The Internet Monk
A Webjournal edited by Michael Spencer
Those Magnificent Young Men In Their Pastoring Machines
The contemporary pastorate has become a disaster for the church on the corner.
by Michael Spencer
"This
isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will
find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is
yours: word and sacrament."- Eugene Peterson
A senior adult friend says that the preacher doesn't preach any more. He gives these "little talks." He also said they've quit mentioning any deaths, illnesses or other prayer needs in the worship services, no matter how loyal the person was to the church over the years. The preacher doesn't visit shut-ins these days; only leaders, prospects and a few new members. Doesn't even stop in at the funeral home. And of course, they quit singing hymns long ago. The preacher told the senior adults the visitors didn't like them. He knows I'm a preacher and he wants to know what happened? Why doesn't his nice young pastor......act like a pastor?
That's quite a story.
The contemporary pastorate is a mess. With hundreds of books, conferences and seminars touting the benefits of changing the traditional church into the purpose-driven, seeker-sensitive, post-modern church, there has been little honest reporting on the resulting awkward evolution of the pastor. In my lifetime, this evolution has swept over the pastorate, replacing what was a recognizable consensus with a maze of models, and an emerging template of the pastorate that would be unrecognizable in most of Christian history.
Historically, the Protestant pastorate has always been under assault from the spirits of the age . During the initial years of the Reformation, many pastors were unconverted, and the pastor who simply occupies the position as a living is still a hazard. In many churches, the pastorate is an unsupervised profession, and so it has been a haven for the lazy and the parasitical. In American history, pastors have ranged from the erudite and educated status symbols of great churches to the ignorant, wild and violent prophets of doom on the frontier. In the modern era, Pastors often seemed to want to be anything but pastors, showing bouts of envy for academics, social workers, psychologists, writers, politicians, business managers and stand-up comedians.
The skills of the pastorate have always been exaggerated beyond the merely mortal. In Elizabethan times, one only needed to be able to read the prayer book. In the classic evangelical model, the pastor was preacher, shepherd and worship leader. As Protestantism succeeded, the pastor needed to be public speaker, administrator, therapist, fund-raiser, scholar, expert on family life, field marshal, television personality, growth expert and guru. Part of the current confusion results from the inability of churches and schools to hone the pastoral model into something that Joe Average preacher could achieve. As most every pastor knows, there is so much room for failure in the modern pastorate that competency seems virtually impossible. Pastors, more than almost any other profession, know what it is to live in constant failure.
Those Who Can't, Teach
My own seminary training was an example. I came from a church where the pastor was the preacher. His primary task was to pray, prepare and preach. Beyond that, pastoral care of the flock was expected, and he spent a sizable portion of his time in homes and hospitals. In this model, a minister's worth was really measured in loyalty to his preaching, a reasonable number of baptisms and how many funerals he was asked to do.
I attended Southern Seminary in Louisville in 1979, 82-84. The pastoral track was a completely schizoid and confused experience. The Biblical studies professors urged us to become Bible scholars of the higher critical variety. The theology faculty was throwing us the latest party from Europe. But you couldn't preach this stuff and the preaching classes never interacted with what we learned in Biblical studies and theology. It avoided it. People who didn't avoid it produced sermons that were sure to get them fired from any normal Baptist church outside the seminary's zone of "acclimated" churches.
Meanwhile, the pastoral care classes were giving us the nonsense of secular psychology and nothing from a remotely Christian model. In classes called "Leadership," we learned systems theory and why we should work with social workers and government agencies. (All that was missing was a trip to Rainbow -PUSH.) Evangelism and Missions were the shabbiest aspects of the curriculum, since they were "conservative" interests in a school that was trying to produce liberal scholars and had accumulated all the resulting contempt for whatever was most simple and obvious in ministry. If you weren't torn to pieces by this medusa of ministry identities, there was a "supervised experience in ministry" that put you in a weekly group with a "real" pastor to see what the real world was like. Fortunately, my supervisor was a good one (he took us bowling), and it did give me some hope, because they guy never once made any references to his seminary education.
