Behind the Conversation: The Uncanny Link Between Marketing & Theology

”Three theologians walk into a bar.”

It actually happened. AMA 2025. Devin Purgason, Mallory Willsea, and me. 

I didn’t realize the connection at the time, but I discovered it as I was prepping for episode five of Higher Ed Icons with Devin. 

Mallory was a Religious Studies major at St. Michael’s College. Devin holds a Master of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I started in a Roman Catholic prep seminary with the idea I might go into the priesthood, converted, spent a decade in a Southern Baptist church, and was halfway through a master's degree in bioethics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School when my path took a different turn.

Three people who trained to care for souls. Now spending their careers trying to help students find their way to institutions that could change their lives.

When we sat down to record our episode with Devin, I asked him what a theology degree teaches you that a marketing degree doesn't. His answer was something about the head, the heart, and the hand. The integration of intellect, emotion, and action into a single act of communication. And he talked about the sermon as a form. Not a metaphor, but a form. You take centuries of dense, contradictory, multilingual source material, and you translate it so the person in the third pew feels moved to do something different on Monday morning.

That, Devin said, is a sermon. But it’s also a university landing page. It is also an admissions email.

Then I asked him whether there was a pastoral logic in the way he approaches student care. Whether the formation he received in seminary showed up in the work.

He paused. And then he said …

"I never put that together before."

I've been thinking about that moment ever since. Here is a person who  grew AI referrals 800 percent in a year at a community college — with typical community college resources. Who restructured his entire team around delivering on the promises his institution makes. Who learned how to build proof before asking for permission. And he had never consciously connected any of it to where he came from.

That's not a gap. Not an oversight. That's the whole point.

The best formation doesn't announce itself. It simply becomes how you move through the world. Devin doesn't approach student care the way he does because he remembers his systematic theology coursework. He does it because at some point, caring for people stopped being something he practiced and started being something he was.

When all else fails, be humble and be kind. That's what I said I carried from my own years in seminary. I believe it. But sitting across from Devin, I was reminded that the real work of formation isn't the lesson. It's the moment you stop needing to remember it.

That's the episode. Go listen.

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