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Pastor: Revised Edition is unavailable, but you can change that!

Ordained ministry, says Will Willimon, is a gift of God to the church—but that doesn't mean that it is easy. Always a difficult vocation, changes in society and the church in recent years have made the ordained life all the more complex and challenging. Is the pastor primarily a preacher, a professional caregiver, an administrator? Given the call of all Christians to be ministers to the world,...

Contemporary ministry has been the victim (or the beneficiary, depending on how one reads our history) of images of leadership that are borrowed not from scripture but from the surrounding culture—the pastor as CEO, psychotherapeutic guru, or media savvy hipster. One of the challenges of the ordained ministry is to find those metaphors for ministry that allow us appropriately to embody the peculiar vocation of Christian leadership. Uncritical borrowing from the culture’s images of leadership can