The icing on the cake was what we called the "Exit" class, a ditty that everyone took on their way out the door. This class was intended to teach you how to marry, bury, baptize, serve the Lord's Supper and be a for-real, actual preacher. (Seminary in a sack.) But the liberal pastor teaching my exit class used every session to talk to us about counseling, stress and good resources for planning the calendar year. We never actually got around to learning how to do any of those things a competent pastor should know. So I graduated seminary not knowing a thing about how to marry, bury, baptize or serve the Lord's Supper. To learn that, I went back to my pastor at home, who never finished college.
It is safe to say that, at the time I went through seminary, it was a roll of the dice for the average church to get a seminary trained pastor. Who knew if you got Brother Joe or Paul Tillich? I sat under and worked with many of these men. It was not a pretty picture. In my opinion and experience, the ordinary, uneducated, bi-vocational pastor did a much better job than the men "equipped" by seminary. Considering the vast confidence churches put in their denominational schools, this was a travesty and an embarrassment.
Has anything gotten better?
The Do-It-Yourself Pastor
Today, Southern has addressed these problems, and I am impressed with what I see graduating from my alma mater. Still, the evolution of the modern pastorate has been deeply effected by the failure of seminaries to produce pastors who are balanced and competent. The rise of a new kind of pastor in the current era of Willow Creek and Saddleback Valley is an understandable evangelical response to this failure, but it is a solution with both good possibilities and deep flaws. We are still a long way from knowing how to reliably find and form a minister.
The question of an "educated ministry" has been with the church for centuries. It is not a question that is directly answered from scripture. When the issue was most hotly debated, the primary training of an educated pastor was what we today would consider a broad undergraduate education, with training in Biblical languages and guided reading in theology. Actual practice in being the pastor of a church never entered the picture in the training of a man like Jonathan Edwards. In my opinion, the idea that a man needs a 96- hour Master's degree, like my M.Div, to be a trained pastor, is ridiculous, wasteful and impractical.
Today, the trend is toward churches and mega-churches educating and training their own ministers. The major shift is towards churches saying that training, education and mentoring are possible within a congregation, in either formal or informal settings. The distance between seminary and church is more pronounced every year, as more churches use internships, institutes, Bible schools, mentoring and the Internet to train pastors and ministers. It is too early to say if this will produce a better minister, but there are good reasons to be hopeful. It would be hard to do worse than the seminary approach.
I fully endorse these options, and believe they are particularly promising for the church in the rest of the world, where college or seminary are not often possible or practical. My own Southern Baptist Founder's movement, which is generously represented at several of our seminaries, is starting an on--line educational hub, where students can study without relocation. Looking at my own education, I wish I could have gone to a general academic institution to study languages and the theological and historical background of the Bible. But by staying at seminary, much of my training for the work of the pastorate was wasted on courses and material that were mostly useless and irrelevant to the task. I would have profited greatly from being mentored by any number of modestly educated men who had a pastor's heart and skills.
The void of pastoral training today is being filled, but not by effective pastoral formation. Today's pastor is increasingly the product of the "seeker-sensitive" movement represented by Willow Creek and Saddleback Valley Churches and the thousands of churches who follow their principles. With a barrage of publishing, seminars, networks, conferences and resources, the seeker-sensitive movement has built upon the momentum of the church growth movement, and is a revolution within American Christianity. Much attention has been given to this movement's impact upon worship, but I believe its influence upon the pastorate is just as important.
What's Not to Like?
As I have met and listened to these young pastors, I have been occaisonally impressed, but mostly distressed. With the surprisingly wide reach of some Internet Monk articles, I am sure that some young pastors believe I have nothing but criticism for them and what they are doing in ministry. Nothing could be further from the truth. I recognize the love for God and the passion for reaching people that lies at the heart of so much that is done in the seeker sensitive movement. I am frequently challenged deeply by the commitment these men have to the mission of the church in the world. Their critiques of the church are frequently prophetic and often painfully true. I recognize a real spiritual quality of love for people and a concern for the church in these "seeker-sensitive" pastors.
But I must voice some serious concerns about the young pastors that I have met in the last decade. If the seeker-sensitive movement is right, then they are heroes. But if the seeker-sensitive movement is wrong, they are perpetuating, preaching and practicing painful errors that will become part of the legacy of Christianity. They are diluting the church with the worst tendencies of the culture. Many of the problems with the seeker movement are problems with its conception of the work of the pastor. By embracing the seeker movement enthusiastically and uncritically, many young pastors have devoted the authority of their position and their preaching to defending error and weakness in the church. This is serious business.
