Pete Gall is an author, speaker, and brand consultant who specializes in stories of desire and pain met by a delighting God who is more than willing to do the dirty work of love and restoration in a fallen world. He’s based in Indianapolis, and enjoys a rich life with the most beautiful, brilliant woman he knows.
This site is a composite of my world – including my professional engagements and personal thoughts. In the end, they’re the same, and there’s no question one informs the other – so if you like the way I think here, that’s what you should expect when you hire me to focus in on your world.
A bit more.
I’m a guy who spent five years in Denver wanting to be the next Christian hero, only to have the idols of my faith collapse around me and send me home to Indianapolis. As soon as I arrived home, I met the woman who became my wife a year later. In an effort to be safe and secure for her, I earned a Cisco networking engineering certification and then proved to the world that I am a very, very poor Cisco engineer. Eventually I admitted that I was wired to write, so I returned to it – mostly doing freelance copywriting for a Christian film and marketing company.
Eventually I wanted to see if I could actually finish a book. It took six months longer than I promised my wife it would take, but I finished it – a review of my time in Denver. I self-published because I knew the story I wanted to tell was too “secular” for the Christian audience and too “Christian” for the secular market. I paid Amazon to associate my title with Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz in January of 2006. By the end of the month Miller’s agent had seen my book and emailed me. We began revising the self-published version and eventually sold it to Zondervan as part of a two-book deal.
I started working on the self-published book in October of 2004. The revised version, called My Beautiful Idol, hit shelves April 1 of 2008. The second book from the Zondervan deal, Learning My Name, was released in June of 2009. I’ve spent five years watching reality grind my excitement and pride about being an “author” to nubs, and I think I’m just about worn down enough to be of some use to the world.
I don’t care about selling a million copies, impressing anybody, or setting the world on fire. I work from home in a 7×7 room beside my porch with a window that looks out at the street. I am active in community groups where the focus is on telling the truth and “calling bullshit” on the lies we tend to hide behind. I have a marriage that’s made of leather, and am very comfortable with the recovery phrase “pray for them, then step over the bodies.”
I love my life. I love God. I love the Body of Christ. I’m not a big fan of church. I’m hostile to the “Robin Hood” fundraising and guilt manipulation techniques that many Christian leaders employ. One of my heroes is John Calvin, who never finished his great theological treatise because he understood that his role in establishing a working sewer system in the city of Geneva was more important and more in line with his obedience to Christ.
My desire is to love the people who come across my path, to invest deeply in (and be shaped profoundly by) five to ten people, and to live a life of service with as little pretense as my still rebellious ego will allow.
So far, my way of living and serving people has worked. If you’ve read the books and want to drop me a line, please do. If you care about your business and are looking for somebody to care about you as you push forward, you can reach me at pete@petegall.com
Pete
