Tag: Pastor
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Scaredy-Cats
Last night our old cat jumped onto the couch next to the four-year-old as he sat with Maggie, listening as she read his bedtime story. This cat, the epitome of scaredy-cat, has never done this before. In the dozen or so years that we’ve had her, she has spent about 90% of her time in hiding:…
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Ordination Testimony
This summer I’ll be ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Covenant Church. On Friday I gave the following testimony about my call to ministry to a regional gathering of Covenant pastors. The best thing about the call to vocational ministry is also what makes this call so hard. In Ephesians…
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The Strangeness of Being a Pastor
Being a pastor isn’t the hardest job – not by a long shot. I can think of many, many jobs that seem far more demanding. Even so, it is a strange vocation without much cultural equivalency. It’s only after ten years in the ministry (as we pastors call it) that I don’t dread the What do you…
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Dangerous Calling
My review of Dangerous Calling by Paul David Trip in the January print edition of Christianity Today has now been posted on their website. There is a disheartening rite of passage every young pastor faces. And though it was almost 10 years ago, I remember my own moment clearly. “Have you heard?” asked my senior pastor when…
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“Crowds are a worse danger, far worse, than drink or sex.”
I’m finishing up Eugene Peterson’s wonderful memoir, The Pastor, a book I’ve anticipated eagerly since I first learned of it last year. About halfway into the book, in a chapter titled “Company of Pastors,” Peterson includes a letter he wrote to a colleague who was leaving his church for one “three times the size of…
David W. Swanson 