I will not surprise my regular readers when I say the root of this error comes from the seeker-sensitive movement's attitude toward the Bible. At this point, it is helpful to note two things. One, many members of the seeker-sensitive movement have realized that there is a problem in the relationship of the Bible and their version of pragmatism, and they are seeking to correct that problem. This is no small thing, and I want those who may strongly disagree with me to remember this. I have heard specific and sincere acknowledgements that the Bible must have a larger place in the seeker sensitive movement, and I believe there will be fruit from that resolve.
Secondly, the problem grows out of the relationship of the seeker sensitive movement's relationship to youth ministry as it has been practiced in America in the post-war era. As far as I know, no one has related the seeker movement to the youth ministry efforts that preceded it, but the connection is important and undeniable.
Youth ministry, in general, was the American church's great experiment with pragmatism. If it worked- i.e. got the kids interested and kept them in church- it was alright. Any honest youth minister would tell you that he or she could get away with all kinds of things that would never be done by anyone else in the church, because the church wants young people in the house. The idea of "if it works, then God will use it," was grown from youth ministry into everything that is evangelical seeker-sensitive ministry today. Most seeker churches- like Willow Creek- are grown-up youth groups. (I know, because some of them are MY youth groups.) They are doing what we taught them was OK in youth ministry, and now they are redecorating the church to suit themselves. And they are good at it.
It was not philosophical pragmatism that came into the church through youth ministry, it was evangelistic and methodological pragmatism. It was an assumption that we should do everything for the purpose of making young people comfortable. Make it all "cool." Make it personal, exciting, emotional and non-traditional. The question that wasn't adequately asked in youth ministry, or in the seeker movement, was what does the authority of the Bible mean in the life and mission of the church? Does the Bible have a method for youth ministry? Youth ministry was never seriously subjected to Biblical critiques of how it went about its business. Youth ministers- like me- weren't held accountable to Biblical standards except in the most severe of cases, and many of us resented ever being told we were going too far. It was always fun to be the outraged youth minister in a church run by Pharisees saying "no" to throwing pies in the sanctuary.
Contemporary youth ministry operated on the notion that the Bible provided the message, but pragmatism provided the methods. This is what has taken root in the seeker movement, and it is what has shaped the ministry style of contemporary seeker pastors.
Nothing characterizes modern pastors more than devotion to this idea that the Bible is a message from God, but not a method from God. When it comes to methodology, we are to use the best of contemporary wisdom and secular methods to reach the "target audience." No one would deny that there is a general sense in which God's wisdom is revealed in human ingenuity or that this may be useful. But no one who reads the New Testament could come away with the idea that we are to turn to the culture for our methods of doing church and evangelizing. The seeker movement, however, is entranced with the wisdom of the culture. Especially the wisdom that comes from marketing, management, business, public relations and psychology. The warning sirens of scripture about this kind of wisdom have gone unheeded among the seeker pastors.
Enamored by the Man
Perhaps the single most well-known statement among seeker pastors is "the purpose driven church." Just the phrase alone states the quandary. What are the purposes of the church? Where do we find them? Does the same scripture that gives us the purposes of the church give us the church's methods in pursuing those ends, or are we on our own? Even the secular press speaks with admiration of this approach with its renouncing of tradition and automatic embracing of the contemporary. In the quest to be purpose driven, the entrepreneurs who have succeeded in using worldly wisdom to build seeker churches have a special authority.
Pastors have always been a ready fan club for any pastor who is experiencing success. If a man has built a church of thousands, he will be on the speaking circuit, in the publisher's office and on the convention podium, telling the rest of us what we couldn't possibly know without him. (See "Rick Warren" in your Google search.) Like youth ministers emulating whoever has the biggest crowd, today's pragmatic pastors literally buy the sermons, programs and administrative tricks of their heroes in a binder, poised to do the same miracles in their own churches.
And so we have churches experiencing what I call the "Dictatorship of the Pragmatariat." This is the frequently intolerant approach to pastoring that often characterizes the seeker pastor's relationship with anyone who doesn't support his methods or makes the mistake of wanting to do anything the way we used to do it. Seeker pastors declare revolutions after every conference, retooling the worship service, renaming the church and reworking the entire program in the mold of their pragmatic heroes. If you can't relate or support, then you aren't interested in church growth. The old has to go and the new has to be adopted. Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War and all that.
