Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Letters to a Young Pastor: Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace
    Letters to a Young Pastor: Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace
    Letters to a Young Pastor: Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    Letters to a Young Pastor: Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace

    By Ian Stackhouse

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Speaking out of twenty-seven years of pastoral ministry, Ian Stackhouse writes a series of letters to a young pastor just starting out. Responding to the various challenges his young charge faces in the first few years of congregational leadership, Letters to a Young Pastor is something of a spiritual reflection on leadership in the context of Christian ministry. To say that the letters are addressed to a fictitious pastor is not to say that the issues are unreal. Letters to a Young Pastor addresses matters that anyone in leadership eventually has to face. It seeks to offer encouragement and practical wisdom, but also an insight into the inner world of a person wrestling with the demands of a vocational life. In this sense, Letters to a Young Pastor has relevance to anyone who is seeking to remain faithful to a calling, whether ecclesial or not, in a world dominated by consumerism, formulas, and success.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2019
    ISBN9781532663437
    Letters to a Young Pastor: Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace
    Author

    Ian Stackhouse

    Ian Stackhouse is Senior Pastor of Guildford Baptist Church, he is the author of The Day is Yours, The Gospel Driven Church and a contributer to the book, Remembering our Future, he is active in the Deep Church movement in the UK - Editorial Review.

    Read more from Ian Stackhouse

    Related to Letters to a Young Pastor

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Letters to a Young Pastor

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Letters to a Young Pastor - Ian Stackhouse

      9781532663413.kindle.jpg

      Letters to a Young Pastor

      Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace

      Ian Stackhouse

      11697.png

      Letters to a Young Pastor

      Reflections on Leadership, Community, and the Gospel of Grace

      Copyright ©

      2019

      Ian Stackhouse. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6341-3

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6342-0

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6343-7

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Stackhouse, Ian, author.

      Title: Letters to a young pastor : reflections on leadership, community, and the gospel of grace / by Ian Stackhouse.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

      2019

      Identifiers:

      isbn 978-1-5326-6341-3 (

      paperback

      ) | isbn 978-1-5326-6342-0 (

      hardcover

      ) | isbn 978-1-5326-6343-7 (

      ebook

      )

      Subjects: LCSH: Pastoral theology | Christian leadership | leadership | Church work

      Classification:

      bv652.1 s71 2019 (

      print

      ) | bv652.1 (

      ebook

      )

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      03/18/19

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Preface

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Letter 1: On having a proper job

      Letter 2: The burden of a reputation

      Letter 3: Be yourself

      Letter 4: On the possession of many books

      Letter 5: Vision statements and all that

      Letter 6: Making friends in the church

      Letter 7: Finding a confessor

      Letter 8: The thrill of a funeral

      Letter 9: Down by the river

      Letter 10: The power of the one

      Letter 11: Weekend woes

      Letter 12: We’re all flawed

      Letter 13: Mastering ceremonies

      Letter 14: Quotidian mysteries

      Letter 15: Protecting your vocation

      Letter 16: Theological table talk

      Letter 17: Safeguarding

      Letter 18: Love the church you have been given

      Letter 19: Hospital visits

      Letter 20: The numbers game

      Letter 21: Early morning prayer

      Letter 22: Going to Colombia

      Letter 23: Preach the word

      Letter 24: Striking the rock

      Letter 25: Creating a hinterland

      Letter 26: Youth churches

      Letter 27: Tough love

      Letter 28: Church hopping

      Letter 29: On homosexuality

      Letter 30: Keep Sabbath

      Letter 31: Following the promptings

      Letter 32: Children of the manse

      Letter 33: The anxiety of counselling

      Letter 34: A few words about worship

      Letter 35: Ministry without strings attached

      Letter 36: Dedications

      Letter 37: Professional detachment

      Letter 38: Summer’s here

      Letter 39: Regrettable decisions

      Letter 40: I don’t like September

      Letter 41: Christianity is not a course

      Letter 42: Falling in love with the pastor

      Letter 43: Churches in your backyard

      Letter 44: A treatise on emails

      Letter 45: The imperative to love

      Letter 46: Preaching after a row

      Letter 47: Justice and spirituality

      Letter 48: Vocational holiness

      Letter 49: Spiritual elites

      Letter 50: The minister’s spouse

      Letter 51: The ethics of listening

      Letter 52: Disputable matters

      Letter 53: The genius of your church

      Letter 54: Ours is a strange profession

      Letter 55: Change is a slow business

      Letter 56: Resignation blues

      Letter 57: On taking pets seriously

      Letter 58: The pressure to heal

      Letter 59: The minister as parable

      Letter 60: On mentors and friends

      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.

