Notes on *The Preacher’s Catechism*

The Preacher’s Catechism, Lewis Allen (Crossway, 2018)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The single most important thing for preachers is to be overcome by the gospel they proclaim. 

• "Our first calling is not to preach him, but to love him and to walk with him." (13)

Table of Contents

1. Preaching, above All

2. Enjoying God

3. The One We Preach

4. By the Book

5. Preaching Christ

6. All Our Days

7. Confident of This

8. Called to Preach

9. For God, for People

10. Not a Square Inch

11. Sin

12. Weakness

13. Knowing Jesus

14. For His Name's Sake

15. Rewarded

16. This Solid Ground

17. Lavish Love

18. Holiness

19. Journey's End

20. The Grace of Law

21. Obedience

22. Love's Choice

23. Image Rights?

24. Our Honor or His?

25. Stop!

26. Respect

27. Servant-Hearted Servants

28. Faithful Attraction

29. Give

30. True to His Word

31. Resist

32. The Heart of the Law

33. Trusting Ministry

34. At the Cross

35. The Courage of Our Convictions

36. Ministering Sacraments

37. Take Them to the Water

38. To Supper

39. Seek First

40. Praying, for His Glory

41. Trust Issues

42. Confession Time

43. All for the King

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "Skills have an essential place, but more essential to our calling are a heart and mind captivated by God and his gospel." (17)

• "A fruitful ministry comes from the heart of a contented preacher. It's not about getting your life circumstances right (be that church, salary, peer recognition, or work-life balance). Some of the most impacting ministries have been carried out through truly wretched situations, filled with years of stress and opposition. So many preachers have stood firm and persevered with fruit owing to their deep heart contentment in the God of the gospel. Christ must be a treasure of ever-deepening worth to us." (18)

• "A preacher whose pulpit freshness comes from a living relationship with Jesus is a great blessing to the church."(19)

• "The Devil love a discouraged preacher, and his infernal crosshairs are always trained on us." (20)

• "Those who keep going in their preaching ministry do so only as they learn to nurture their own souls. Even the strongest of us are fragile men. It's not enough to preach grace; we need it ourselves." (20)

Preaching, above All

• "Above everything else, those of us who are called to preach need to know that God is love (1 John 4:8)." (27)

• "God loves, and shows that love, because he is love. Love is of God's essence. And so the source of all reality is a God of ardent, consuming, and delighting love. This is who he is." (28)

• "Our infinite happiness, as saved sinners, consists in enjoying the Son of God. Delight in Jesus is distinctly godlike, and is God's redemption purpose for the world. The Father is redeeming sinners to be delighters in his Son." (29)

• "What is your heartbeat? Do you love to preach, or do you love the One you preach? Do you love to prep your sermons, enjoying the hard mental and spiritual work, or do you love the One you are discovering more about." (30)

• "We must teach others that God is love, and that life on earth is an invitation from heaven to know that love and to live in the light of it." (30)

• "You can only preach what you love. You can only truly love if you know and are daily fed by the love of God. God is always preaching himself, as the God of love. He has no greater message, no other gospel, and no greater purpose. Neither do we."(30)

Enjoying God

• “God loves a cheerful preacher. Our ever-blessed, ever-joyful God wants to be proclaimed by those who are brimful of the joy his grace in Christ brings. He calls us to delight in him and, out of that joy,

  to call others to the feast. Preacher and sermon must be filled with gospel joy.” (31)

• “Why single out joy when joy is so often crowded out by almost anything else? The reason is that joy, like nothing else, shows whether we really believe the gospel. Joy is gospel authenticity. Joy is not an emotional buzz, an escape from the difficulties we face. To know Jesus Christ means to taste, and to want to taste more, the delights of peace with God the Father, who cares for and smiles on us, the Son, who journeys with us, and the Spirit, who empowers us.” (32)

• “Life in Christ is not, above all, a set

  of commands to obey externally but the inward work of the Holy Spirit to remake our minds and hearts.” (32)

• “The Christian life begins with hearing the Word of God in the power of the Spirit and responding to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith. Christian maturity is an ongoing experience of the same:

  we see Christ in his Word, and we worship him, gladly giving our hearts to his lordship.” (33)

• “God designs that his church be served by Word-soaked, joy-seeking, and joy-sharing

  preachers of his delightful gospel.” (34)

The One We Preach

• “Preachers have a single calling, to express who and what God is. This is our mandate, to declare what God has revealed about himself.” (35) 

• “The preacher must teach people of God so that they can worship him with all their might. He must preach God so that they learn to adore the God who loves lost people because he chooses to, with no compulsion whatsoever, except the compulsion of the overflowing love of the Trinity.” (37)

By the Book

• “Why is the Bible such a thrilling and powerful book? Simply because it is all about Jesus Christ.” (40)

• “The Bible is Jesus's book, all that God has to show us about his Son, and all that we need to come to his Son and to be transformed by him. Make the Bible anything less than the discovery of Jesus, and no wonder we can so easily be dull preachers and disciples.“ (40)

1. Preaching Christ

• “Preaching, though, is ultimately divine activity. J. I. Packer says that it is "the event of God himself bringing to an audience a Bible-based, Christ-related, life-impacting message of instruction and direction through the words of a spokesperson.” (44)

• “The Emmaus road gives us a vital principle (Luke 24:25-27, 45): hearts that hear Christ in his Word and are opened to him are burning hearts.” (44)

All Our Days

• “Self-pity is as much out of place in Christian ministry as self-promotion is. Worship him because of who he is, the Lord of heaven and earth.” (49)

• “The life of a Christian, and of a Christian preacher, is a moment-by-moment giving of all his heart to God and God's grace, in the power of the Holy Spirit.” (50)

• “Get your heart pulled in its deepest impulses to God in Jesus Christ, and your preaching ministry, however difficult, will be a fitting expression of your life's worship.” (50)

Confident of This

• “The question we must face, and which our post-sermon activities betray, is this: can we find heart peace as we trust that God is at work? Whether we're jogging off our adrenaline or collapsed on the sofa, is there trust in our hearts? Do we really believe that

  our preaching will achieve God’s work?” (54)

Called to Preach

• “John Calvin identified the two aspects of a call of God to ministry: the individual's inner compulsion ("I have to do this") and the church's recognition of the man's necessary godliness and gifts in handling God's Word.” (56)

• “Only the servant-hearted are called to be servants of the Word.” (59)

For God, for People

• “You cannot honor God unless you are ministering the fullness of the gospel with gospel love for the good of the lost and the saved. Preaching to the glory of God is all about helping others to grasp and delight in the truth of the gospel. God's glory revealed in the cross of Christ and declared in preaching is the good of grace-hungry people. "The eternal salvation of the human soul, through the presentation of divine truth, is the end of preaching," William Shedd wrote. That is what God wants from you, and that is what your hearers need from you, regardless of whether they currently understand that or actually want it. Anything less is just bad preaching.” (62)

• “Preaching must always be an exercise in self-effacement, not self-promotion, or even self-fulfillment. Jesus says, "Feed my sheep,"not "Feed your ego." People must be led to Christ, and led on with Christ through preaching.”(62)

• “Our goal is to deepen the joy of our hearers in Jesus Christ.” (64)

• “Ministry is the battle against mistrust and misapplied confidence, in our own lives as well as in the lives of those we preach to.” (64)

• “God has invested his glory in his children seeing and delighting in the saving grace of his Son in his proclaimed Word.” (64)

Not a Square Inch

• “It's no good being convinced that the Lord wants you in the pulpit if you're not really sure about his involvement in the world beyond your allotted few square feet of activity each Sunday.” (65)

• “You are preaching into a universe ruled by King Jesus. This life-changing truth must be the solid ground for all your preaching. Believe it, and preach it.” (66)

• “Our calling is to speak gospel words in what often appears to be the chaos of our lives and the lives of our congregations. “Our God reigns" must never sound trite. It must always be heard for what it is, a uniquely hope-filled and peace-bringing claim.” (66)

• “Preachers are, by most measurements, believers with a good deal of faith. Because of that, it's

  all too easy to fail to appreciate the struggles many of our hearers have in believing. There again, time spent with fellow Christians who suffer, or time spent in our own trials, brings home the fact that faith is anything but natural or straightforward.” (67)

Sin

• The last Adam was a preacher as fearless as he was sinless. He always spoke God's Word in obedience to his Father and in the service of his listeners. His loyalty to God's Word took him to another tree, the cross, to die there as our Sin-Bearer (1 Per. 2:24).” (73)

Weakness

• “Perhaps we feel so low on Mondays precisely because we are low. Mondays have lessons of grace to teach us. We need the Monday gospel. Left to ourselves, we are all without hope.” (77)

Knowing Jesus

• “So if we want to find our strength again, we need to go back to Jesus, look to him, and live.” (80) 

• “With a daily walk with Jesus those fears don’t vanish, but they are brought under his control.” (82)

• “So, put Christ before you. Study him and speak to him. Give him your heart.” (82)

For His Name's Sake

• “Endure hardship" is the motto of apostolic ministry (see 2 Tim. 2:3; 4:5). Endure hardship. Not because it is good for you, like a diet or exercise, but because Jesus did, and our calling is to be transformed in the image of his holiness.” (84)

• “Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world.

