raben_76325's review
3.0
Book 125 of 2020: Seminary is often a time of information overload as students learn about the Bible in an in-depth way, often including the original languages in which the Bible is written. However, many new pastors, when they get to their first pastorate, look around them and see practical things that they don’t know and wish they had learned in seminary.
This book assembles fifteen essays to address fifteen of these issues. Issues range from how to teach your kids to love the church, what do do when your church is dying, how to manage conflict, and what to do when you can’t get a job. This gives the book a very eclectic mix of practical advice that would be excellent for new pastors (and maybe a good refresher for more experience pastors).
Even though I am not called to pastoral ministry, I found several ideas that were helpful in this book’s pages. I kept putting this book down for other books though because of the way the chapters were formatted. Each chapter gives advice in the form of a list or bullet points. I think some pastors might find that helpful, but to me, it gave the book a whole self-help article kind of feel, and I just can’t reconcile that with the nature of the advice given. Spiritual progress and success runs along a very different timetable than success in other areas of life, and reducing decisions, such as whether or not to accept a ministry call, is a little distasteful to me.
This book assembles fifteen essays to address fifteen of these issues. Issues range from how to teach your kids to love the church, what do do when your church is dying, how to manage conflict, and what to do when you can’t get a job. This gives the book a very eclectic mix of practical advice that would be excellent for new pastors (and maybe a good refresher for more experience pastors).
Even though I am not called to pastoral ministry, I found several ideas that were helpful in this book’s pages. I kept putting this book down for other books though because of the way the chapters were formatted. Each chapter gives advice in the form of a list or bullet points. I think some pastors might find that helpful, but to me, it gave the book a whole self-help article kind of feel, and I just can’t reconcile that with the nature of the advice given. Spiritual progress and success runs along a very different timetable than success in other areas of life, and reducing decisions, such as whether or not to accept a ministry call, is a little distasteful to me.
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