Tag: pastors

Ministry

You can’t be “Pastoral” with Everyone

Chris

When you are a pastor, there are two primary elements of your ministry you and the people agree on. You study the Bible and you tell people about it. Whether you preach, teach, or write, most people understand these basic parts of what you do.

Another element of pastoral ministry is counseling. Real counseling isn’t just listening and being a friendly ear to hear about people’s problems, though some who go to a pastor’s office think of it like that. It also involves sharing biblical guidance for problems and situations.

As a result of all of this talking about the Bible, the impulse for a pastor or Bible teacher is to try and speak into everyone’s life as a pastoral influence. But we do not have permission to be such a voice into every life we are connected with or bump into.

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Christian Living, Church Life, Ministry

Calling Off “The Preacher Hunt”

Chris

You have probably found yourself in one of those conversations. The internet is all abuzz because someone figured out that a certain preacher is mixing his theologies. He said something questionable. It’s time to burn all of his books and denounce any pastor or church that has them in its library.

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Maybe you know those kind of people. They scour the internet for everything they can find to discredit a well-known preacher of the Gospel with a mega-church and book deals. To have that many people in their church, so many followers on Facebook or Twitter, they must be watering down the Gospel. “Let’s expose them and tear down their empires,” is the war cry of these people.

I’m hesitant to call them Christians. Sure, they sound like they are sold-out, radical, gung-ho for God and the purity of His Church. But if they were to take some time and read their Scriptures instead of countless articles on the internet, they might be surprised how unbiblical and unChristian they are acting. They are hunting preachers instead of sharing Christ.

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Ministry

Why I Waited a Year for My First Vacation

Chris

This past Sunday I did something for the first time in over a year. I missed a Sunday at church. I’m not really sure when I last took Sunday off, even before we took our current pastoral position last August. But I do know that it was an awkward day for me.

You might think me a little unbalanced for not having a Sunday off in over a year. One member joked that the church must pay me so much that I feel too guilty to miss a week. That was not the reason, of course, but I was very intentional about it. While I did take a few days during the week a couple of times over that year, it was very important to me to be in the building every week.

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Book Reviews

Book Review: The Character of Leadership

Chris

The Character of Leadership: Six pillars of a leader’s character is a book that is easy to read, probably won’t take you long to read, but will challenge you to build up who you are before you seek to increase what you are. A primary thought behind the book is this: “Leadership will destroy the man whose character is not prepared for it.”

I was introduced to Pastor Gregg Johnson at our Maritime District fall pastor’s conference. He had made the journey from New York state, was our guest speaker for the event, and he had the opportunity to share on some of these thoughts. It was obvious that Pastor Gregg was not writing and speaking about leadership so he could make a lot of money. He never once mentioned the size of his church, how many leaders he led or how many he had groomed over the years. Pastor Gregg’s goal was to challenge pastors and church leaders so that their ministries, families, even their personal lives, would be protected and blessed by God. So when we all received a copy of the book at the conference, I was excited to read it.

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