  And self-sacrifice will lead us, his followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort.” (85)

Rewarded

• “The gospel makes no sense and has no power unless judgment is real and heaven’s reward is eternal.” (88)

• “The Lord of the harvest alone can give the increase; but he has given us the mandate of wielding prayer and the Word in order to see people brought to Christ and built up in him.”(90)

This Solid Ground

• "Because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption." We preachers can never get enough of this truth. It must master us, subduing our pride in success, and lifting and comforting us in disaster.” (92)

• “We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul." (94)

Lavish Love

• “Most of us who preach lurch between pride and despait, often in the same day. We puff ourselves up, delighted to be preachers. Says Spurgeon, «The pride of knowing replaces the humility of being known." And then, we fail in our task and are in the depths.

  The remedy is never that we should seek some stoic resignation in the highs and lows of ministry--never too up, never too down. The remedy is in the gospel, and especially in the gospel truth that in Christ we are adopted into God's family. The doctrine of adoption is vital for the preacher. We are not preachers first; we are not primarily servants, called to a round of preaching and teaching. Those things are secondary at best. Above everything else, we are sons, the adopted sons of God. We are children, with all of God's people. The Father has lavished his great

  love upon us to make us the children of God (1 John 3:1). The Son has given us the right to become those children John 1:12), and declares his delight in us as his brothers (Heb. 2:12-13).” (96)

• “Hard work for his sake is the privilege we get to do as

  an act of worship. It is the natural activity of children who know their Father's smile.” (97)

Holiness

• “In the light of God's Word we must identify

  our sins and repent of them; in their place we must think through new habits of godliness; we must pray specific prayers with discipline; we must put ourselves right into the fellowship of God's

  people, serving, sharing, and learning; we must learn to live out our baptism, take the Lord's Supper, and sit under good preaching.” (100) 

• ”Preaching is the commitment to showing our hearers from the Word that Jesus is powerfully real. Our growth in grace must not only back up our words; it must also display the real and powerful Jesus in our lives.” (100)

• “We must be holy. If we neglect this calling, we may well end up preaching ourselves, or getting in the way of our Master. If so, our unholiness will actually obscure the glory of Christ. If we are dull, if we are unmoved by the truths we handle in the pulpit, if

  an illustration we use is self-promoting or inappropriate for some other reason, if our words aren't conveying love and tenderness

  (the list could go on), then we are getting in the way of the beauty of Jesus.” (101)

• “The Lord might not give us crowds, but as M'Cheyne himself prayed, our longing should be to be as holy as a pardoned sinner can be. Only as we grow to be like Jesus are we effective in showing him to others in our lives and through our proclamation.” (101)

Journey's End

• “Even if we have sixty years of preaching behind us and have led thousands to a closer walk with Christ, it will be Christ alone who acquits us. We will never earn our salvation.” (105)

The Grace of Law

• “Preachers of Jesus must be like Jesus. No one will listen to a man to learn Christ if they cannot look at him and see Christ.” (109)

Obedience

• “Christ alone keeps the law for us in his obe-

  dience for our sakes, and he alone dies for us under the penal sentence of God for our lawbreaking. Slaves are redeemed and adopted into God's family, and a new nature is given to us.” (115)

Love's Choice

• “Will you really believe that your God can and will

meet all your needs, so that you will bring him all of the love and trust he is so very worthy of? He wants all of your heart, preacher, and unless he has that, he is satisfied by none of your ministry.” (122)

Image Rights?

• “The opposite of love is not hatred; it's indifference-

  "I don't care." But love does care. God will have us for himself. And that is the call, and the power,

  of the gospel?” (125)

Stop!

• “We are to enjoy our Sundays, not as anxious performers but as Christ-satisfied disciples.

  We give ourselves to God in worship and to our church families in fellowship. And we refuse to try to justify ourselves by our preaching. We yield to Jesus, surrender to his righteousness, and rest in his love.” (135)

Respect

• “Church members live in a secular environment of disrespect. Backbiting, disloyalty, and worse are the everyday hazards of their workplace. When they come to church, they must discover the freedom and peace of being in an utterly different culture. Respect

  and honor must be the tone of all relationships in the body of Christ. So it is with the preacher.” (139)

Faithful Attraction

• “Keep yourselves in the love of God" (Jude 1:21). If you are this loved through Christ, then explore it, stay in it, allow it to satisfy you. ‘Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. (Prov. 4:23).” (147)

Give

• “Giving suffcient time each week to preparing sermons is an act of will. It is a commitment to self-discipline, and when we decide to do it, it will put pressure on the rest of our schedules. It is,

  though, supremely an act of love.” (151)

True to His Word

• “Obedience to the commandment "Do not lie

  does not mean "tell the truth regardless of whom you crush under it," but it means "tell the truth in order to serve others in love.” (154)

• “The truth of God, the whole truth, with Jesus at the center, will become a chore, because it doesn't achieve your appointed goals. The Word preached faithfully deeply inconveniences you as well as your hearers with its demands. Your pride won't allow that

  for very many years. In time, you'll preach less of the Word and more of yourself.” (156)

• “If your ministry is a journey in self-love, then no one gets served, you least of all. If by grace you lay your heart and work before the King of kings, then your words will be filled with truth and love. Only then do preachers truly serve the King.” (156)

• “If your ministry is a journey in self-love, then no one gets served, you least of all. If by grace you lay your heart and work before the King of kings, then your words will be filled with truth and love. Only then do preachers truly serve the King.” (156)

Resist

• “One of the greatest psychological pressures for any preacher is being content with our current experience of God's grace and managing our longings for so much more blessing.” (157)

• “Coveting, at root, is a refusal to recognize God as God.” (158)

The Heart of the Law

• “Preachers are ambitious. At least, we should be. If we don't long that people will meet the risen Christ through our ministry, then what do we want to achieve through preaching?” (163) 

• “You and I must strive for excellence as we preach, without ever losing sight of the excellence the Lord calls for: ultimately, loving him and our neighbors is all that counts. That's our highest calling, in the pulpit and out of it.” (163)

Trusting Ministry

• “Salvation is of the Lord, and that includes the gift of faith in order to receive the saving work of Christ (Eph. 2:8; cf. 1:19). True saving faith is nothing less than the work of the Spirit of Christ in our hearts.” (169)

• “And the more you grow in the Spirit's power in response to the Word, the deeper your confidence in this Word will be, whether privately read or

  publicly preached.” (170)

• “Jesus offers himself through his Word in the gospel. Stand on the rock of this truth.” (170)

At the Cross

• “The gospel we preach must be the gospel we consciously rely on. And what we rely on, we love. Our greatest need, then, is a sight of our sins, and serious repentance at the cross for them. As we bring both our sin and our sorrow for it to the cross, we discover again the life Jesus died to bring us. There worship flows as we see our Savior in his life-bringing glory?” (172) 

• “Repentance isn't the soul wallowing in its muck (leave that to the pigs), it is the soul forsaking everything to find forgiveness and life in Jesus?” (174)

• “Commenting on Galatians 3:1, John Calvin said,

  ‘Let those who would discharge aright the ministry of the Gospel learn not merely to speak and declaim, but to penetrate into the consciences of men, to make them see Christ crucified, and feel the shedding

  of his blood.’ Preachers who know their own need of Jesus can do so, and will?” (174)

The Courage of Our Convictions

• “Would you lose your sorrows? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead's deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing

  which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of grief and sorrow; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead.” (178)

Ministering Sacraments

• “We must also recover our belief, then, that the pulpit needs to share its message with the baptistery and the Table, and that they must be given their rightful places in the drama of redeeming grace.” (181)

• “If your preaching is mediocre at times, or worse than that, don't indulge in despair: the Lord is

  near in his sacraments.” (181)

• “The sacraments are to show us the gospel and to strengthen our gospel faith, as we've seen. They teach us who belongs to Christ and who doesn't. And so, they call us to renewed trust in Christ and to enduring obedience to him, by his grace. We have

  been washed by Christ, and we are feeding on him. Could we need anything else? So finish your sermon on time, preacher. Don't weary your hearers. They've heard the gospel from you. And now, in water, bread, and wine, let them see it and celebrate it.” (182)

Seek First

• “If you wait until your day is less busy, your heart is less burdened, your moods make it feel exciting, or your sin takes wings and flies away, you will never pray.” (192)

• “The Westminster Shorter Catechism states that prayer is "an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies." (193)

• “Only a living, honest relationship with God nurtured and expressed in prayer, will keep us from hellish hypocrisy and fill us with the life of Christ.” (193)

• “Prayer is recapturing a Christ-centered worldview,

  in which we celebrate again his loving rule. Problems might not go away, but they regain their God-ordained perspective.“ (195)

