. But people feel entirely comfortable walking into a priest's office with their AI-generated theological audit.

His prescription was interesting. The pastor's job, in this environment, is not to out-argue the chatbot. It's to be skilled enough that they can move through all of the noise and give people what they actually need. And what people actually need — what's really keeping them up at two in the morning in New York City — is not a better answer to their intellectual questions. It's relief from fear, guilt, and shame.

"The very thing they're consulting," he said, meaning AI, "is about to take away their job." And that person, sitting on the A train platform, wondering about their purpose, needs someone who can introduce them not to an abstract God, but to the living God, who is still forgiving sinners today.

That sentence landed on me. I've been thinking about it since.

On what this work costs

I asked the question I most wanted to ask, and the one I was most afraid of: What did ministry cost you that you didn't anticipate? And was it worth it?

Jacob paused. He told me the question had made him tear up when I'd sent it ahead.

"It costs you your entire life," he said, "on a number of levels."

What he named specifically was his family. There are photographs — his wife, his kids — taken at things he missed because he was at a church event. "I allowed the church to take me away," he said. The church, he observed, is the bride of Christ. She can also, at times, be a cruel mistress.

He's found his way to a guiding question, one he now asks before he says yes to anything: Will these people be at my funeral?

Not as a morbid calculation, but as a clarifying one. He knows he wants his wife and his children there. That knowledge reorganizes a lot. It doesn't resolve the tension — ministry's demands on time and presence are real, and the congregation's need is always present — but it gives him a north star for deciding what counts.

What he loves, he said, is being invited to the full range of a human life. No two days are the same. He gets to stand at the altar at a wedding, wander into a reception, and meet Uncle Charles — the one with a bad experience at a church ten years ago — and have that conversation. He gets called to a bedside before surgery. He's been in the room when a child was stillborn, when parents waited for the first cry that never came.

"God masks Himself through my vocation," he said. "And that becomes the enabling word for me to be with people at the very best and very worst."

He wouldn't trade it.

Neither would I. And there is something in that shared recognition — two pastors who have each paid the price and are still standing — that is its own small grace.

A word before I let you go

We ended, as all good conversations between Episcopalians and Reformed interlopers eventually do, with a collect for the New York Knicks — written by a friend of Jacob's, prayed together with full liturgical gravitas, world without end, amen.

You'll have to imagine the rest.

But I've been sitting with what Jacob said about the difference between knowing about God and knowing what you need from God. Those are not the same thing. Most of us have more information about God than we know what to do with. We've read the books, we've attended the conferences, we've fed the sermons into the chatbots and come back with our ten points of critique.

And underneath all of that, in the dark of two in the morning, we are still afraid. We are still guilty. We are still ashamed of things we carry that we haven't told anyone.

The church — at her best, when the living God is actually being proclaimed — is the place where that can come out. Not because she has better programs or more compelling content. Because she is still in the business of introducing frightened people to the God who forgives.

That's not an abstraction. That's the whole thing.

What would it mean, for you, to move toward that? Not to the church as institution, or as social club, or as cause — but to the living God, who is apparently still in the business of meeting people exactly where they are?

Don't answer too fast. The question has weight.

This conversation was originally published on Trygve Johnson’s Substack, Kingfisher Study, and is republished here by the PreachFor Foundation. Read the original conversation.