One of the pastors I serve with calls me the “newbie.” Although I’ve hung around the church for a while I’m still very much wet behind the ears when it comes to being a pastor. I am a newbie. I’ve recently shared that over the last few weeks I’ve started to make reading a regular part of my growth and ministry as a pastor. Today I found one of those newbie books that I’m really excited about when it comes to this newbie pastor stuff. This morning I purchased a book by Henri Nouwen called, “Creative Ministry.” Something in his introduction, “Beyond Professionalism” caught my attention: “…a Christian minister will never be able to be a minister if it is not his or her own most personal faith and insight into life that forms the core of his or her pastoral work.” Pg. 7. I’m taking a wild guess in what Nouwen is trying to point out when it comes to ministers and their own faith and spirituality. A minister is to move beyond the normal regular office hours, pastoral care, preaching, and other day-to-day duties of an ordained minister. He or she is to move to a place in which their very core of who they are as followers of Christ becomes the reason for why they do what they do within the life of the church as a minister. In essence it gives a newbie like me permission to venture out into the world of asking the hard questions and to begin building some kind of foundational basis for my ministry as a pastor.

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