Praying, for His Glory

• “Preaching easily falls into a default setting of "Yours be the glory, O Lord; and a little to me, too, please." We need to root out that spirit of pride, that clawing, grasping, insecure longing for the praise of men. We do so with prayer. Pray that the Father would set a delight in his glory in Christ deep in your affections

  so that the thought of even trying to snatch a hint of the glory due God alone would disgust you.” (199)

• “You are praying and working not to grow a big church but to serve a church so that people will increasingly yield their lives to Jesus Christ.” (200)  

Trust Issues

• “His presence can still racing thoughts, give hope

  for despairing preachers, and bring back restless, wandering desires to him. You believe that for your congregation, don't you? Believe it for yourself. And experience it as the gift of God to his praying children, including his preachers.” (203)

Confession Time

• “The preacher who repents will live and thrive. Try it. And the ministry that is bathed in repentance and enjoying renewing grace will be a truly gospel one, and will bear the hallmarks of authenticity.” (208) 

All for the King

• “When our hearts bow joyfully to the King, then, and only then, will our preaching have any integrity and impact.” (210)

• “Love only the work, and the work will crush us. Of course it will; the needs of a struggling church and a broken world are completely overwhelming. And while we effectively forget who God is in his gospel love, we will think that he achieves some satisfaction

  (some glory, even) in our being overworked and beaten down.”(210)

• “Preaching is the declaration of the God we know. Preaching is one broken sinner saying to others with exactly the same struggles, "This is the grace I'm discovering, which I long for you to know with me." (210)

• “You can see and you can hear when people are contented. The church can see and hear when those in the pulpit are delighting in Christ and satisfied

  in him. True contentment is as powerful as it is visible.” (211)

• “And so we dare to pursue contentment in God. We dare believe that there is such a place of settled joy and peace in Jesus. We really can make him our treasure when life and ministry are painful, as much as when they are exciting. We can, and we must. To him be the glory, forever.” (211)

Notable Content 

Six questions to help asses whether sin has crept into your preaching. (73)

1. What happens in my heart when people thank me for my preaching? Do I straight away silently thank God that they were blessed? Or do I thank myself for my skills as a preacher?

2. When I preach a terrible sermon, why does it devastate me? Is it because I don't think that Christ's sheep have been fed? Or is it because my ego hasn't been stroked?

3. Do I preach to serve my hearers or to scratch my own preaching itches? Do I choose passages for the pulpit because I know they will serve where my hearers are in need or because I prefer them and think I preach them well?

4. When someone says something critical that is true but painful about my preaching (to me or to someone else, and it has gotten back to me), is my first response angry self-pity, or do I give God thanks for this Spirit-given opportunity to grow in my preaching?

5. Should I adopt a different preaching tone and style or perhaps preach shorter sermons in order to reach my hearers more effectively? Or do pride and fear tie me to preaching as I always have?

6. Do I ever have the courage to ask those closest to me (my wife or the church's leaders) about my preaching? Am I prepared for honest and loving feedback, or do I wish to keep justifying my ministry exactly as it is?

Ten Commandments, re-written: (116)

1. Put nothing in the place of Jesus.

2. Make nothing which gets in the way of your love for Jesus.

3. Honor Jesus' Name in all you do.

4. Seek your soul's rest in Jesus.

5. Honor your parents, as a love-expression for Jesus.

6. Do not murder, as Jesus brings life, never death.

7. Keep sexually pure, because Jesus has won your body, as well as your heart.

8. Do not steal, because Jesus is enough.

9. Do not lie, because Jesus is the truth, and loves the truth.

10. Don't set your heart on anything, because Jesus really is enough.

    Four pointers to obey the commandment concerning contentment: (159)

    1. Believe that God is who he is.

    2. Identify your discontentment, and starve it.

    3. List your blessings, and celebrate them.

    4. Knowing Jesus is contentment. 

Notes on *The Contemplative Pastor*

The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans, 1993)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The vocation of a pastor is determined by God in Scripture, not the secular-shaped demands of people- and our vocation, biblically, is deeper and slower than you'd think.

Interaction 

• "Psalm 131!" (25)

• "Imperturbable as = "Poised harpooner", "Well-differentiated self", "Men with chests" (CSL), "Trained emotions and stable sentiments by which our minds govern our appetites." (JR). (25)

• "When dealing with secularists. (not talking about Christians here)." (32)

• "Patience for the pastor, perhaps more than anything else, requires him to believe that Jesus is real, that we need Jesus to do his work, that we don't do Jesus's work for him." (49)

• "Let us talk about God like we believe he's real, and the world like he has entranced it with himself "re-mythologize". (79)

• "What local churches say to pastors, truly." (139)

• "Peterson closes with several wonderful poems that celebrate the gospel and various seasons within the church's life." (155)

Table of Contents

Foreword

I. The Naked Noun

II. The Unbusy Pastor

III. The Subversive Pastor

IV. The Apocalyptic Pastor

V. Ministry amid the Traffic

VI. Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art

VII. Praying with Eyes Open

VIII. First Language

IX. Is Growth a Decision?

X. The Ministry of Small Talk

IX. Unwell in a New Way

X. Lashed to the Mast

XIII. Desert and Harvest: A Sabbatical Story

XIV. Poets and Pastors

XV. Poems

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Foreword

I. The Naked Noun

• "if I, even for a moment, accept my culture's definition of me, I am rendered harmless." (16)

• "The essence of being a pastor begs for a redefinition. To that end, I offer three adjectives to clarify that noun: unbusy, subversive, apocalyptic." (16)

II. The Unbusy Pastor

• "How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works id I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?"(17)

• "The word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront. Hilary of Tours diagnosed our pastoral busyness as irreligiosa sollicitudo pro Deo, a blasphemous anxiety to do God's work for him." (17)

• "I (and most pastors, I believe) become busy for two reasons; both are ignoble. 1. I am busy because I am vain. 2. I am busy because I am lazy." (18)

• "But if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don't have time to do my proper work, the work to which I have been called. How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion?" (19)

• "I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time." (20)

• "I need a drenching in Scripture; I require an immersion in biblical studies. I need reflective hours over the pages of Scripture as well as personal struggles with the meaning of Scripture. That takes far more time than it takes to prepare a sermon." (20)

• "I want the people who come to worship in my congregation each Sunday to hear the Word of God preached in such a way that they hear its distinctive note of authority as God's Word, and to know that their own lives are being addressed on their home territory. A sound outline and snappy illustrations don't make that happen.mThis kind of preaching is a creative act that requires quietness and solitude, concentration and intensity. "All speech that moves men." contends R. E. C. Browne, "was minted when some man's mind was poised and still." I can't do that when I'm busy." (21)

• "Pastoral listening requires unhurried leisure, even if it's only for five minutes. Leisure is a quality of spirit, not a quantity of time." (21)

• "The trick, of course, is to get to the calendar before anyone else does. I mark out the times for prayer, for reading, for leisure, for the silence and solitude out of which creative work prayer, preaching, and listening - can issue." (23)

• "The pastor is not, and should not be, exempt from the hundred menial tasks or the administrative humdrum. These also are pastoral ministry. But the only way I have found to accomplish them without resentment and anxiety is to first take care of the priorities. If there is no time to nurture these essentials, become a busy pastor, harassed and anxious, a whining, compulsive Martha instead of a contemplative Mary."(23)

• "To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil." (24)

• "The metaphors Jesus used for the life of ministry are frequently images of the single, the small, and the quiet, which have effects far in excess of their appearance: salt, leaven, seed. Our culture publicizes the opposite emphasis: the big, the multitudinous, the noisy. It is, then, a strategic necessity that pastors deliberately ally themselves with the quiet, poised harpooners, and not leap, frenzied, to the oars. There is far more need that we develop the skills of the harpooner than the muscles of the oarsman. It is far more biblical to learn quietness and attentiveness before God than to be overtaken by what John Oman named the twin perils of ministry, "flurry and worry." For flurry dissipates energy, and worry constipates it!" (25)

III. The Subversive Pastor

• "I am undermining the kingdom of self and establishing the kingdom of God. I am being subversive." (27)

• "Yes, I believe that. I believe that the kingdoms of this world, American and Venezuelan and Chinese, will become the kingdom of our God and Christ, and I believe this new kingdom is already among us. That is why I'm a pastor, to introduce people to the real world and train them to live in it." (28)

• "In general, people treat us with respect, but we are not considered important in any social, cultural, or economic way. In parody we are usually treated as harmless innocents, in satire as shiftless parasites." (29)

• "It's hard to maintain a self-concept as a revolutionary when everyone treats us with the same affability they give the grocer. Are these people right? Is their way of life in no danger from us? Is what we say about God and his ways among us not real in the same way that Chevrolets and basketball teams and fresh garden spinach are real? Many pastors, realizing the opinion polls overwhelmingly repudiate their self-concept, submit to the cultural verdict and slip into the role of chaplain to the culture. It is easy to do. But some pastors do not; they become subversives in the culture." (30)

