(RNS) — Growing up, Nicole Martin recalls hearing stories from her great-grandmother, Estelle Cartledge, about helping her husband build a church in Pittsburgh during a time of segregation when women leaders were viewed with suspicion.
Her great-grandmother’s response was simple.
Do the work in front of you. Let God take care of the rest.
“Do what God has called you to do,” Martin recalled her great-grandmother saying.
Martin hopes to follow that advice in her new role as president and CEO of Christianity Today, the venerable evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham 70 years ago, where she has been tasked with helping define CT for the future.
It’s no small task. Once seen as the flagship publication for evangelicals, especially during the rise of that movement as a political force, CT has struggled in recent years to find its place in Trump’s America, where the old rules no longer apply.
The past decade has marked a tumultuous time for CT. The magazine has experienced runaway successes like the “Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a podcast about the fall of megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, and has produced groundbreaking reporting about scandals involving evangelical leaders like disgraced evangelist Ravi Zacharias.
But there has also been controversy, especially in the wake of a 2019 op-ed from former editor Mark Galli, who declared that Donald Trump was unfit to be president of the United States. That op-ed, published weeks before Galli’s retirement, made national headlines and reignited an evangelical feud between Trump supporters, like Franklin Graham, son of CT’s founder, and so-called Never Trumpers.
The magazine had also had leadership turnover, with four editors-in-chief over the past six years, and faced layoffs, and dealt with the fallout of an investigation that found the magazine’s leaders had ignored allegations of sexual harassment for years. Just this past week, CT learned that best-selling author Philip Yancey, a beloved long-time contributor, was retiring after confessing to an eight-year affair. And several high-profile reporters left in recent months, with former news editor Daniel Silliman saying he left because of “significant disagreements with the new leadership, both practical and philosophical.”
Martin said CT has had to own up to its past mistakes and learn some hard lessons. Her focus now is on building a healthy work culture, helping build the staff and focusing on journalism that tells the “stories of the kingdom of God.”
“We own that we have not always been a healthy culture,” she said. “We own that we have sometimes had to release people for reasons that I wish we didn’t have to. We own that people have left because of contention. We don’t ignore that, but we learn from that.”
Part of that learning process involves reading every exit interview for signs of where things went wrong and then working on making improvements. She hopes to build “a thriving culture where people are happy.”
She is also working on the publication’s overall strategy. She said that in the past, CT has at times tried to do too many things and lost sight of its core mission.
“We had to ask ourselves, are we a spiritual formation ministry that works through journalism and storytelling?” she told RNS during an interview in Wheaton, Illinois, where CT rents co-working space after selling its office building in 2024. “Or are we a journalism and storytelling ministry that aims to help people make sense of the world from a biblical lens, and then spiritual formation happens?”
While spiritual formation is important, Martin said, CT’s main mission is journalism and storytelling. Now the task is to determine which stories to tell and in what format. That’s an ongoing strategic conversation, said Martin, who has been in her new role for about a month.
Last month, CT’s newest editor in chief, Marvin Olasky, who took on that role after former editor Russell Moore moved over to a new role at CT, published a “Declaration of Principles,” which outlines the publication’s beliefs and its approach to journalism, including having a “big tent” view of evangelicalism, where folks with common beliefs can still disagree.
“We are not saying we are all things to all people,” Martin said. “We’re going to be who God has called us to be as orthodox evangelicals. But within that, we’re going to have Republicans and Democrats. Within that, we’re going to have a welcome space for people to share their differences and their commonalities.”
That approach could be a hard sell in a time when belonging to the wrong party is seen as a sin. But Martin, a Vanderbilt grad with degrees from Princeton and Gordon-Conwell seminaries, believes the Bible can still bring people together.
That’s something she learned in a previous role at the American Bible Society, where she would be at meetings with pastors from different denominations — like Pentecostals and Lutherans — who found common ground in their love for the Bible.
And the Bible, she said, is CT’s foundation.
She said a shared faith in the Bible and in Jesus can overcome political differences.
“If we lose the art of civil dialogue in the Christian tent, we have lost our faith,” Martin said. “There has to be a faith impulse that says, ‘I want civil dialogue, even when we disagree.’”
Still, Martin said that taking sides in a political debate comes with all kinds of headaches. Martin said she wants CT to be courageous and stand for the Bible, but not to be divisive. “We reserve the right to celebrate and criticize people from any political area, especially because we resist the urge to be in a camp,” she said. “We just want to stay stable on the Word of God.”
Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, said CT remains influential but still has a lot of work to do.
“I think Christianity Today is still seen by many in the secular press world as the voice of evangelicalism,” he said. “I think its greatest challenge now is, can it reclaim the conflict, regain the confidence of a significant swath of evangelicalism that it’s lost?”
In announcing Martin’s new role, the Rev. Claude Alexander, chair of CT’s board, cited her commitment to the Christian message and her skill in relaying it. “She brings unquestioned commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ and an unrivaled ability to promote and defend its claims effectively across various constituencies,” he said.
As the first Black woman to serve as CT’s president, Martin knows she’ll face some skepticism, especially at a time when conservative Christians have come to view diversity as problematic.
But she is who she is and embraces that.
“I think I understand how God has made me,” she said. “None of us gets to select our gender, none of us gets to select our race. We’re born as we’re born. I embrace and understand my ethnicity and my gender, and I see them as assets, not just for CT, but also for the Kingdom.”
She also said diversity is God’s idea, drawing on an image from the New Testament book of Revelation about people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” being part of God’s kingdom.
“That’s not a cultural view,” she said. “That’s a biblical view. We’re trying to be biblical.”
In recent years, CT has done of great deal of reporting on some of the scandals in the evangelical world, something that will continue under Martin. The Bible does not steer clear of telling bad news, Martin said, and CT wants to follow the example of the Bible.
But CT will also tell stories in the hopes that there will be redemption.
“There’s never been a time when we’ve had to share bad news, where it hasn’t had a thread of hope and redemption,” she said. “So I pray there is a time when we don’t have to tell a bad news story, but our job is to help people make sense of the world, and sometimes that means exposing what is harmful for the body of Christ so that we can learn and grow.”
Martin said that she’ll need to bring humility and wisdom to the new role. There’s a lot of work ahead, but she’s hopeful. And while the word “evangelical” has fallen out of favor among some Christians, because of its political connotations, she embraces it.
“I’m an evangelical because I believe in the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” she said. “We’ve had many debates on the word evangelical, and yes, there are people who would say the word has taken on different meanings, and I understand that. But I refuse to give over the word that best identifies the good news.”