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I n the Christian church Disciples of Christ, a prominent part of the leadership of the local congregation consists of elders. These are lay people, for the most part. The first and major part of this book consists of studies prepared for the elders at First Christian Church in New Martinsville, West Virginia. There are also some other studies on the same model for other purposes and a few samples of materials I had earlier prepared to assist elders in their normal worship responsibilities. I have served as a minister in the Christian church Disciples of Christ from the time I finished seminary in the spring of 1976. I retired in October 2007 and have continued in a modest role since then. Out of my ministry came an impulse to come to terms with the rich spiritual and theological, pastoral, and personal ferment that I encountered. The bases of that search lay in my reading and study, in my prayer, and in my pastoral practice. My background includes a BA from the College of Wooster with a major in chemistry and an MS from Purdue University, working in the school of chemical engineering. I left Purdue as a PhD student, having completed everything except the dissertation, in January 2003. I received my DMin from Christian Theological Seminary in 1976 and was then ordained to Christian ministry by the Region of Indiana and First Christian Church in Lafayette, Indiana. Over the years, I found that my writing in a variety of formats served me well in growing my understanding and capacity as a pastor, sharing the writings as I went along with friends and colleagues and parishioners. These I am collecting in major part in the series I am calling Directions of a Pastoral Lifetime. I hope that the value I have found in them may be more broadly shared.
Drawing on a lifetime of pastoral experience, The Care of Souls is a beautifully written treasury of proven wisdom which pastors will find themselves turning to again and again. Harold Senkbeil helps remind pastors of the essential calling of the ministry: preaching and living out the Word of God while orienting others in the same direction. And he offers practical and fruitful adviceâ€"born out of his five decades as a pastorâ€"that will benefit both new pastors and those with years in the pulpit. In a time when many churches have lost sight of the real purpose of the church, The Care of Souls invites a new generation of pastors to form the godly habits and practical wisdom needed to minister to the hearts and souls of those committed to their care.
Abbot Andre Louf said that, when a person decides to get serious about the spiritual life, s/he should acquire a spiritual director. Wayne Proudfoot argued that the form of religious experience depends upon the tradition in which it is perceived. Georges Bataille searched out the meaning of his own intense inner experience in non-traditional ways. This book seeks to follow the meaning of traditional measures of the spiritual life learned through the experience of the author once his spiritual life decided to choose him.
In The Pastor, author Eugene Peterson, translator of the multimillion-selling The Message, tells the story of how he started Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland and his gradual discovery of what it really means to be a pastor. Steering away from abstractions, Peterson challenges conventional wisdom regarding church marketing, mega pastors, and the church’s too-cozy relationship to American glitz and consumerism to present a simple, faith-based description of what being a minister means today. In the end, Peterson discovers that being a pastor boils down to “paying attention and calling attention to ‘what is going on now’ between men and women, with each other and with God.”
Life engages the eye and ear, all the senses, offering a vision of some inclination or intrigue. Often, in a poets mind, those hints and guesses that come in glimpses of events and images and poses begin to suggest the energies that come in a poems life. The poem draws out the interactions that happen in the mind and proposes itself. A poet is a writer; a writer writes. The poem then becomes the lure for a reader to discover a happening within. So are these offered.
Faces and actions of people and animals; the flair of nature and the subtleties of interaction; the way life arrives for me to observe and live, to hear and sense, to engagethat is what spawns my poetry. Those poems selected and chosen from a past, with a few more contemporary in their lure to me and my pencil, are drawn together in this collection as a sampler of my engagement with life. I hope you find them engaging and inviting so that you may entertain the actions of the poem as it writes itself upon your mind, creating there your own experience of life, readying for the open engagement with what life directly brings to bear upon you.
Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life informs and inspires the practice of ministry through "on the ground" learning experienced in a variety of ministry settings. Each of the fifty chapters explores a single concept through story, reflection, and provocative open-ended questions designed to spark conversation between ministers and mentors, among ministry peers, or for personal journal reflections. The book is closely integrated with the author's Three Minute Ministry Mentor web resource.
Every pastor struggles with demands for his time, and how to determine priorities in ministry. Some choose to respond to the most urgent needs, while others seek a more balanced and intentional approach. But what determines these priorities? Where should a busy pastor look for wisdom in making decisions? In the Pastor’s Ministry, pastor and author Brian Croft looks to the Scriptures to determine the top ten priorities for a faithful pastoral ministry. These biblically rooted responsibilities help pastors determine how to spend their time and with greater discernment respond to the demands of the church. Each of these priorities is rooted in a direct command of God’s Word, including: Guarding the Truth Preaching and Teaching the Word Praying for the Flock Setting an Example Visiting the Sick Comforting the Grieving Caring for Widows Confronting Sin Encouraging the Faint-Hearted Identifying and Training Other Leaders To be successful and faithful in pastoral ministry, every pastor needs to understand these core callings and make them part of his regular practice. These ten responsibilities guide how a pastor schedules his time, helping him to lay the foundation for a biblically faithful ministry in his church.
These are bible studies of a limited scale, developed and led by the author with two of the congregations he served. The first congregation was in Mantua OH in the late 1970s, from which the first three bible studies arose: Ruth, Lamentations, and The Infancy Narratives. The second congregation was in New Martinsville WV from 1998 through 2003, these being done is a slightly different style: Psalms of Ascent, Selected Psalms, The Speech of Stephan, Encountering God, Matthew 5 and Matthew 6 & 7. I sought to bring a serious, somewhat scholarly approach to the study of the bible among those congregation members who chose to attend. This revisiting of those studies prove once again their value to me. I hope they prove to be so for you as well.
The Bible studies I chose to do came about in answer to the request from my first congregation out of seminary. I consistently sought to present a serious, somewhat scholarly approach to the interest among my parishioners. I would take a book in the Bible to study, assume it was written or edited to be read from the beginning, and make sense to the reader in that format. I attempted to discover for myself and my group what the book sought to convey. In this volume, the study of 1 Corinthians (198283) followed that pattern exactly.