• "The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden Adams and Eves are willing to pay their respects to God, but they don't want him invading their turf. Most sin, far from being a mere lapse of morals or a weak will, is an energetically and expensively erected defense against God. Direct assault in an openly declared war on the god-self is extraordinarily ineffective. Hitting sin head-on is like hitting a nail with a hammer; it only drives it in deeper. There are occasional exceptions, strategically dictated confrontations, but indirection is the biblically preferred method." (31)

• "Prayer and parable are the stock-in-trade tools of the subversive pastor. The quiet (or noisy) closet life of prayer enters into partnership with the Spirit that strives still with every human heart, a wrestling match in holiness. And parables are the consciousness-altering words that slip past falsifying platitude and invade the human spirit with Christ-truth." (36)

• "Words are the real work of the world - prayer words with God, parable words with men and women. The behind-the-scenes work of creativity by word and sacrament, by parable and prayer, subverts the seduced world. The pastor's real work is what Ivan Illich calls "shadow work" - the work nobody gets paid for and few notice but that makes a world of salvation: meaning and value and purpose, a world of love and hope and faith - in short, the kingdom of God." (37)

IV. The Apocalyptic Pastor

• "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." (39)

• "Pastors are the persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances, and who therefore must be apocalyptic." (41)

• "Apocalypse is arson- it secretly sets a fire in the imagination that boils the fat out of an obese culture-religion and renders a clear gospel love, a pure gospel hope, a purged gospel faith." (41)

• "How can I keep from settling into the salary and benefits of a checkout clerk in a store for religious consumers How can I avoid a metamorphosis from the holy vocation of pastor into a promising career in religious sales? Here is a way: submit my imagination to St. John's apocalypse the crisis of the End combined with the urgencies of God- and let the energies of the apocalyptic define and shape me as pastor." (41)

• "He is an alert and alive pastor. He reads and assimilates the Scriptures; he reads and feels the impact of the daily news. But neither ancient Scripture nor current event is left the way it arrives on his doorstep; it is all turned into prayer." (42)

• "The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us?" (42)

• "People would rather talk to the pastor than to God. And so it happens that without anyone actually intending it, prayer is pushed to the sidelines. And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this." (43)

• "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." (44)

• "People are uncomfortable with mystery (God) and mess (themselves). They avoid both mystery and mess by devising programs and hiring pastors to manage them." (48)

• "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." (48)

• "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." (49)

• "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." (49)

V. Ministry amid the Traffic

• "Sundays are important - celebrative and essential. The first day defines and energizes our lives by means of our Lords resurrection and gives a resurrection shape to the week. But the six days between Sundays are just as important, if not so celebrative, for they are the days to which the resurrection shape is given." (54)

VI. Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art

• "Until about a century ago, what pastors did between Sundays was a piece with what they did on Sundays. The context changed: instead of an assembled congregation, the pastor was with one other person or with small gatherings of persons, or alone in study and prayer. The manner changed: instead of proclamation, there was conversation. But the work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity." (57)

• "This is the pastoral work that is historically termed the cure of souls. The primary sense of cura in Latin is "care," with undertones of "cure." The soul is the essence of the human personality. The cure of souls, then, is the Scripture-directed, prayer-shaped care that is devoted to persons singly or in groups, in settings sacred and profane. It is a determination to work at the center, to concentrate on the essential?" (57)

• "The cure of souls, is the essential pastoral work It is not a narrowing of pastoral work to its devotional aspects, but it is a way of life that uses weekday tasks, encounters, and situations as the raw material for teaching prayer, developing faith, and preparing for a good death. Curing souls is a term that filters out what is introduced by a secularizing culture." (59)

• "Pastors who devote themselves to the guidance of souls must do it among people who expect them to run a church." (59)

• "The cure of souls is not indifferent to the realities of human lethargy, naive about congregational recalcitrance, or inattentive to neurotic cussedness. But there is a disciplined, determined conviction that everything (and I mean, precisely, everything) we do is a response to God's first work, his initiating act. We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed!" (61)

• "Running-the-church questions are: What do we do? How can we get things going again? Cure-of-souls questions are: What has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on?" (61)

• "The primary language of the cure of souls, therefore, is conversation and prayer." (63)

• "Life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep In repair by our wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the creation, the cross, grace, God." (64)

VII. Praying with Eyes Open

• "Witness is the key word in all this. It is an important biblical word in frequent contemporary use. It is a modest word saying what is there, honestly testifying to exactly what we see, what we hear. But when we enlist in a cause, it is almost impossible to do it right: we embellish, we fill in the blanks, we varnish the dull passages, we gild the lily just a little to hold the attention of our auditors. Sea lion stuff. Important things are at stake - God, salvation -and we want so much to involve outsiders in these awesome realities that we leave the humble ground of witness and use our words to influence and motivate, to advertise and publicize. Then we are no longer witnesses, but lawyers arguing the case, not always with scrupulous attention to detail. After all, life and death issues are before the jury." (79)

• "Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week, Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, 'It is all right, believe it or not, to be people." (84)

VIII. First Language

• "That the central and shaping language of the church's life has always been its prayer language." (89)

• "This is my essential educational task: to develop and draw out into articulateness this personal word, to teach people to pray. Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God in faith." (93)

• "But I have determined that the language in which I must be most practiced and for which have a primary responsibility for teaching proficiency in others is Language I, the language of relationship, the language of prayer - to get as much language as possible into the speech of love and response and intimacy." (94)

IX. Is Growth a Decision?

• "Real work always includes a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, but when the work is done well there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand, a cultivation of humility." (100)

• "Real work, whether it involves making babies or poems hamburger or holiness, is not self-expression, but its very opposite. Real workers, skilled workers, practice negative capability the suppression of self so that the work can take place on its own. St. John the Baptist's "I must decrease, but he must increase" is embedded in all good work." (101)

• "I will to not will what I am already good at in order that what is more than me and beyond me, the will of God, can come into existence in my willing work." (102)

• "We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice." (104)

• "At our human and Christian best we are not fascists barking our orders to God and his creatures. At our human and Christian best we are not quietists dumbly submissive before fat At our human and Christian best we pray in the middle voice at the center between active and passive, drawing from them as we have need and occasion but always uniquely and artistically ourselves, creatures adoring God and being graced by him, "participating in the results of the action." (105)

• "Gospel reverence, Christ reverence, spouse reverence is a vigorous (but by no means presumptuous) bold freedom, full of spontaneous energy. This is the contextual atmosphere in which we find ourselves loved and loving before God. We are more than ready to bow down before Christ unafraid that we will be tyrannized, for Christ has already laid down his life for us on the cross, pouring himself out and holding nothing back. Willed passivity." (107)

• "Humble boldness (or, bold humility) enters into a sane, robust willing - free willing - and finds its most expressive and satisfying experience in prayer to Jesus Christ, who wills our salvation." (109)

X. The Ministry of Small Talk

• "Pastoral work, I learned later, is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary. It is the nature of pastoral life to be attentive to, immersed in, and appreciative of the everyday texture of people's lives - the buying and selling, the visiting and meeting, the going and coming." (112)

• "Most of us, most of the time, are engaged in simple. routine tasks, and small talk is the natural language. If pastors belittle it, we belittle what most people are doing most of the time, and the gospel is misrepresented." (115)

• "Pastors especially, since we are frequently involved with large truths and are stewards of great mysteries, need to cultivate conversational humility. Humility means staying close to the ground (humus), to people, to everyday life, to what is happening with all its down-to-earthness." (115)

IX. Unwell in a New Way

• "These two views- the pastor's theological understanding of people and the people's self-understanding - are almost always in tension." (118)

• "So sinner becomes not a weapon in an arsenal of condemnation, but the expectation of grace. Simply to be against sin is a poor basis for pastoral ministry. But to see people as sinners - as rebels against God, missers of the mark, wanderers from the way that establishes a basis for pastoral ministry that can proceed with great joy because it is announcing God's great action in Jesus Christ "for sinners." (120)

• "Pastoral ministry increases in effectiveness as it discerns and discriminates among the forms of sin, and then loves, prays, witnesses, converses, and preaches the details of grace appropriate to each human face that takes shape in the pew." (121)

• "Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God." (124)

X. Lashed to the Mast

• "But professions and crafts are different. In these we have an obligation beyond pleasing somebody; we are pursuing or shaping the very nature of reality, convinced that when we carry out our commitments, we benefit people at a far deeper level than if we simply did what they asked of us." (132)

• "Am I keeping the line clear between what I am committed to and what people are asking of me? Is my primary orientation Gods grace, his mercy, his action in Creation and covenant? And am I committed to it enough that when people ask me to do something that will not lead them into a more mature participation in these realities, I refuse?" (134)

• "There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing - God, kingdom, gospel - we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the the biblical words of command and promise and invitation." (139)

Notable Content

• "I have no interest in "delivering sermons"." (20)

• "The pastor as the 'Poised Harpooner'." (24)

• The Assumptions of Subversives: (34)

  1. One, the status quo is wrong and must be overthrown if the world is going to be livable.

  2. Two, there is another world aborning that is livable. Its reality is no chimera. It is in existence, though not visible. Its character is known. The subversive does not operate out of a utopian dream but out of a conviction of the nature of the real world.

