Pastoral Theology In The Baptist Tradition

A veteran Baptist pastor and ministry professor offers a distinctive free church vision for pastoral leadership, attending to voices from the past four centuries as they speak about the practice of ministry. The book contains theological reflection on current ministry issues among Baptists based on biblical and historical foundations and reflects a diversity of Baptist life across time and around the world, including many different voices. Each chapter contains reflection questions to help readers consider the implications of Baptist thinking.

The study of lived religion is an enterprise which attempts to elucidate how 'ordinary' men and women in all times and places draw on religious behavior, media, and meanings to make sense of themselves and their world. Through the influence of liberation theology and postmodernism, pastoral theologians_like other scholars of religion_have begun more closely to examine the particularity of religious practice that is reflected through the rubric of lived religion. Pastoral Bearings offers up ten studies that exemplify the usefulness of the lived religion paradigm to the field of pastoral theology. The volume presents detailed qualitative research focused on the everyday beliefs and practices of individuals and groups and explores the implications of lived religion for interdisciplinary conversation, intercultural and gender analysis, and congregational studies. Reflecting upon the utility of this approach for pastoral theological research, education, and pastoral care, the studies collected in Pastoral Bearings demonstrate the importance of the study of lived religion.

Purves proposes a thoughtful reading of early classical texts to provide insight into contemporary pastoral work.

In this book, Gordon Heath and James Dvorak bring together three traditions that are not often brought together under one roof: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. Authors from a number of Protestant traditions, as well as one from Orthodoxy and one from Catholicism, have contributed to a volume that provides a grander vision of the diversity of the church as well as a deeper sense of the differences that divide and the similarities that unite. This book provides a much-needed and helpful forum for a variety of Christian positions to be presented and defended so that Christians can at least operate out of understanding rather than ignorance. The authors also hope that such understanding will nudge people closer together as baptized followers of Jesus Christ. The gracious spirit of each contributor to this volume indicates that it is possible. All contributors in this volume write about their own tradition, and a number write not just as academics but also as ordained leaders in their churches. The insider's perspective that each author brings allows passionate presentations of each perspective but also committed defenses of the same.

While many pastoral ministry books focus on the practical duties of the pastor, few works actually consider how theological truth defines the pastor’s role and responsibilities. These pragmatic ministry tools, though instructionally beneficial, essentially divorce biblical doctrine from ministerial practice. As a result, pastors’ lives and ministries often lack the theological roots that provide the stability and nourishment necessary to sustain them. Pastoral Theology constructs a theological framework for pastoral ministry that is biblically derived, historically informed, doctrinally sound, missionally engaged, and contextually relevant. By using traditional theological categories the authors explore the correlation between evangelical doctrine and pastoral practice. Through careful theological integration they formulate a ministry philosophy that defines the pastoral office and determines its corresponding responsibilities in light of theological truth. The authors provide a theological understanding of the pastorate that will equip aspiring pastors to discern and pursue their calling, challenge younger pastors to build on ministerial truth instead of ministerial trends, and inspire seasoned pastors to be reinvigorated in their passion for Christ and his church.

Baptists' Timothy George and David S. Dockery update and substantially reshape their classic book in an effort to preserve and discover the Baptists' “underappreciated contribution to Christianity's theological heritage.” George and Dockery have re-arranged this volume—considerably abbreviated from the seven-hundred page first edition—in light of the Southern Baptist identity controversy.

The New Guidebook for Pastors is written in the tradition of classics like Criswell’s Guidebook for Pastors. But since most pastoral guidebooks available today date back to 1980 or earlier, this new resource by Mac Brunson and James W. Bryant will offer fresh experience-based encouragement to all pastors in their pursuit of excellence and development in their God-called profession. Among the twenty chapters are "The Pastor and His Call," "The Pastor and His Family," "The Pastor and His Staff," "The Pastor and Worship," "The Pastor and Finances," "The Pastor, Wedding, and Funerals," "The Pastor, Politics, and Moral Issues," and "The Pastor and His Denomination."

Classifying pastoral care as an applied theology suggests that it stems from a separate and pure theology. In this new volume, R. John Elford contends that pastoral concerns and actions are not products of theology, but in fact are the catalysts that prompt and necessitate it. Elford offers a detailed critical analysis of the relationship between theology and pastoral care and compares how different faith traditions understand the pastoral. He traces how shifting historical circumstances and perceptions of pastoral need spurred changes in theological understanding, and he asserts the need for these traditions to be in conversation with modern culture. In closing, The Pastoral Nature of Theology considers the role of morality in pastoral care and how contemporary issues often bring about profound theological problems.