One of my friends told me of a Sunday when their newly converted seeker pastor came back from a national conference and implemented an arsenal of major changes. The inevitable murmuring began, he took to the pulpit, and, in uncharacteristic seeker pastor fashion, told the grumblers that if they didn't agree with the changes, they should go elsewhere. This church was moving forward with what God wanted- which just happened to be getting rid of the hymnals, etc. This sort of "support it all or bail out" tactics are not unusual among the pragmatists. Sometimes, you gotta be cruel (to the members) to be kind (to the seekers.)
I once visited a church where the pastor was trying to implement contemporary praise choruses in a congregation that loved hymns and traditional rural Baptist church music. Because the seeker church down the road had hit the chorus trail, the pastor had organized a "Praise Team" but hadn't yet found a way to get rid of the choir. So on the night I visited, the "Team" did their choruses, and the choir- mostly- stood silently. (A few sat.) Then the choir got their turn, and belted out a Gospel number, followed by more "As the Deer" to a tape track. It was war. The tension was so obvious, that I suggested to the pastor that he consider two services. He proceeded to tell me the history of the struggle, and it was obvious that the "good guys" were the people who wanted the Praise Team, and the "bad guys" were the traditional sorts. Such is the legacy of pragmatism. The people who built and paid for the place are suddenly the enemy, because they won't go along with what the experts told us to do.
The seeker movement's pragmatism can be serious or silly. In one church I visited, the seeker pastor was preaching on Acts 2, and the events of day of Pentecost. This was a man who studied with me at seminary; a man with an excellent mind. But his exegesis of the whole text was this: God wanted to draw a crowd to hear the Gospel so he sent some miracles like wind and tongues of fire. So, obviously, we need to do "big" things to draw a crowd to hear the Gospel. In another church, the pastor went through a stage of believing his sermons would benefit from elaborate sets. So I would tune in just to see what giant prop was used this week. His sermons began to resemble an episode of "The Price is Right." One seeker pastor I know removed the pulpit ( a prerequisite of being serious about the seeker approach) and preached sitting on a ladder, where we could all wonder if he was going to fall off. Al Martin's contention for the dignity and gravity of the ministry was not held in high esteem, to say the least.
In fact, all of this shows why seeker pastors usually prefer to start a church from scratch: because it is such a headache to get the church on the corner to give up everything they have been doing for years and do it the way they sold us at the last conference. Most decent sized communities now have anywhere from one to twenty new churches made up of boomer members following seeker pastors into the greener pastures of the purpose driven church. Some are new starts, and some are splits. Most are way overconfident that they have the answer.
New church starts are always good news as far as I am concerned, and if the wash out of the seeker movement is thousands of new congregations, then praise God. The question is, are these congregations able to produce disciples, or are they so adept at conforming to the culture that they will not be able to transmit the Christian faith across the culture? That remains to be seen, but the contemporary version of the pastor doesn't leave me very hopeful that the faith can overcome the pragmatism that dominates today's boomer churches. What will emerge, in my opinion, will not be seeker sensitive and post modern, but will be sub-Christian and hopelessly merged with the culture.
I've Got A Question
Are pastors called to be church growth "entrepreneurs?" The contemporary pastorate seems to be all about church growth, not Christian growth. Evangelism has even been eclipsed by church growth. Worship is now about church growth. The majority of "purpose driven" churches are dominated by the agenda of growing larger. Given that church growth is an effect, not a cause, in the New Testament, what is the eventual result of retooling the pastorate to be completely about church growth? Won't the church be tempted to find a justification for embracing anything that will bring about growth? Are the skills of the entrepreneur really the tools of the pastor?
Are large churches or many churches the New Testament model? In the recent past, it was considered healthy for a large church to start many mission congregations. I served a First Baptist Church that had at least ten "daughter" churches in the community. This was not unusual in Southern Baptist life before the "seeker" church became the model, (with Saddleback Valley as an exception.) But today, churches see no reasonable limits to their size, and believe that a mega-church can evangelize the community better than many smaller churches. (The error of this assumption will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that large churches do some things well, and other things poorly or not at all.) Evidence seems to indicate that the growth of mega-churches comes at the expense of smaller churches and their ability to permeate an area with congregationalized Christians.
