The work of the pastor each weekend moves from the place where God's Word is proclaimed and prayers are offered to the ordinary places and relationships of people’s lives met immediately after the service. Eugene Peterson describes it this way: The people having received the benediction, now make a disorderly re-entry into a world of …
The Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs [Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work by Eugene Peterson, part 2]
As I continue my journey of re-learning and recovering what it means to be a pastor, I am blogging my way through Eugene Peterson's Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. In this book, Peterson seeks to recover a sense of pastoral practice and integrity based on the Megilloth, the five scrolls connected with five key …
Recovering Pastoral Practice [Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work by Eugene Peterson, part 1]
I first stumbled into the work of Eugene Peterson in the 1990s through his translation work with The Message. It was not too much later, however, that a pastor and mentor introduced me to his writing on pastoral ministry, sometimes referred to as Eugene Peterson's Pastoral Library. About three years ago, I re-read and steadily …
Learning to Minister: John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood
The past year has been an interesting one for pastors in North America. A series of colossal moral failures from famous pastors is matched only by the rash of recent pastoral suicides. The heartbreak on one side and the outrage on the other leaves many pastors simultaneously sympathetic and disappointed. In that dark valley, pastors, …
Continue reading "Learning to Minister: John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood"
Exemplary Lives of Renewed Pastors
In reading J. I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness some time ago, I came across this moving quotation from Richard Baxter about the need for pastors to attend to their own lives in ministry. Baxter was an interesting figure, best known for his writing of that classic of pastoral practice, The Reformed Pastor. Just a quick …
Matthew Erickson 