      —Dave Hansen, The Art of Pastoring

      Preface

      The writing of these letters coincided with twenty-five years of being called to pastoral ministry. They provided an opportunity to give thanks to God for his faithfulness in keeping me through the ups and downs of church life. They also gave me an opportunity to reflect deeply on what it means to pursue what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls life together in the context of an increasingly consumerist, chronically individualistic, society. It is my hope that these letters will encourage a new generation of pastors in the church to hold fast to the best of their vocational instincts.

      Acknowledgements

      Throughout my Christian life, which began in my late teens, I have been fortunate to have had a number of really great pastors: Peter Scott, who was the pastor of Immanuel Church during my time in Durham as an undergraduate; John Putman, who led the Kings Church Staines, and who gave me my first opportunity to preach while I was still teaching at nearby Kingston Grammar School; and Stuart Reid, under whose ministry I came to faith in my late teens, and who I eventually worked with as an Assistant Pastor straight after Bible college about ten years later. There have been countless others as well, who have helped shaped my life in more ways than they could possibly know (and more ways than I am probably aware of). But my particular thanks, on this occasion, goes to Dave Hansen, who in fact retired from pastoral ministry last year, and whose reflections on the vocation of pastoral ministry are quite simply the best thing you will ever read on the subject. But for his first book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without All the Answers, I think I would have left the ministry fairly early on. So disillusioned had I become with the executive models of leadership that were popular among evangelicals in the nineties, I decided, at the point at which I was being asked to lead the church at Amersham, either to leave the ministry and find myself a proper job, or, alternatively, find a different way of leading the church—one that was more congruent with the classical notions of prayer, scripture, and spiritual direction.

      That I chose the latter was mainly due to the publication of Dave’s book. I read it in one sitting and literally cried my way through the whole thing. Thrashed out in the context of two small churches in the backwoods of Montana, he was describing a vocational life that I had very much felt called to but which I couldn’t seem to attend to very well because of all the other pressures that modern pastors have to face, most notably church growth.

      To be fair, I had already read a good deal of Eugene Peterson, who Dave knew well in fact, and who in many ways blazed the trail in terms of a recovery of pastoral ministry. Dave wouldn’t mind me saying that. Furthermore, I had some great mentors in people like Stuart Reid, who I mentioned earlier, Philip Greenslade, and a dear man called Frank Matthews, who had the dubious task of supervising me through the first few years of ministry. In their different ways, all three men tried to help me overcome the pressures they knew only too well from their own experience of leading churches, and encouraged me to stay true to the gospel. But at that moment in time what I needed (what we all needed, in fact) was a voice from outside of my world—across the pond, as it turns out. And in the providence of God, it was Dave’s book, as well as his subsequent books on the church and on prayer, and then of course the wonderful gift of his friendship that formed soon after, that provided the voice. The Art of Pastoring gave me the courage to leave behind the world of targets and trends and simply immerse myself in the life of the church. It was like a second conversion, and like all true conversions I have never looked back.

      Hence, I should like to dedicate these letters, which are in essence my own condensed reflections on pastoral ministry, to Dave and his dear wife Debbie, who has been Dave’s mainstay through the years of being a pastor, as my own wife Susanna has been mine. It’s not easy being married to a person with a vocation, made more difficult for both women by the existential angst their men carry, even on a good day. But I thank God for you Dave, thank you for the many times you have listened to my struggles, for the many wonderful conversations about P. T. Forsyth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and, finally, for all those complimentary tickets to see the Cincinnati Reds. What a boondoggle!

      Introduction

      When I mentioned to friends that I was writing a series of letters from a senior minister to a new minister, the reply I received, almost without exception, was: "Oh, like The Screwtape Letters." It is a strange comparison, to be sure, unless of course one thinks of one’s minister as something of a devil. Nevertheless, I took it as a compliment,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1