Recommended Pastoral Theology?

The Public Square
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What books of pastoral theology (or practical theology, if you prefer) do you recommend?

I’ll offer a couple recommendations (in addition to the usual Baxter’s Reformed Pastor and Gregory’s Book of Pastoral Rule): Harold Senkbeil’s The Care of Souls and Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor. Senkbeil is a veteran Lutheran pastor, and while his book is self-consciously very Lutheran, the central concept he writes about - a pastoral habitus/disposition - is something that, although lost today, was very familiar to Reformed pastors in the 17th and 18th centuries. Peterson is probably a surprise recommendation. He didn’t finish his race as a pastor particularly well. That’s worth acknowledging. But his earlier books on pastoral ministry are a needed corrective to the activity-centered mindsets of so many pastors today. One friend described him as an having an almost Kierkegaardian insight into the problems endemic among today’s caste of pastors.

Here are a couple tasters to show why I think both books are so valuable today.

From Senkbeil:

'Every useful human endeavour is more than just mastering external skills; these flow from an inner attitude or aptitude developed by repetition. By practicing for years a musician grows not only in instrumental proficiency, but the artistic expression that informs reliably fine performances. A chef’s expertise isn’t merely a matter of external technique, but the internal intuition that results from years of habitually blending the right ingredients, timing, temperature, seasoning, and presentation that makes for consistently fine cuisine. And as you will see by my recurring stories throughout this book, a farmer learns his craft over time and experience as he is shaped by the very animals and crops he tends and harvests. Habit is not something you were born with; it’s obtained over long experience.

It’s no different when it comes to pastors. A “practical habitus” for ministry is never completely mastered. This “practical disposition” is acquired through a lifelong process by which the pastor as Christian goes on receiving what he brings to others. So for as long as he lives the pastor, like other children of God, treads the path of continual repentance and faith on his own personal pilgrimage back home to the Father’s house. Daily he confesses his sins and daily he receives the Holy Spirit and everything that Jesus died to bring him: forgiveness of sins, life, and eternal salvation. This daily dying to sin and rising to new life through faith in Christ is the pivotal hinge in every Christian’s life, and it’s an essential ingredient in faithful and consistent care of souls. No pastor can give to others what he himself has not received. Turn that around and you have the very core of what pastoring is all about: giving out the gifts of God in Christ that you yourself received by faith. The essence of pastoral work is to bring the gifts of the Good Shepherd to his sheep and lambs. And here’s the well from which you draw inexhaustible grace ever day as a pastor: In the church the Holy Spirit daily and richly forgives all your sins along with the sins of all believers.’ [Harold Senkbeil, The Care of Souls, (Lexham Press, 2019), 18-19]

From Peterson:

'With the vastness of the heavenly invasion and the urgency of the faith decision rolling into our consciousness like thunder and lightning, we cannot stand around on Sunday morning filling the time with pretentious small talk on how bad the world is and how wonderful this new stewardship campaign is going to be…

If we have even an inkling of apocalypse, it will be impossible to act like the jaunty foreman of a home-improvement work crew that is going to re-landscape moral (or immoral) garden spots. We must pray. The world has been invaded by God, and it is with God we have to do.

Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them. The Amen gathers what has just happened into the Maranatha of the about to happen and produces a Benediction. We pay attention to God and lead others to pay attention to God. It hardly matters that so many people would rather pay attention to their standards of living, or their self-image, or their zeal to make a mark in the world.

Apocalypse opens up the chasm of reality. The reality is God: worship or flee…

With programs shaping the agenda—not amazing grace, not stubborn sin—the pastor doesn’t have to be patient. We set a goal, work out a strategy, recruit a few Christian soldiers, and go to it. If, in two or three years the soldiers haven’t produced, we shake the dust off our feet and hire on as captain to another group of mercenaries. When a congregation no longer serves our ambition, it is abandoned for another under the euphemism of “a larger ministry.” In the majority of such cases, our impatience is rewarded with a larger salary.

Apocalypse shows this up as inexcusable exploitation. Apocalypse convinces us that we are in a desperate situation, and in it together. The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state. All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness. Apocalypse ignites a sense of urgency, but it quenches shortcuts and hurry, for the times are in God’s hands. Providence, not the newspaper, accounts for the times in which we live.

Impatience, the refusal to endure, is to pastoral character what strip mining is to the land—a greedy rape of what can be gotten at the least cost, and then abandonment in search of another place to loot. Something like fidelity comes out of apocalyptic: fidelity to God, to be sure, but also to people, to parish—to place.

St. John was patient, teaching the Christians in his seven less-than-promising congregations to be patient. But it is an apocalyptic patience—not acquiescence to boredom, not doormat submissiveness. It is giant sequoia patience that scorns the reduction of a glorious gospel to a fast-food religion. Mount Rainier patience that mocks the fast-lane frenzy for a weekend with the Spirit. How long did it take to grow the sequoia? How long did it take to build Rainier? Apocalypse ushers us into the long and the large. We acquire, with St. John and his congregations, fidelity to place and people, the faithful endurance that is respectful of the complexities of living a moral, spiritual, and liturgical life before the mysteries of God in the mess of history.

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarrassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition. None of these marks is remotely biblical. None is faintly in evidence in the gospel story. All of them are thoroughly documented diseases of the spirit. Pastors are in great danger of being undetected carriers of the very disease we are charged to diagnose and heal. We need the most powerful of prophylactics—something like the apocalyptic prayer and poetry and patience of St. John. [Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, (excerpts from the chapter, ‘The Apocalyptic Pastor’)]

What others would you add?