  3. Three, the usual means by which one kingdom is thrown out and another put in its place- military force or democratic elections- are not available. If we have neither a preponderance of power nor a majority of votes, we begin searching for other ways to effect change. We discover the methods of subversion. We find and welcome allies.

• Three Types of Language: (90)

  1. Language I is the language of intimacy and relationship.

  2. Language II is the language of information.

  3. Language III is the language of motivation.

Notes on *The Art of Pastoring*

The Art of Pastoring, David Hansen, (IVP, 1994, 2012)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Pastors are called to be parables of Jesus — people meet Jesus in our lives when we follow Jesus.

• "I attempt to describe why it is that people meet Jesus in our lives when we follow Jesus. Even more, I have attempted to describe how and why following Jesus is the central principle of pastoral ministry, the comprehensive principle that integrates every task." (13)

• "The thesis of this book is that people meet Jesus in our lives because when we follow Jesus, we are parables of Jesus Christ to the people we meet." (13)

• "Here's what the pastoral ministry is for me: Every day, as I go about my tasks as a pastor, I am a follower of Jesus, I am therefore a parable of him to those I encounter. The parable of Jesus works the power and presence of Jesus in their lives." (31)

• "Pastors who are parables of Jesus Christ change people's minds about Christ and bring the real Christ to people." (145)

Interaction 

• I pray petitionary and intercessory prayers because that grace of God at work within me leads me to desire things I cannot create. God's grace at work in me causes me to want to see things happen that I can't make happen. So I ask him to. (114)

• Difference between parable and symbol. (143)

Table of Contents

I. Beginning

II. Call

III. The Holy Spirit

IV. Temptation

V. Eschatology

VI. Preaching

VII. Prayer

VIII. Friendship

IX. Sacrament

X. Leadership

XI. Leaving

XII. Reward

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

I. Beginning

• "Better to be a follower of Jesus and no expert at that, just a sinner saved by grace, called to love because I have been bought with a price." (22)

• "Pastoral ministry must be following Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ called me to this work, and following him must be integral to realizing his calling." (22)

• "The speakability of God: this is what I want my life to be, a living organism through which God speaks, Not a hero, but a regular guy working away at imitating Christ in my everyday life." (26)

• "My shepherding is an authentic extended metaphor of the Good Shepherd. And as such, my life conveys the surprising presence of the grace of God." (27)

• "But if Jesus is communicated through us because of the likeness we share with him in our everyday life, if the essence of delivering Christ is living like him in our whole life, matching our life's narrative with his life's narrative, then our everyday life counts." (29)

• "An adequate definition of pastoral ministry emphasizes following Jesus as the act of ministry, and particularly following Jesus on the way of the cross." (29)

• "Sexual sin gets the press, but ego press kills the church." (30)

II. Call

• "The gospel is the power of the love of God, and as such it gives the pastor the power of the love of God to give to others. If the gospel is the pastor's bread, the pastor will always have bread to give away." (41)

IV. Temptation

• "I've tried and tried, but I've never been able to mix ambition and love. When I'm trying to be important and I'm plotting my way to the top, I can't love my wife, I can't love my kids, I can't love my friends, I can't love my parishioners. When I'm climbing ladders I cut myself off from the power of the pastoral ministry, which is love. For me to love, for me to follow Jesus, I need to step off the ladder." (76)

• "In our hypertherapeutic milieu, people want professionals to do something to them to make them feel better. Living through life, meeting the demands of following Jesus, living under the lordship of a holy God doesn't appeal to the general public these days." (78)

• "Pandering is a moral problem. We pander to people's desires for shortcuts because we don't want to walk the Way of the Cross with them. We want shortcuts just as much as our people do." (82)

V. Eschatology

• "If we can't teach our people where they go because we don't know ourselves, or if we feel that we cannot teach them what we really believe about heaven and hell, we are poor pastors." (85)

• "The widespread lack of a coherent, biblical eschatology among preachers, and their unwillingness to teach it, leads to toothless, people-pleasing preaching." (86)

• "All I see is people that need Christ. I see people in danger. I feel a fire light in my gut: the message God has given me for this morning is something the congregation needs to hear and respond to. Nervousness about my performance is displaced by concern for the people to hear the Word of God and believe in faith. I see their end. I see their need. I see that there is a decision to be made about Christ, and that decision counts for everything."(99)

VI. Preaching

• "Preaching is a form of aggression. As we preach, Yahweh, the God of war, conducts holy war to conquer territory. The field of conflict is the human heart." (108)

• "Thinking Christocentrically helps me sort through the side issues and leads me straight to the heart of every biblical text and the subject of all sermons: Jesus Christ." (111)

• "This is what renews our hermeneutic: hearing Christ preached and taught by authors and preachers who are unafraid to tell us the truth. And that is the whole point of preaching: to tell the truth boldly and unashamedly." (112)

VIII. Friendship

• "I'm gun-shy of people who like me too much."(137)

• "They thank Jesus but give me the credit. Their speech is think with spiritual lingo, but they treat me like I'm their savior. I don't think they're talking about me or Jesus. They're talking to someone or something I symbolize to them. Psychologists call this transference." (137)

• "What must die in every pastor is the subconscious desire to please people. What must not die is the will to love. There's the risk."(140)

• "There are intelligent steps the pastor can take to avoid the snare. Don't try to be a therapist. When pastors try to be therapists, the danger intensifies."(142)

• "But pastors should never, under any circumstances, attempt to create or enhance transference reactions in parishioners. They do happen, and they can have happy endings, but they should be avoided. The happy endings are rare." (143)

• "How can a pastor be a parable of Christ and not a symbol of God? There is a critical difference between symbols and parables: symbols are durable, parables are impermanent." (145)

• "Pastors, as parables of Jesus, bring Christ to people and then as quickly as possible become unimportant, unnecessary and superfluous to the important thing: the parishioners' relationship with Jesus." (146)

• "Rather, pastors need to allow their personal effect on people to be powerful, but light-handed and brief. This is what it means for a pastor to be humble. Humble pastors don't hang around for adulation, for then they might become an idol. Becoming an idol is the greatest fear of the humble pastor."(146)

IX. Sacrament

• "Sin is not a mistake. Our sin is our willing unlawfulness, our purposeful breaking of God's law. In attitude and in deed, we rebel against God, and we have for that reason forfeited our right to live. We deserve to die for our sins. That's what the death of Jesus is for; our deliberate unlawfulness." (158)

• "God's love is not a theory, nor does it meet an abstract need. God's love is a factual, historic action: the death of Jesus Christ. The purpose of God's act of love is to meet our real need, the forgiveness of our sins." (159)

X. Leadership

• "Jesus Christ is the object of proclamation. Preaching our visions and ideas for the church is cheap leadership, and it is not preaching. But biblical, Christocentric preaching is powerful pastoral leadership." (168)

• "A good sermon is like the breakfast the risen Christ prepared for his bone-weary disciples, fish cooking on coals, and bread." (168)

• "Preaching clever ideas, church programs, politics and heart warming stories is thin soup. But bringing the Word of God faithfully to people week after week is a gourmet feast, good to taste and good for the soul. Christians who hear good preaching learn to "taste and see that the LORD is good" (Ps. 34:8). They develop a taste for the Word. They love to hear the Word of God, thoughtfully prepared, lovingly presented." (169)

• "Whereas the sermon divided the church into individuals, the sacraments unite individuals with the body of Christ." (175)

• "It is simple insight that the traditions of Christianity that place heavy stress on the sacraments tend to view individuals from the perspective of the unity of the church, while the traditions of Christianity that place heavy stress on preaching tend to view the church as a collection of individual disciples."(176)

XII. Reward

• "It's just plain true that the more our world values autonomy and self-realization, the more discouraged and defeated we pastors have become. The more the world around us becomes its own eschaton, the less we will be understood and appreciated for what we do. And to the extent that we pastors accept the world's stance and attempt to become our own destinies through autonomy, the more we will despise our call and demand satisfaction now for our efforts. That's when we start trying to make stones into bread." (195)

Notable Content

• "Reading the text in its original language accomplishes two vital things. Looking at the text in its original tongue is another way to fiddle with it. It is a way of spending unhurried, inefficient time with the text. It forces me to slow down and listen more intently." (104)

• "Whereas morning prayer is praying the Psalms, wandering prayer is praying like the Psalms." (118)

• Chapter 8 delves into the topic of transference. This is one of the most important treatments of this topic I’ve read in regards to pastoral ministry, and it is extremely relevant, especially for younger pastors (129)

• "A pastor is not a symbol of God. A pastor is a parable of Jesus Christ." (143)

• "But the sacraments, whose responsibility is to unite us, become a definite threat to the unity of the church if they are celebrated willy-nilly in small groups." (178)

Notes on *The Care of Souls*

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart, Harold Senkbeil (Lexham Press, 2019)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Our primary habitus as pastors is to know Jesus and give him to others through Word and sacrament.

