In his volume on Jeremiah and Lamentations in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Dean Wenthe makes this comment: “It should also be noted that for all their imaginative and intellectual capacities, the Fathers remained pastors. Their use of the sacred Scriptures was not the abstract debate of the academy but the concrete pastoral care …
Justin Wainscott and Matt Crawford have recently posted helpful items on the importance of theology for helping us to live and die well. Justin reflected on the first two question s of the Heidelberg Catechism in light of preparation for a funeral and Matt quoted the trial of several early Christian martyrs in North Africa. …
Here is another quote I used in my paper calling for a renewed emphasis on oversight of souls. This one is from the book on pastoral ministry by Hezekiah Harvey, prominent Baptist pastor and theologian in the 19th century Northeast US. The care of souls is the radical idea of the pastor’s office. he is …
Here is another quote I used in my recent paper arguing for the centrality of the oversight of souls. This one concerns P. H. Mell, a pastor who also served as President of the SBC multiple times. “Very much of his power as a preacher lay in the way he had of getting close to …
Justin Wainscot just pointed me to a recent post by Tim Keller on our theme here. In the post Keller mentions that he fears too many think that expository preaching is a “magic bullet” that will make everything else in a church go right. If you know Tim Keller you know that he is not …
Justin Taylor today posted on John Piper moving to the pastorate 30 years ago. In that post he cited an excerpt which John Piper’s dad sent to him advising him on the realities of the pastorate. There is much wisdom here and it affirms the argument often made here of the importance of involvement n …
I am currently refreshing my Latin by working back through a grammar with a friend. It has been a delight. Today in the exercises for translation was this sentence: Pauci viri de cura animi cogitabant. Which means, “Few men were thinking about the care of the soul.” Given the concern of this blog and the …
I was away from blogging most of last week with my duties at our “Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and the Future of Denominationalism” conference. I was very pleased with the way things came together. I think ti was an important conversation about the future of the SBC with implications for broader evangelicalism. Several bloggers gave summaries …
This week Union will be hosting the “Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and the Future of Denominationalism” conference which I have mentioned here previously. As part of that conference I will be giving a paper under the title of this post. My aim will be to argue that the oversight of souls is the heart of pastoral …
Just this week I came across this quote from John Erskine. He is discussing various challenges of pastoral ministry and urges his readers to know their flocks. This is just one more piece of the long chain through the history of the church of understanding pastoral ministry as involving personal knowledge of one’s people. “Sermons, …