Learning and the Life of the Pastor

Excellent newspaper journalism and biography are not the only components of a lifelong learning plan of reading for the pastor. Fiction and poetry can also contribute to the sustaining of pastoral minitry. Here, of course, the possibilities are virtually endless. Engaging and illuminating novels include Pulitzer Prize winners Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2005), Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998). Many other contemporary novelists are especially suggestive when exploring the implications of grace in human communities. Wendell Berry’s wonderful series of novels about the fictional but recognizable town of Port Williams is a rich and enjoyable collection that yields heartwarming and heartbreaking accounts of faith, perserverance and community. Port Williams is a landscape of pastoral imagination. Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, The Memory of Old Jack and Andy Catlett: Early Travels are some of the novels in this series. Each breaks open in fresh and sometimes startling ways the issues that pastors deal with every day. My own understanding of living faithfully with the promises we make, promises that pull in their wake both joy and suffering, has forever been changed by a reading and then a rereading of Jayber Crow.

A lifelong learning plan will include many other goals as well, all of which can contribute to a healthy and long life of pastoral ministry. But there is hardly a more enjoyable learning plan than the steady reading of wonderful novels and nonfiction. Both pastor, in sermon preparation and pastoral care, and congregation, in listening and discussing, will learn to spot the deep incarnational resemblances between the themes of the gospel and the themes of human experience and observation. The sustaining of pastoral ministry through reading will, in fact, support both pastor and people.

Adapted from Best Advice, William J. Carl III, editor. Copyright © 2009 by Westminster John Knox Press. Published by Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville,Kentucky. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.