Quotes About Pastoral

The truth of faith is not articulated in offering reasons for suffering, but rather in drawing alongside those who suffer, standing with them, and standing up for them. This is pastoral care at its most luminous.

Gregory of Nazianus taught around AD 370: "The responsibility of pastoral office is great indeed, and no one ought to enter who has not deeply examined motive and ability, who has not struggled against call in the face of godly demands of office and the frailty of mere humanity.

But by the end of the first century there is evidence to suggest that his surviving correspondence began to be collected into a Pauline corpus, which quickly circulated among the churches—first a shorter corpus of ten letters and soon afterwards a longer one of thirteen, enlarged by the inclusion of the three Pastoral

A good pastor knows when they can't put two sentences together.

La vida pastoral de otro tiempo vuelve a hallarse aquí; la misma vida bíblica, con toda su sencillez y su grandiosidad.

It seems to me that in a pastoral situation our first risk is to throw people back on themselves with exhortations and instructions as to what to do, and how to do it... [Actually we are] to direct people to the Gospel of Grace—to Jesus Christ, that they might look to Him to lead them, open their hearts in faith and in prayer, and to draw them by the Spirit into His eternal life of communion with the Father

parents, and Christian believers when their communities and environment are destroyed by corporations seeking profit? These are the questions of pastoral theology.

A. W. Tozer once wrote, "Do you know who gives me the most trouble? Do you know who I pray for the most in my pastoral work? Just myself."28

My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into the kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Rightly understood, Christian theology has a pastoral dimension to its task. The agenda to be addressed by a well-formed theology is a broad one, but it certainly includes the deepest hopes and fears that arise out of the day-to-day concerns of the community of faith.

The best and the most talented in the pastoral ministry and in denominational hierarchies harm themselves and harm the church most through their unrestrained ego and unwillingness to step off the high places. Sexual sin gets the press, but ego sin kills the church.

Since it is so difficult in the concrete to judge what is and is not "mortal sin," and who is and is not subjectively guilty of it, we should choose pastorally not to make that judgment except in extreme and obvious cases. Then Eucharist would be recognized again as what it really is: not just the "bread of angels," but on this earth the strengthening food and sacrament of sinners.

As a priest of forty years, I find that much of the spiritual and pastoral work of churches is often ineffective at the levels of real transformation, and calls forth immense passivity and even many passive-aggressive responses

The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green - the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne.

Pastoral care cannot be reduced to ethics, and ethics cannot be reduced to pastoral care. If we reduce our care to ethics, we will lack empathy, love, and understanding in applying ethical norms to people's lives; if we reduce ethics to pastoral care, we will end up with a minimalistic ethic of shallow love or humanistic care.

If pastors are not ready at all times to preach, they are neglecting one of their principle responsibilities. Pastors

Pastors are to comfort, rebuke, correct, encourage, and instruct those who are in spiritual need. In order to be effective in biblical counseling, pastors must first visit with God before they visit with others. They must receive counsel from the Scriptures before they become competent to counsel others. Counseling is to come from the overflow of a heart that has been saturated with the Word of God.

I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.

The task of pastoral ministry, above all else, is to arrange contingencies for an encounter with the divine.

Quand j'étais petite, je gardais les vaches; maintenant ce sont elles qui me gardent…

Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.

Protestants now recognize that the Reformation itself had deeply pastoral roots. The concern was not for the reformation of doctrine and the church as such, but for the care of people in their lives before God, with the realization that thinking wrongly about God leads us to live wrongly.

Most of the early monks were not ordained. It was the pastoral work they undertook with the faithful that, over the centuries, gradually led to the present situation in which most monks are ordained priests.