Ralph Drollinger, who has spent much of the last three years teaching the Gospel to President Trump’s cabinet, dresses like a man of the world. One morning this summer, during a layover at Miami International Airport, he was the very picture of American business — a friendly-looking, dark-suited, jowly man in his late prime. The woman sitting beside him, looking just as exactingly appropriate in her black pantsuit and white shirt, was his wife, Danielle. She quietly scrolled through her iPad as Drollinger explained why the trip they were about to embark on to Managua, Nicaragua, had him uncharacteristically worried.

The Drollingers were flying to Managua at the behest of Daniel Ortega, the country’s strongman president, who had invited them down as his guests. Drollinger, who has set up Bible studies in the capitals of 32 states and 24 foreign countries, saw another opportunity for growth. He did not engage in too much soul-searching before accepting. The decision to go was a bold one, especially considering the relationships he claims with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, neither of whom could be counted among Ortega’s backers. Pence has accused Ortega of “state-sponsored violence,” while Pompeo has said Ortega is guilty of having “inflicted horrible pain on the Nicaraguan people.” Their colleague John Bolton, who was still Trump’s national security adviser at the time, had called out the Ortega government as part of the “troika of tyranny,” a “triangle of terror stretched from Havana to Caracas to Managua.”

“This looks like a big mess we’re getting into,” Drollinger said. “They’re going to try and play this as though I’m an arm of the administration.” Their flight was set to board in less than an hour. The Drollingers had two business-class seats. A church leader in the United States had paid for the tickets, while the Ortega government was providing the hotel. It would be hard to turn back now, especially for someone who gives deep consideration to the impact of the smallest gestures. Drollinger’s manner harmonizes what he calls the “gong” of truth with what he calls “the jellyfish” of kindness, a lesson from Proverbs 3:3: “Do not let kindness and truth leave you.” “That’s a very perceptive question,” he will often say, and he invites his interlocutors to interrupt him if they find him going off too deep on a tangent.

Drollinger, 65, is around seven feet tall. His impeccable dress softens the impact of his height, in the same way a vast pinstriped sheet might muffle the presence of an elephant or an atrium-size Alexander Calder sculpture. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s, Drollinger played center under the legendary coach John Wooden and was part of two national-championship teams. Later he would write that Wooden was “the patriarch” who drilled into his players a doctrine of “impeccability and nonnegotiability.” Wooden was a stickler for detail. He measured Drollinger’s playing height as 7 feet 1 3/8 inches. He specified the correct way for players to smooth out their socks and tie their laces. Drollinger is just as specific about his subordinates’ attire: dark wool suits; all-white cotton shirts; Italian silk ties with a pronounced, teardrop-shaped dimple; black lace-up shoes. Drollinger’s requirements for his own dress are even more stringent. The shirts are Egyptian cotton. The cuff links bear the great seal of the United States. On this day, Drollinger’s size-17 feet were clad in Allen Edmonds shoes made of black cordovan, a leather that, Drollinger says, more than justifies its high price with outstanding durability. Logging the miles necessary to drive the growth of his ministry excites him more than overseeing his existing flock. “I hate maintenance,” he told me. He saw himself less as a pastor than as something more like an apostle, one who “basically says, All right, let’s launch out and try to get some new territory for the sake of God’s glory.”