Convicting words from William Still's The Work of the Pastor:
Tag: pastoral ministry
Aspiration and imitation are a natural part of life. Little boys and girls aspire to run or shoot like their favorite athletes. Writers aspire to craft sentences like their favorite authors. Young preachers aspire to exposit Scripture like the pastors streaming on their smartphone. It’s only natural that people emulate those who perform some skill … Continue reading So You Want to be the next Charles Spurgeon?
All I ever knew about church leadership was the typical Southern Baptist model of having one senior pastor. Any other form of leadership seemed odd or not Baptist. That was until I learned in Bible college about this thing called "a plurality of elders." Since that time, plurality in church leadership has shifted from an … Continue reading Why I’m Thankful for a Plurality of Pastors
Rehoboam stood before the people at Shechem. They had come to make him king. The people who once looked to his father, Solomon, now looked to Rehoboam. Though he suffered decline at the end of his reign, Solomon led the kingdom to heights it had never seen, and Rehoboam now felt the weight of that … Continue reading Going the Way of Rehoboam
The people wanted a king. Or, to be more exact, the people wanted a different king. That's the story of 1 Samuel 8. The Lord formed Israel to be a kingdom under his rule and reign. He was their king, but the nation demanded to have a ruler like all of the other nations. Rather … Continue reading A King like the Nations
I recently finished Arnold Dallimore's biography of Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher known as the "Prince of Preachers." If you're familiar at all with Spurgeon, you've likely heard about how gifted of an orator he was or how effective he was as an evangelist. While those traits certainly did characterize his life and ministry, there … Continue reading Spurgeon’s Humility
A sobering quote from Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity: I don't know of any other profession in which it is quite easy to fake it as in ours. By adopting a reverential demeanor, cultivating a stained-glass voice, slipping occasional words like "eschatology" into conversation and heilsgeschichte into our discourse—not often enough actually … Continue reading The Danger of Faking Pastoral Ministry
