The Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2): Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God

Edwards, then, there was a significant moral structure for rudeness that was bound to divine action. Rudeness was not being a blockage to someone’s expressive identity but instead a sign that rot had entered the soul (to change the metaphor).

The sermon now needed to enter the personality of the listener. And Henry realized that the only key that fit the lock of individual personality was personality itself.

action by personifying acceptance and friendship. It is the pastor’s task, Henry believed, to run at the speed of intimacy—and this was very different from pastors before him.

divine action becomes obscured in a disenchanted world.

We live in a time—call it a secular age—when society has devalued the pastor and yet we nevertheless yearn for ministry.

The way to compensate for this unease and remain in the church is to become obsessed with the how, but in a very different way from Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was concerned with how you did your deeds because they revealed if your affections were holy. If your inner life was encountering the divine presence, then it would be clear in how you lived y

The church is the house of ministry because it is a place of prayer. The pastor prepares his people for ministry by teaching them to pray, by creating space for his people to pray for others and be prayed for. We receive the being of God through giving and receiving ministry. Prayer is the most directed, embodied way to live out of the disposition

Because the self is buffered from encountering spiritual forces that it doesn’t welcome, the spiritual is chosen as an accessory—and the spiritualities chosen are usually more fashionable than traditional religions.

If Edwards was pushing his people up the hill of holiness, making priests of them all, Beecher layman-ized the priesthood, making the pastor just like one of the people.