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Thank you for sharing these.

Peterson’s point on prayer is a good reminder. So often I have found myself talking about things and never praying about them…especially during conversation with others. I want to get better at this, and it seems to be as simple as saying “Let’s pray about that,” or “Let’s thank God for this.”

Pr Bayly recommended reading books about literal shepherding. He mentioned The Shepherd’s Life. I’ve started it. Really good. About England’s Lake District sheep farmers.

In a similar vein, perhaps it would be helpful to remember pastors are also fishers. RC Trench spends time on this regarding Luke 5:1-11, the great draught of fishes miracle. Here are some of his comments:

It is not for nothing that the promise here clothes itself in language drawn from the occupation of the fisher, rather, for example, than in that borrowed from the nearly allied pursuits of the hunter. The fisher more often takes his prey alive ; he draws it to him, does not drive it from him; and not merely to himself, but draws all which he has taken to one another; even as the Church brings together the divided hearts, the fathers to the children, gathers into one fellowship the scattered tribes of men. Again, the work of the fisher is one of art and skill, not of force and violence; -Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord

and this from a footnote:

Yet this title of ‘fishers’ itself also fails to set out the whole character of the Christian ministry; sets out only two moments of it in any strength, the Church’s missionary activity, as the enclosing within the net, and the bringing safely to the final kingdom, as the landing the contents of the net upon the shore (Matt. xiii. 48). All which is between it leaves unexpressed, and yields therefore in fitness, as in frequency of use, to the image borrowed from the work of the shepherd; has given us no such names as 'pastor ’ and ‘flock’ to enrich our Christian language. That of 'shepherd ’ expresses all which ’ fisher ’ leaves out, the habitual daily care for the members of Christ, the peculium, after they have been brought into the fellowship of the Church. It was, therefore, fitly said to Peter, ‘Thou shalt catch men’ before it was said, ‘Feed my sheep;’ and each time though not a different commission, yet a different side of the commission, is intended; he shall be both evangelist and pastor. Jeremy Taylor gives the matter a slightly different turn: ‘In the days of the patriarchs, the governors of the Lord’s people were called shepherds. In the days of the Gospel they are shepherds still, but with the addition of a new appellative, for now they are called fishers. Both the callings were honest, humble, and laborious, watchful, and full of trouble, but now that both the titles are conjunct, we may observe the symbol of an implicit and folded duty. There is much simplicity and care in the shepherd’s trade ; there is much craft and labour in the fisher’s, and a prelate is to be both full of piety to his flock, careful of their welfare, and also to be discreet and wary, observant of advantages, laying such baits for the people as may entice them into the nets of Jesus’s discipline.’

I could list other books but they are all recommendations from Pr Bayly, so you are probably already familiar with them? One book does come to mind, Samuel Rutherford’s Letters.

I have just started my call, so for myself I need to be immersed in the work more than anything else and later will be able to see what books are helpful (aside from those tried and tested by experienced pastors). Still, I too am curious of others suggestions.

Blessings,

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And on a related note, from the late John Wimber: “Catch the fish, then clean them”. :slight_smile:

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Coming back to this…

Calvin’s sermons are worth every penny. From his sermon on 1 Tim 1:1-2:

Paul, however, does not simply call himself an apostle. He writes that it is ‘by command of our Lord Jesus Christ’, who has been ordained by God his Father as our supreme and only teacher. All, therefore, who venture to teach, must speak in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, for of him alone it is said, ‘Listen to him! (Matt. 17:5). When that voice was heard from heaven it was meant to shut the mouth of every creature, so that none should presume to preach anything devised by their own brain or claim to be a teacher or instructor. These things are reserved for the Son of God. What else then must we do? Let all who teach confess in truth that Jesus Christ speaks by their mouth, as Paul himself says in another place: Do you ask for proof regarding him who speaks in me? It is our Lord Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 13:3).

Pastors are the mouth of Jesus. What else can be said? The Second Helvetic Confession comes to mind:

THE PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD IS THE WORD OF GOD. Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.

Calvin spends a lot of time bolstering the authority of true pastors in that first sermon.

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Christmas sale anyone???

The description above is wrong; it’s the three-volume set of sermons on the Pastoral Epistles Matt’s just quoted from.

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Sinclair Ferguson’s Some Pastors and Teachers is also very helpful. Spent some time reading it this weekend. Ferguson’s writing is always theologically rich and deeply nourishing to the soul. SP&T is largely a collection of previous essays rearranged in one volume for practical theology, but it’s well worth working through slowly. His introduction is along the lines of what @tbbayly has been urging of us around here for years - we need to put our gifts to use for Christ’s church.

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Bonhoeffer’s Life Together is also essential reading. Whatever you make of his personal theology or whatever you think about the recent film on his life, Life Together is an outstanding work of pastoral theology, for both the pastor and the congregation. Here’s one excerpt (and there are many like it throughout the short book):

'Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realise it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great general disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.’

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Yes, your comments remind me that Bonhoeffer’s reputation as a pastor will last a lot longer than his reputation as a theologian, bogged down as it was in early twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy.

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From memory, the Gregory Peck film ‘Twelve O’clock High’ had good lessons on how to lead men, a good understanding of command (including its pitfalls). Different medium, but comparable quality to Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin novels (and films) leadership lessons.

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Another film recommendation: Netflix’ ‘The Two Popes.’

Want to know how the world sees theological conservatives? Watch their portrayal of Pope Benedict. The sneering mockery he received in that film angered me…and I am firmly Protestant in my doctrine.

But the lesson was a valuable one to learn.