This is a public forum to share ideas, ask questions, and reflect on being a pastor in the CRC.
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ElaineWrite your own blog post to share your ministry experience with others.
It’s tidier to believe God plans everything that happens even if we cannot ever (or at least for now) know why. But maybe we are not supposed to have a tidy theology on such wild and wooly matters.
As Mills details his own journey from disorientation back to hope, we see what this does to the pastor’s soul, spirit, mind. The hurts are real and they cut deep.
As I have been grading sermons these past days (about 25 of them since middle of last week with about 10 to go) I often find myself writing “Show, Don’t Tell.”
Even the best seminary degree represents little more than a priming of the pump for a lifetime of abiding learning. The wise church knows this and provides pastors with rich and ongoing opportunities to be led by the Spirit.
We preach in our churches but in the larger sense we are always preaching in public. We cannot bracket out the larger world when we preach.
Gratitude somehow builds up in us during the ordinary and good times of life so as to make us less likely to be defeated when the bottom falls out on us in this or that area of life.
Talk to anyone from the world of seminary admissions/recruitment today and you will hear the same story: enrollment numbers for seminaries are down across the board.
Back in the late 1990s shortly after I published a little book called Remember Creation, I was invited to give five morning lectures on creation stewardship at a Christian Bible camp north of Seattle.
At the CRC Synod, as usual, a raft of new candidates for the ministry was approved. This year there were 44 names on the list. I do pray they will all get a call someday soon...
Few, if any, students arrive at Calvin Seminary thinking they already know theology very well. But some do arrive at seminary convinced they already know how to preach...
As a pastor, one of the greatest joys I’ve had in the pulpit has been precisely in uncovering the real stories of Scripture, especially the ones that got sanitized in Sunday School or Christian dayschools.
Jesus did tell us to love our enemies, pray for them, turn the other cheek, and a few other radical things that start to look a whole lot more radical if in fact you end up having actual enemies...
I confess--when I had to write down in my sermon log book what I had preached the day or two previous--sometimes it happened I'd find myself with my pen poised over the log book page and I could not recall the sermon...
Preaching should mostly be about saying something nice, but not at the cost of saying nothing at all in case the soundness of the faith is threatened.
During my first year of ministry, an issue of Reformed Worship magazine arrived in the mail. This particular issue covered the Season of Epiphany, and so I asked my wife if she had ever heard of that word...
It's difficult for me to believe that it's been now close to 8 years since I left my last congregation as pastor and weekly preacher. I like to think that my ability to draw on nearly 16 years' worth of preaching experience helps me in my job now training up a new generation of preachers via our students here at Calvin Seminary. But every once in a while I realize that maybe I've been out of the "game" just long enough that I have lost touch a little with the struggles of preachers today...
Two weeks ago I was privileged to sit in on a consultation on preaching hosted by my colleagues. One theme we circled back to often had to with the use of social media in the preaching event. Many of us who were at the consultation had been pastors of congregations in the past and we admitted to each other that it's an odd thought to ponder someone in a pew Tweeting about a sermon even as we are delivering it...