• "The classical texts of pastoral care have always called the cure of souls a habitus, a pastoral temperament or character worked by the Holy Spirit through his means."

• "Genuine habitus: doing all you've been given to do in the full realization that you're only an instrument for the Lord to do his work through you."(22)

• "This, I'm convinced, is the sole power for consistent ministry as pastors. We love because we have first been loved- then we in turn love others as we ourselves have been loved. We are, in a very real sense, only channels or conduits for the love of Christ that enfolds us, impels us and compels us for faithful work in service of the Great Shepherd who has laid down his life for us all." (121)

• "Our job is not to usher in perfection, but to bring people to Jesus and him to them." (180)

• "Your job is merely to bring people to Jesus and Jesus to people." (194)

Interaction 

• We are commending the person, Jesus. (14)

• Give them Jesus. (17)

• Guilt is as objective, specific, internal response to sin committed. Shame is something you wear- its the identity you take on in the aftermath of sin that either you committed or was committed against you." (140)

• When it comes to sexual desire, our calling is chastity. There's no neutral ground. It's either virtue or vice. Either fidelity (if married) or abstinence (if single)- the calling to virtue. It is a positive call- "live this way!" Not merely negative against the sin/vice- "don't do that!" (177)

• The liturgy our local church on Sundays is meant to give shape to our whole Christian lives. (188)

Table of Contents

I. The Pastoral Craft: One Farm Boy's Story

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

VI. Guilt and Shame

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

X. Christ's "Other Sheep": Mission and the Care of Souls

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

Conclusion: Joy in Office

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Preface

• "This is the secret for sustainable pastoral work: You need to realize that you've got nothing to give to others that you yourself did not receive. Jesus loves you first, then you love him back by loving his sheep and lambs in his name and stead." (xx)

I. The Pastoral Craft: One Farm Boy's Story

• "Pastors do not teach mere ideas or concepts; by their ministrations they bring Jesus himself into the hearts and lives of people ravaged with guilt, burdened with shame, and struggling under a boatload of pain in all its dimensions: physical, emotional, and spiritual."(14)

• "Wherever pastors bring the words and mysteries of Jesus, they bring Jesus himself, and he personally does the comforting." (14)

• "Whenever and wherever pastors do this work of Jesus, Jesus himself is present, even though he remains unseen." (15)

• "So then, effective and faithful pastoral ministry in each succeeding era must remain intimately connected with its essential core- the divinely given presence of Christ Jesus and the truth of his word by which alone we live. The challenge for pastors in every generation is to link the person and work of Jesus to every shifting era by means of his unchanging word- not to contextualize the message, but to textualize people into the text of Scripture, you could say." (17)

• "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 can draw inexhaustible grace every day as a pastor: In the church the Holy Spirit daily and richly forgives all your sins along with the sins of all believers." (19)

• "That's what it means to be a servant of Christ. You get your hands dirty among his earthly- and earthy- people. But you do it because you have life in your hands to give them." (25)

• "So right up front, let's start with this foundational definition: As a pastor you're above all else a true servant of Christ and steward of God's mysteries. Let that identity- that habitus- dictate everything you do and say in ministry. Then you yourself will be well served as you serve others in Jesus' name."(26)

• "What you might consider mundane routine is the very heart of your calling: to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ and to administer his life-giving sacraments. Preaching, baptizing, communing may be ordinary and God-ordained- but they are never dull." (29)

• "Have you come to realize that by your own reason or strength you can accomplish absolutely nothing in the ministry." (29)

• "Christianity is nothing more than the life and truth that God has disclosed and transmitted through the incarnate flesh of Jesus, his eternal Son." (31)

• "Pastors impart teaching that comes from the Holy Spirit of God and they bring that divinely given teaching to people who have received the Holy Spirit by faith." (33)

• "To be an agent and emissary of Jesus energizes and empowers you for active work as his servant. Just think: Christ Jesus, your Savior and your Lord, has called and commissioned you to love and serve the very sheep and lambs for whom he shed his blood and gave his life." (35)

II. What is a Pastor? The Classical Model

• "The text of sacred Scripture is at the heart of all pastoral work; the core of what we do in the diagnosis and sure of souls revolves around the word of God in written and verbal form because these in turn flow from Christ, who is the word of God made flesh." (45)

• "One divine word- incarnate, spoken, written- this is the word that you and I bring to God's people yet today as we go about the care of souls. And in that word there is life- the life of Christ for all humanity. That's why everything we do as pastors we do by means of the word of God." (56)

• "All ministry with the written word is ultimately the ministry of the one word of the Father made flesh for us and for our salvation."(56)

III. The Cure of Souls: Attentive Diagnosis

• "So the process of the cure of souls has two phases: attentive diagnosis followed by intentional treatment." (67)

• "Whenever someone is asking for my help I give them my rapt and undivided attention." (72)

• "Probably the most important skill to acquire is the art of listening to the conscience- listening accurately and spiritually, beneath the surface." (77)

• "Let's interact conversationally, responding to questions naturally and then asking our own questions appropriately." (79)

IV. The Cure of Souls: Intentional Treatment

• "Two things are indispensable, then, when it comes to serving as a spiritual physician: being attentive and being intentional. Faithful diagnosis and cure includes both. First we pay attention in Jesus' name, accurately assessing what threatens faith. Then we speak in Jesus' name, intentionally treating the underlying ailment with his healing word." (99)

• "All prayer is essentially answering speech; we as the children of God repeat back to him the word he has spoken to us. The first step in such word-based prayer is simply to echo what he has told us, repeating back to him what he has promised or commanded in that word." (106)

• "The Lord God, who has (insert his creative, redeeming and sanctifying power here) give you his blessing that you may (find required help, comfort, strength, etc.) for (purpose)- and the blessing of God Almighty: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" be with you now and forever." (109)

V. Sheep-Dogging and Shepherding: The Noble Task

• "There's nothing more important than to know Christ- that is, to believe in him and so receive life eternal in the life still to come as well as like in all its fullness already now. Everything else in all the world is peripheral to that; this alone is central." (125)

• "The New Testament word for conscience is syneidese. From its cognates this word means "to know together with," referring to a soul's perception of its standing before God. Conscience is not so much a moral compass as it is an umpire, or the capacity to see oneself as God sees you. It's conscious sensitivity toward God's judgment and grace." (128)

• "Our task as spiritual physicians is to treat bad consciences, continually delivering the healing balm of the living word of God and his life-giving sacraments." (129)

VI. Guilt and Shame

• "Remember, guilt has to do with behavior, shame has to do with being and identity. Believing himself to be disqualified as a son, he hoped to be hired as a servant instead." (140)

• "Baptism happens only once. But its significance goes on and on. For the rest of their life, every baptized child of God goes on dying and rising every day. Dying to sin but rising to righteousness, the sin addict dies and is raised again and again to live no longer as a slave but as a son within the Father's house." (149)

• "Once hiding in shame and broken by guilt, the soul emerges to live and love in wholeness and purity, made right again and purified by the shed blood of Jesus, the holy, sinless Lamb of God who was made to be sin for us that in him we might be made the righteousness of God." (152)

VII. Holiness and the Cure of Souls

• "In all your work, then, be conscious that you are nothing more- and nothing less- than an emissary of Jesus Christ." (157)

• "Sexual chastity is the gift of God's Spirit by which the powerful force of sex is first contained and then redirected, harnessed, you might say, for godly purposes. So abstinence apart from marriage and faithfulness within it is not the impossible dream, but a blessed reality for the man who in co-operation with the Holy Spirit uses his masculinity in service of God and his neighbor." (175)

VIII. Drawing Near to God: Proximity and Holiness

• "When I speak of liturgical living I mean that everything we have to give as Christians we first receive from God by entering repeatedly into his presence." (188)

• "What's true in Christian worship is also true in Christian living. There's a liturgical shape to the Christian life as well as our worship." (188)

• "Just as you and I cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ our Lord- or even come to him, so we cannot by our own works or effort make ourselves holy. Ours is an inherent, but derived holiness." (191)

IX. Invisible PowersL Spiritual Warfare

• "You've got to pay closer attention to invisible things. Behind every complication and difficulty encountered by pastors and churches, yes by every Christian, lurk the machinations and intentions of the Evil One. The devil is the sworn enemy of Christ and his church." (197)

• "Word and prayer go together for any Christian, but especially for pastors. That's why a rich life of prayer and meditation is essential" (202)

• "Jesus shows us in the Our Father how to pray as he does. He lists all the primary concerns: God's name, his kingdom, his will, our daily bread, and the forgiveness of our sins. Then significantly he concludes with two petitions that focus our attention on the spiritual battle that we're daily engaged in." (204)

