DiscipleshipMiller takes Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi as the question that follows every pastor home: who do you say that I am? A conference address mixing personal story with theological seriousness, reflecting on living and ministering east of Eden, between hell's gates and the keys of the kingdom.
At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a meditation on identity, ministry, and what we hope to leave the generation that follows.
Two PCUSA amendments are heading to presbyteries for ratification, and Andrews lays out exactly what they say, what they don't say, and what's at stake. Drawing on his father's prayer that he be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove, he urges presbyters to be both.
Parish ministry is one of the most demanding journeys a person can take. Ray writes to encourage those discerning the call, and the older ministers who tend them, with a reminder that the calling is never private: it is always the church's gift to one of its own.
Ray opens with a Boy Scout sea voyage to Austria as a fifteen-year-old, the moment a curious kid first met big questions. The address builds from that memory toward an invitation: theology as combat in the best sense, the place where serious questions actually get fought through.
Forty years into ministry, Bullock offers six observations about how Presbyterians have trained their pastors and where the model has thinned out. Stewardship of time, the witness of unlikely converts, and the irreplaceability of mentors all show up on his list.
COVID-era ministry left pastors asking questions they'd never had to ask before. Brown sets the pandemic alongside cultural upheavals over identity, race, and politics, and offers practical reminders for ministry that hold up no matter which kind of change is washing over the room.
Ray opens with himself as a fifteen-year-old on a weather-beaten ship bound for Austria, the journey on which he first noticed how much words could carry. The piece works toward a theology of language: words as one of the gifts that lets us think God's thoughts after him.
Billings is dying of cancer, and the bones inside him are described by a doctor as 'like Swiss cheese.' He writes about how Christians and the wider culture talk about death, and why those two ways of talking diverge so sharply at the end.
Church-leadership conferences offer endless cures for stagnant congregations: webinars, restructuring, mergers, branding consultants. Ray draws on John Leith and a long memory to question whether any of these have actually produced what they promise, and to point toward what historically has.
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.
Nixon learned the limits of video calling during a long-distance courtship: the format is a poor substitute for actually being together. She brings that lesson to bear on the COVID-era church, where Zoom worship and live-streamed sacraments couldn't fill the space the gathered body of Christ left behind.
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