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?