A large church that I think highly of recently went to two separate facilities, but both will have the same preaching by way of a video link. The eventual implications of this are disturbing, as whole denominations can form without pastoral leaders in the congregation preaching to the congregation at all. This is a solid church, but it is showing the evidences of the seeker approach to pastoral ministry.
Pastor or technician? Pragmatism requires technicians to manipulate the machine. How is it that concerns like pastoral care, theology and discipline have been replaced by worship rehearsal, administration, communications and information technology? It is hard to believe that pastoral interests have gotten even more secular than the days when every pastor wanted to be a psychologist or a political activist, but today's pastors are envious of businessmen, advertisers, technology geeks and corporate visionaries. The Gospel is a product and the world is a market niche. The Christian pastor is dying of envy.
Why do the boomers (and other niches) matter more than others? Seeker sensitive pastors have inherited the church growth mindset that identifies groups and asks questions about how those groups can best be evangelized and congregationalized. This is commendable both theologically and Biblically. The problem seems to be with the significance and influence of some groups as opposed to others. The seeker sensitive, purpose-driven pastor seems unquestioningly convinced that the boomer generation should prevail in its preferences for everything in the life of the church. As boomer sensibilities have dominated in the consumer culture of evangelicalism, it prevails in local churches, particularly in worship. Why do boomers matter so much more than the Greatest generation or other senior adults? Why is the idea of a cross generational church so difficult for today's seeker sensitive pastors? Isn't the boomers well-publicized narcissism a threat to the church's calling to pass on the faith?
What are these guys reading? What are today's pastors reading? Thankfully, there are some reading the Biblical and theological books that shape solid Biblical preaching and discipleship. But if the bigger picture is telling us anything, it is that today's pastors are consuming large quantities of junk food for the mind. The most often read books for pastors are cardboard, not steak.
Our state Baptist paper used to run a "Top Ten Books for Pastors" list every year. I always marveled that not a single one of these lists contained even one book about the Bible or classical theology. Not one! All that ever appeared on these lists were books about church growth and entrepreneurial "how-to's." Preaching and teaching in many seeker churches reflect this famine. The pew is reflecting it as well, as millions of Christians produced by the modern pastoral ministry are thoroughly pagan with the very thinnest veneer of a Christian worldview. With a focus on church growth and a bias against Biblical and theological content, many contemporary pastors are starving the flock in their drive to grow the church, all the while saying they are fulfilling the Great Commission. You know, those verses that say teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded.
What is wrong with preaching? The current pastoral crisis is most manifested in a crisis in preaching. Some of the leaders of the seeker sensitive movement have acknowledged this problem and are modeling more substantial preaching, but one will rarely find strong, distinctive, Biblical preaching among these pastors. Because they are enamored with the pragmatic assumptions of the seeker movement, contemporary pastors seem unable to appreciate the scriptural model of expository, didactic preaching and are wholesale customers for anything that communicates with the preferences of the "niches." Not only has traditional "preaching" as a ministry taken a hit, many distinctive and necessary Christian doctrines have never been heard in seeker circles. Seeker preachers are convinced that their audiences want low key, high humor, low content, high application, motivational, short, entertaining talks given by a man who constantly walks around the room.
Historically, the pulpit has been attacked by the secular critics. Today, traditional preaching is under attack by the new generation of pastors. Preaching needs constant reformation, but that reformation needs to come from scripture, not MTV and SNL.
Whatever happened to worship? I can't move on without acknowledging that the contemporary seeker pastors have contributed to a gutting of worship. The "worship wars" are a most necessary battle, because many churches have now become audiences for a show that is called worship. With video entertainment on the big screen, a band playing CCM for the boomers and an outlined stand-up routine for a sermon, many churches have abandoned Biblical worship entirely. Evangelicalism had the ax at the root of this tree by allowing revivalism to take over much of their own approach to preaching and worship, but the seeker movement finished the job. The secular concert or club scene, not the Biblical drama of redemption, dominates in the worship of many pastors who are committed to the new approach.
