My Heart in this page is to Encourage fellow Pastors in Youth Ministry to tend to your soul. If you have a book that has impacted you (other than the Bible, duh) Please send me a review and we can sharpen each other and I will add it. (By the way, I don't get any $ from you buying anything from any of these links or anything on this site, I am just trying to help you save time.)
"American pastors are becoming 'a company of shopkeepers' preoccupied with image and standing , with administration, measurable success, sociological impact, and economic viability." Eugene Peterson.
Eugene Petersons Book Working The Angles gives us some important encouragement. If you havent read it, I suggest you pick up a copy today
Three Pastoral acts are so basic, so critical, that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts are Praying, Reading Scripture and Giving Spiritual Direction. Besides being basic, these 3 acts are quiet. They do not call attention to themselves and so are often not attended to. In the clamorous world of pastoral work nobody yells at us to engage in these acts. It is possible to do pastoral work to the satisfaction of the people who judge our competence and pay our salaries without being either diligent or skilled in them. Since almost never does anyone notice whether we do these things or not, and only occasionally does someone ask that we do them, these 3 acts of ministry suffer widespread neglect.
Prayer is an act in which I bring myself to attention before God
Reading Scripture is an act of attending to God in his speech and action across 2 millennia in Israel and Christ (and I, Matthew, would add time preparing for a sermon doesnt count! You need time in the word apart from just message prep)
Spiritual Direction is an act of giving attention to what God is doing in the person who happens to be before me at any given moment.
Rediscovering Expository Preaching By John MacArthur,Jr is another amazing book about fundamentals for pastors.
David Crowder's new Book Sunset and Sushi is refreshing and Hilarous. He brings you to a place of Praise as you explore the Psalms and I would highly recommend it and it makes a great devotional for your students.
I was surfing through Chuck Swindoll's website and found this great sermon series Realistic Portrait of a Pastor to encourage pastors, so I converted the files into mp3's for us tech geeks to be able to download and put in our cars or mp3 players. These files are free on his sight www.insight.org in the archives.
Chuck pulls from these key texts.
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
1 Thessalonians 2:1-12
1 Timothy 4:13-16
