Starting a New Pastorate During a Global Pandemic

I became pastor of a church and three weeks later the quarantine started. I had been searching for a church for about four months, but then everything came together remarkably fast. I candidated, the next day we sold our house, and a week and a half later I had my first day. My wife and […]

The Pastor and his Family

Pastors get asked a lot of questions when they sit down with a church search committee, as they should. Extending an invitation to a pastor is a big deal for both the church and the pastor. The range of questions they typically ask will no doubt vary from church to church, but one question that […]

Interview on Small-town Ministry

About a month ago, the Gospel Coalition published my article Small-town Ministry is Big with Opportunity. To say the least, I was surprised by the response. Several pastors and leaders contacted me from all over the place to thank me for the article and spoke of how it encouraged them. But the biggest surprise was when […]

Some Reflections on Blogging

I started this blog exactly 10 years ago today. I was still in my first year of pastoral ministry and blogging was becoming popular so I thought, why not give it a try? Since then, there have been seasons where I have blogged quite frequently and other seasons where I have blogged rather infrequently. A […]

The Pastor and Personal Holiness

“My people’s greatest need is my personal holiness.” So wrote Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843), an influential Scottish pastor of his time. If you were to survey pastors today and ask them this simple question: “what do you think the greatest need of your congregation is?” I suspect you would get a whole host of different answers, […]

Some Lessons Learned From 10 Years of Pastoral Ministry

Hard to believe, but this past May marked my 10thanniversary in pastoral ministry. This has been a deeply gratifying and rewarding experience and I am grateful to God for His call upon my life. While in some ways I am still just a beginner in ministry, there have been many lessons learned during my first […]

Preach the Word and Love the People

I will never forget a conversation I had with one of my seminary professors shortly before I graduated. I had already accepted a call to serve as pastor of a small rural church in Ohio and was eager to hear what he (a former pastor) had to say. I asked him, “what advice he would […]

The Call of God

I have always been fascinated by the bible passages where the call of God is given directly to His chosen servant. Let me give you a few examples. Moses: “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, Who […]

Billy Graham’s Biggest Regret

As the tributes have poured in from all over the world following the death of the renowned evangelist Billy Graham, I remembered back to an interview he did with Greta Van Sustern a few years ago. In one of the questions, Sustern asked Graham, “If you were to do things over again, would you do […]

Bible Verses for Pastoral Visitation

An important aspect of pastoral ministry is that of visitation. Pastoral visitation will be done in a number of different contexts, but whatever the venue and whatever the situation, pastors need to be ready to minister the Word to those in need, especially when it comes to visiting and ministering to the sick. In his […]