X. Christ's "Other Sheep": Mission and the Care of Souls

• "Pastors are increasingly pressured to make a choice. They can either be an evangelist or a shepherd, a missionary or a pastor. Likely you've faced some pressure on this yourself either overtly or subtly, asked to choose between two options that are actually false alternatives." (221)

• "Too many sermons stop short of preaching Jesus; they are content to preach about Jesus instead." (227)

• "Christians are not called to be secret agents operation incognito, but witnesses for their Lord and Savior by their words and example." (230)

XI. The Shepherding of Shepherds

• "Everyone needs a disciplined approach to prayer." (242)

• "First the Spirit instructs us by his word and then he calls forth our reflection, thanksgiving, confession, and intercession in answer to that word." (250)

XII. Always Be Steady: Equilibrium in Ministry

• "Take courage, then, for the task before you. A pastoral habitus brings enduring joy. The work may seem exhausting, but repose awaits: rest eternal, sight unending, love undying, praise eternally resounding." (274)

Conclusion: Joy in Office

• "Love and joy are inseparably bound together in the inscrutable will of God." (279)

• "When God's love is in motion, there is joy even in the midst of sorrow." (280)

Notable Content

• Four Guideposts for Pastoral Conversation: (79-91)

  1. Faith

  2. Providence

  3. Holiness

  4. Repentance

• How to Bless:

  • As a servant of Christ you're authorized to bestow by means of a blessing any promise God makes in his word. Each blessing begins with God because he is always the actor, and the suffering soul the recipient. For example: "The Lord God, who has (insert his creative, redeeming and sanctifying power here) give you his blessing that you may (find required help, comfort, strength, etc.) for (purpose)- and the blessing of God Almighty: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" be with you now and forever." (109)

Notes on *Hearers and Doers*

Hearers and Doers: A Pastor's Guide to Making Disciples Through Scripture and Doctrine, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, (Lexham Press, 2019)

Main Idea/Takeaway

Pastors must be theologically rooted to help church members recover the primacy of Scripture in their discipleship.

• "Hearers & Doers is intended to help pastors fulfill their Great Commission to make disciples, with emphasis on the importance of teaching disciples to read the Scriptures." (Preface xi)

• "My hope is that the present book will help pastors recover Calvin's vision for theology as a help to reading the Bible in ways that enliven and encourage disciples to walk its way of wisdom." (Preface xxii)

• "To make disciples is to teach people how to become biblically literate so they can be effective inhabitants and representatives of the city of God, for the purpose of gospel citizenship." (71)

• "Accordingly, this book is a guide for hearing and reading the Bible rightly, as well as a training manual for doing the Bible rightly. The goal is to train disciples to walk around in the strange new world of the Bible even as they live in the familiar old world of the present. It is a pastor's guide for training hearers and doers, faithful followers of Jesus Christ and faithful interpreters of the Word that directs us in his Way." (71)

• "I want to examine the significance of sola Scriptura in making disciples by stressing its role in fostering the Christocentric social imaginary that makes the church a creature of the word." (99)

• "A pastor does many things, but I have argued that most of these things are forms of ministering God's word: either by speaking (preaching, teaching, counseling, praying) or enacting it (celebrating the Lord's Supper, visitation). The particular focus of the present work has been on the pastor as disciple-maker, or what I have described elsewhere as "public theologian"- one who does theology with and for people." (241)

Interaction

• Social imaginary = deep assumptions. (8)

• The negative task of theology. (9)

• What other words are shaping our people? (50)

• Pastors minister by helping people make connections in three key areas. (117)

• What is a pastor-theologian? (123)

• If we don't mature immature Christians into real disciples, who will? The church is where this must happen. This goes for all 'immature Christians' that make up a congregation. The consumers, the feminists, etc. Where do they go to become disciples? It must be the church. And so the stronger brothers must bear with the failings of the weak. (Romans 15:1)." (125)

• Preach the Bible; baptism and Lord's Supper; and people are not part of the church who shouldn't be. (127)

• This is our consumer culture, which is not 1 Timothy 6:8. (146)

• Credo-Baptism see p.218. (150)

• Lord's Supper see p.221. (151)

• "The church is most itself at Table." (221)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: Warming Up: Why Discipleship Matters

I. The Role of Theology in Making Disciples

II. Whose Fitness? Which Body Image?

III. From Hearing to Doing

IV. Doctrine for Discipleship

Part Two: Working Out: How Discipleship Happens

V. Creatures of the Word

VI. Company of the Gospel

VII. Communion of Saints

VIII. Children of God

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction:

• "In short: what it means to be biblical is inextricably related to what it means to be Jesus; disciples, and what form this discipleship should take in the twenty-first century." (xviii)

• "Doctrine, like Scripture, teaches disciples who they are "in Christ." Disciples have to understand, and remember, whose Way they belong to." (xviii)

• "Why should pastors study theology? So that they can better know whom they worship, and learn how to form others into true worshipers who know how to worship, and to walk, in spirit and truth (John 4:22-24)." (xxi)

• "Theology is about learning how to live out Christ's life in us (Gal 2:20), a life that includes cruciform wisdom (1 Cor 2:2) and resurrection power (Phil 3:10)." (xxiii)

• "The aim of evangelism is to make converts, people who believe the gospel, repent of their former way of life, a bonfire of the vanities, and face a new direction- Christward." (xxiv)

• "Making disciples involves more (but not less) than informing minds or forming habits. It also involves transforming imaginations, that is, that primary ways they see, think about, and experience life." (xxv)

• "The pastor must be a theologian: someone who can relate life in general, and the lives of his congregation, to what Scripture shows us the Father doing in Christ through the Spirit to renew creation." (xxvii)

Part One

Warming Up: Why Discipleship Matters

I. The Role of Theology in Making Disciples

• "There is probably no more damaging picture distorting our present-day lives, and our understanding of the God of the gospel, than "love." Love is often depicted as a desire to be fulfilled (romanticism) or as accepting people for who they are (inclusivism) or as loyalty to one's own people group (tribalism)." (7)

• " A social imaginary is the picture that frames our everyday beliefs and practices, in particular the "ways people imagine their social existence." The social imaginary is that nest of background assumptions, often implicit, that lead people to feel things as right or wrong, correct or incorrect." (8)

• "The doctrines we hold be they philosophical, political, or theological, feel right or wrong, plausible or implausible, based largely on how well they accord with the prevailing social imaginary or world picture. What I have called above the "negative task" of theology is to critically reflect on the way in which the church embodies the prevailing social imaginaries of the day rather than the biblical imaginary- the true story of the Triune God is doing in the world." (10)

II. Whose Fitness? Which Body Image?

• "Theology helps the church make disciples by exposing the lie- the false social imaginaries that often hold even church members captive (the negative, critical task) - and by redirecting them to the way, truth, and life of Jesus Christ (the positive, indicative task)." (14)

• "Food cults arguably replace what religion once did by prescribing... food rules and rituals. Like religion, they provide meaning in confusing situations, giving us moral guidelines and comfort." (27)

• "Pastors, too, ought to be concerned with the diet of their congregation, particularly if we stretch the term to include what kind of reading and entertainment church members imbibe on a regular basis."(42)

III. From Hearing to Doing

• "Discipleship is about becoming who we are in Christ, and this is entirely a work of God: "Therefore, is anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17)." (44)

• "Discipleship is essentially a matter of hearing (authority), believing (trust), and doing the truth (freedom) that is in Jesus Christ." (50)

• "As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: in discipleship, "Jesus is the only content." Disciples do the truth, then, by following his way and living out his life: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20)." (52)

• "To be a disciple is to hear, do, and adore what we see there, in the mirror of Scripture: the lordship of Jesus Christ." (53)

• "True disciples are awake and alert to what is going on in the world, to what is really real, namely, the "real presence" of Jesus Christ. The true story of the world, narrated in Scripture, concerns God's presence and activity." (54)

• "We agree that the imagination is a key factor in making disciples. Yet we become disciples not simply by participating in Christian liturgical practices but by participating in- living into and acting out- Scripture's canonical practices and, yes, Christian doctrine (see 1 Tim 4:16)." (56)

• "To walk in the truth is to live in accordance with the truth of the gospel, that it, the truth of the new reality that has come into being in and through Christ's person and work." (59)

• "Christian discipleship is companionship with Christ. The Christian Way is that of the long-distance walker, a long obedience in the same direction, where day in and day out, with each step we take, we choose to live in a way that follows Jesus and corresponds to the truth- our new life in him. Making disciples is a step-by-step process of helping men and women to walk the Way of Jesus Christ." (60)

IV. Doctrine for Discipleship

• "Discipleship involves waking up to the realization that there is a choice, and we must stay awake to the lordship of Jesus Christ long enough to make the right one: to obey, and thereby to exercise, like Jesus, genuine freedom." (78)

• "Feeding on God's word involves more than tasting or taking a bite; it means making a meal of it, digesting it. Eugene Peterson calls Christians to absorb and imbibe the Bible so that it seeps into all our pores." (79)

