42 articles from 34 issues, 1996 to 2026 · Page 2 of 4
A year into the pandemic, Burnett surveys what Western churches have learned about themselves: the limits of technology, the costs of physical absence, and the question every pastor is now sitting with: will the people actually come back?
Three months into pastoral ministry, Nixon noticed that her seminary theology courses turned out to be more practical than the courses labeled 'practical theology.' This conference address asks why, and what congregations lose when academic theology gets quietly dismissed as impractical.
Pastors are asked to be administrators, therapists, CEOs, organizers, and visionaries, and many are exhausted. Burnett interviews Burgess, Andrews, and Small about their book recovering the ancient practice of a pastoral rule, examining lives from Augustine to Bonhoeffer for what shaped fruitful ministry.
Earl Palmer has been called the best expository preacher in America of his generation. Burnett interviews him at age eighty-five about how he came to faith at Cal Berkeley, what shaped his approach to the text, and what he wants the next generation of preachers to keep alive.
How did Calvin actually understand pastoral care? Willis works from Calvin's commentary on John 10, where Christ alone is the shepherd and human pastors serve only in a derivative sense, and shows what that subordination meant for the daily work of caring for souls.
War is hell, but coming home is its own hell. Tietje, a chaplain to combat veterans, listens to soldiers without a narrative for what they've lived, and finds in Holy Saturday the strange grace that the gospel has already descended into the hell of being lost.
Irenaeus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, Calvin: a remarkable continuity runs through the church's understanding of what pastors are for. Burnett gathers their voices into a single conversation about the care of souls and asks what's been quietly dropped from the trade in our time.
The Christmas story turns on small things: an old couple visited by an angel, a young woman of little standing, a manger. Gatewood follows that pattern as a calling for the church: to love the small, since this is precisely how the Mighty One came to be among us.
The third and final part of Laverentz's series on the elder as shepherd. Drawing on the original 1788 PCUSA Constitution, he sketches what eldering as soul-care could look like in a twenty-first-century congregation, and what's at stake when the office shrinks to corporate-board duties.
Part two of the elder series opens with an 1898 Kansas City session quietly addressing one of their elders' moral failure with the kind of pastoral seriousness modern church courts have largely abandoned. Laverentz reads the case as a lost grammar of shepherding.
Burgess works through baptism in the form of a parish dialogue: Martha worries the congregation doesn't follow up, Jerry's too busy, Lisa's not sure baptism matters, Max thinks it's mostly welcome. The conversation works toward a shared theology of what the church is doing when it pours water.
Burnett uses Eugene Peterson's lesser-known The Wisdom of Each Other to think about the church as a supernatural community. Peterson's old friend Gunnar shows up after forty years of silence, ready to quit competing with God and join him, and the letters that follow are a quiet education in faith.
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