Can the contemporary pastor recover from the confusion the seeker movement has brought to the work of the undershepherd of Christ? I believe real, lasting, irreparable damage has been done, and thousands of young people will enter the pastorate under these assumptions and experience failure, while millions will sit under ministries that choose to starve the flock in favor of church growth. I believe the traditional churches that bring in these pastors are going to be torn into factions and see much painful pastoral turnover. But, at the same time, I believe the reform of the church and the work of the pastor are hopeful trends, precisely because many churches and young pastors know that the way forward cannot be down the seeker-driven path.
Whatever happened to the church? Many seeker pastors actually have a strange dislike for the church itself. It goes beyond just getting away from the traditional building and trappings. It is defining Christianity as a movement and not as a local community of believers. It is this impulse that has ripped away denominational labels and left Christians with the idea that every "Community Church" believes the same, generic message. In fact, church membership, church discipline, church continuity- all are non-starters with the seeker crowd. Longtime BHT readers know well my insistence that a church must have a confession, a covenant and a constitution to move away from just being an audience or a gathering of semi-interested persons. This conception of the church is no-go with the seekers. Theology on Tap on Thursdays at the pub is the church as much as Sunday morning at the sanctuary. Our definition of church has to be more sophisticated than both of these. Without the identity, boundaries and definition of specific local fellowships, Christianity will die.
A Last Word: The Volatile Mix
Before I end this essay, I need to mention that I am beginning to see a volatile mix occurring between the pragmatism of the seeker-sensitive approach and the quasi-Gnosticism of the Charismatic movement. These two streams of evangelicalism share a low regard for scripture's authority in anything other than the essential Christian message. The seeker movement's pragmatism looks to the culture while the charismatic movement increasingly looks to experience and "prophecy" for their visions of the church and their direction for pastoral ministry.
The results are distressing. More and more churches are becoming almost unrecognizable as Christian fellowships. As if the pressure of church growth pragmatism was not enough, there is an increasing pressure in the pastorate to generate spiritual experiences. Out from under all forms of authority except the direct authority of the Spirit, an increasing number of pastors are free operators who glibly claim divine direction for any idea that suits them. (I recently asked a young pastor to follow some guidelines our school has for the use of the invitation. Though he was a guest preacher and had just arrived the day before, he told me, "The Holy Spirit is my authority and I have to do what he tells me to do." And he was Southern Baptist.)
Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God books have contributed to the idea that a single pastor and his subjective impressions about what "God is doing" are sufficient for any pastor to claim God's authority and endorsement. Blackaby's idea are persuasive and appealing. No doubt, this model will see results, but it will hurt churches and further push the already damaged template of the Biblical pastor into the fringe. Blackaby needs to come to grips with the potential for fanaticism in his approach, and bring a few thousand pastors back to earth.
My own pastoral experience was most deeply influenced by knowing many solid, faithful pastors, often in small churches. While the model of pastoral ministry in my SBC upbringing was flawed- particularly in its emphasis on having only one, full-time pastor for a church and in emphasizing church growth far too much- it was sufficiently faithful for me to know that a pastor's ministry is defined by scripture and is lived out in loving the Church as Christ loved it. I patterned my life after preachers who preached the Bible, taught the congregation, visited the shut-ins, shepherded the flock, believed in prayer and kept ministry in balance. If I had grown up under the current crop of pastors, I would not have seen these things. I may have been just as deeply drawn to the ministry, but I would have a very different conception of it.
One of my mentors told me that when the church lays hands on a minister, they are calling him to remain faithful when they are not. Today's pastors are running after a vision of the church that does not come from the church at all, but from cultural capitulators on the fringes of the church. This is the church's loss and a tragedy in the body of Christ. God's plan is for his pastors to represent Christ and to equip His people with word and ministry to be faithful followers of Jesus.
Today's pastor's aren't servants as much as they are experts. They don't so much love the church as they are energized by what they can lead the church to do. By seeing everything in the church as a means to an end, the end becomes all the more important. On that note, scripture is clear. Ephesians 3:21 "To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever."
I would like to invite anyone who is interested in reading a far different, far more Biblical view of the pastoral calling than you will get from anyone else, to read the Pastoral writings of Eugene Peterson. Peterson saw it all coming far ahead of his time. I enthusiastically recommend his books such as The Contemplative Pastor, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work and Working the Angles, among many others. All his writings are full of a rich and full view of the pastorate.