• "Reading the Bible theologically, as teaching by God, of God, and leading to God, is our best hope for breaking free of the pictures that hold us captive: consumerism, humanism, transhumanism, nihilism, existentialism, moralism, scientism, and so on- idols all, of heart and mind. Reading Scripture theologically means reading it together, in the church, in ways that lead to its readers' moral and spiritual, and sapiential formation." (85)

Part Two

Working Out: How Discipleship Happens

V. Creatures of the Word

• "Pastors must do everything they can to ensure that Scripture alone, and not some other story, serves as their congregation's essential social imaginary." (94)

• "One such insight is that the church must always be "reforming" its thought and life in accordance with the Scriptures. In particular, the church must always be reforming in order to imagine the world that the Bible imagines." (95)

• "The best way to take captive the imagination of Christians in any age is through the church's proclamation of the gospel in word and deed: in sermon, sacrament and shapes of everyday living." (103)

• "The evangelical imagination alone opens up the real possibility of living along the grain of reality: according to what is really the case "in Christ." (110)

• "As Ephraim Radner says, preaching "is a way of putting us back where we belong: into the text itself...where God's word, in all his creative omnipotence, does its work of self-giving and conformation." (115)

• "Pastors minister this needed understanding by helping people make connections in three areas: between the parts of the Bible and the overarching story; between the Bible and the world in which they live; and between who they are at the moment and who God calls them to be in Christ." (117)

• "The sermon is not a secondhand description of what is happening in a historical galaxy far, far, away. No, gospel preaching proclaims the true story of the world, acknowledging that all things are "from him and through him and to him" (Rom. 11:36). The sermon is the heavy artillery in the pastor-theologian's arsenal, and the best frontal assault on imaginations held captive by other stories promising other ways to the good life." (118)

• "Scripture alone is the ultimate story from which disciples must take their existential bearings." (119)

• "Pastors cannot know everything about everything, but they should be able to know one big thing about everything: whether or not it fosters life in Christ." (121)

• "We read the Bible in order to discern the Way of truth and life that leads to fellowship with God and human flourishing from ways of falsehood and illusion that lead only to the dead end of idolatry and human frustration." (122)

• "The pastor-theologian is a special kind of generalist a generalist who "specializes" in relating all things to the gospel of Jesus Christ in order to make disciples, especially by disciplining their imaginations to conform to the unified biblical narrative with Christ at its center." (123)

• "It takes an imagination shaped by the Bible to see one's congregation as a living temple, with each member a living stone. (1 Peter 2:5)" (124)

• "It takes a biblically formed eschatological imagination to look at a sinner and see a saint." (124)

VI. Company of the Gospel

• "The church is the biblically mandated place to make disciples." (125)

• "The Reformers also wrestled with the problem of how to recognize the tru church, and developed three criteria: the right preaching of the word, the right administration of the sacraments, and the proper exercise of discipline." (127)

• "What pastors have to say that no one else can say is not simply that there is a God bu that God has acted. The gospel is a report of something that has been done. We have news- breaking news that the kingdom of God has broken into our world in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God has acted (creating news to report) and God has spoken (the news is reliable because those who reported it were inspired by God). (129)

• "Christians today are living between the first and second comings of Jesus, in the closing scenes of Act IV, poised between memory and hope." (130)

• "Doctrine does not add content to Scripture, but it does add understanding. Doctrine develops only because the church's understanding of the biblical story and its implications has developed, just as Jesus promised it would: "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth." (John 16:13)" (133)

• "So how do we learn to get real? 'By reading Scripture theologically', that is, with the help of doctrine's ministry of understanding, and with a view to participating in the story of Scripture tells, the ongoing drama of redemption." (144)

• "Each part of the church's worship service- spoken or sung word, bath, table, prayer- focuses on some aspect of Jesus' story. Taken together, then, the liturgy is the church's spoken and enacted interpretation of the reality attested in and by Scripture. The liturgy is therefore theodramatic. It is all about rehearsing what the Triune God has done, is doing, and will do to renew creation and form a holy nation to be his treasured possession. Accordingly, the liturgy is a prime training ground for making disciples fit for theodramatic purpose." (145)

• "Everything in which we habitually participate leaves a little mark on our soul, forms our spirits, and trains our loves." (146)

• "Much of the mainstream culture in the modern and postmodern West contributes to the formation of individualist consumers who believe that certain things or experiences will complete their identity and satisfy their desire for happiness." (146)

• "Everything begins with disciples; ability to inhabit the biblical story and thus let Scripture serve as their primary imaginary." (153)

• "The point of liturgical performance is not to give disciples lines but rather to help shape their understanding of the story of Jesus of which they are a continuing part, and to prepare them to be the kind of people who want and are able to continue acting out new scenes of the same drama." (154)

• "What I am calling liturgical formation is the process of helping disciples enter into the drama to the point of becoming story-dwellers, people whose imagination is fixed on the reality of what God is doing in Christ through the Spirit to renew humanity and all creation." (160)

VII. Communion of Saints

• "sola Scriptura means that Scripture alone, as God's own set-apart discourse, is the only wholly reliable, sufficient, and final authority for the church's life and thought (including imagination). (176)

• "Pastors need to help disciples discern which doctrines are essential, requiring unity, and which are nonessential, requiring liberty (and charity)."(197)

• "Mere Protestant Christianity uses the resources of the solas and the priesthood of all believers to express the unity-in-denominational-diversity that local churches have in Christ." (201)

• "The local church, a people with canon sense and catholic sensibility, is the true end of the Protestant Reformation." (202)

VIII. Children of God

• "Christlikeness is the goal of discipleship. It is not only a way of walking but a state of being. To be more precise, it is the state of being-in, and abiding with, Christ." (204)

• "Christ is the image of God and disciples are to be images of Christ." (204)

• "The sobering truth is that much of what is going through our heads is not the story of Jesus but some other story." (209)

• "Pastors need to wake up congregations to the cultural forces that are forming their spirits, and perhaps clouding their vision." (211)

• "Learning Christ is a matter of following- or we could say practicing- Christ. It is by reading God's word, illuminated by the Spirit, that disciples learn to think rightly, see rightly, judge rightly, and act rightly, that is, in a Christlike manner." (216)

• "Wisdom means knowing what to do in particular situations in order to glorify God and follow Jesus in ways that befit faithful disciples. In a word, theological wisdom means knowing how to improvise the mind of Christ at all times, everywhere, and to everyone." (217)

• "To be in Christ is to be in the process of being restored to true humanity, a process that requires our active involvement. To put on Christ means to act out his life in us." (220)

• "The church is most itself at Table, for it is in partaking Christ's body that the church becomes Christ's body: one. In all its activities, especially the Lord's Supper, a local church in its corporate life "puts on" the spectacle of reconciliation in Christ and not only acts out but also becomes a parable of the kingdom of God." (221)

• "To take, read, and preach the Bible in the church, with an ear for the word of God to the people of God, is to read it as testimony to Christ, his person and work, his suffering and glory." (225)

• "This is our ultimate calling, our highest privilege and responsibility: to live into our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father. This is our destiny (and our predestination, Eph 1:5), to be adopted as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ." (234)

Notable Content

• "If you want to know what fuels the present-day social imaginary, follow the money: the GWI estimates that global wellness fuels $3.7 trillion economy, more than three times larger than the global pharmaceutical industry (beauty and anti-aging programs and products alone amounted to almost $1 trillion)." (18)

• See Atul Gawande's, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End , for a well articulated critique of the effects of secularization and medicalization on our concept of what it is to be well. (23)

• See Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet (27)

• See (72-75) for seven initial theses on reading the Bible theologically.

• The Four Principles of the Protestant Reformation:(96-97)

  1. The material principle: justification by faith (sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus)

  2. The formal principle: "according to the Scriptures" (sola Scriptura)

  3. The dynamic principle: the Spirit who ministers, illumines, enlivens, and unites.

  4. The final principle: a citizenship of the gospel.

• "Scripture alone ought to rule our thinking about what a pastor is and does." See (114-116) for three metaphors that pastors would do well to allow to reshape their vocational imaginations.

• Five-Act Play: World History as a Drama of Redemption

Act I: creation and its subsequent corruption

Act II: beginning from Genesis 12 and running through the rest of the OT

Act III: Jesus: God's definitive saving Word

Act IV: begins with the risen Christ sending his Spirit to create the church

Act V: last judgment and the consummation of all things

• cf. John 13. Case for Community Groups. (139)

• Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Case for Community Groups. (140)

• Five Premises of sola Scriptura: (172-173)

  1. The Bible is the word of God written in human words inspired by the Holy Spirit.

  2. God both authors and authorizes the Bible.

  3. God's word is God's discourse: something God says about something to someone in some way.

  4. Different types of discourse exercise authority in different ways over different domains.

  5. All divinely authored discourse serves the same ultimate end.

• Prioritizing public Bible reading. (198)