Quotes About Pastoral

#1. The best thing about a horrible city is that it makes you to understand the beauty of the pastoral life! The bad crystallizes the value of the good.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#2. In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?

John Dewey

#3. The enemy uses all his power to lead the Christian, and above all the minister, to neglect prayer. He knows that however admirable the sermon may be, however attractive the service, however faithful the pastoral visitation, none of these things can damage him or his kingdom if prayer is neglected.

Andy Murray

#4. We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

Bill Ayers

#5. The best and the most talented in the pastoral ministry and in denominational hierarchies harm themselves and harm the church most through their unrestrained ego and unwillingness to step off the high places. Sexual sin gets the press, but ego sin kills the church.

David Hansen

#6. From the very moment of Kanga's appearance the pastoral playground is overshadowed by doubt and guilt, for the all-too-loving anima-Woman has pitched her temple here!

Frederick C. Crews

#7. The focus of pastoral leadership is so consistently on the people, in fact, that the spiritual condition of the flock is the only real measure of a leader's success.

Christopher A. Beeley

#8. In 1996, I entered into pastoral counseling with Pastor David Drake from the Metropolitan Chapel on North Forest Road in East Amherst, New York.

Janet Pfaff

#9. On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again ... on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward.

Isaac Asimov

#10. Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it

Gerald Priestland

#11. What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Helen Frankenthaler

#12. Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

Susan Sontag

#13. In every human society of which we know - prehistoric, ancient or modern, whether hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural or industrial - at least some form of art is displayed, and not only displayed, but highly regarded and willingly engaged in.

Ellen Dissanayake

#14. The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine might be the most helpful and profound book I've read in years. If you're in pastoral ministry grab a copy.

Matt Chandler

#15. Mark this down if you can. Silences, not just sentences, form the work of pastoral ministry. Wise pastors are listening preachers.

Zack Eswine

#16. Put this in your 'pastoral' pipe and smoke it!!!"

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#17. You have before you the task of seeking new ways to announce Christ in situations of rapid and often profound transformation, and of emphasizing the missionary character of all pastoral activity.

Pope Benedict XVI

#18. precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.

Marcel Proust

#19. To awaken a new longing for holiness: this is the great pastoral challenge that we have before us, if we want to be faithful to God's plan and also to respond to the yearnings and hopes of the peoples of America and of all peoples on earth ...

Crescenzio Sepe

#20. Pastoral ministry is about an ongoing confrontation with the god of this world, with blindness, hardness of heart, remaining sin.

C.J. Mahaney

#21. I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

Gore Vidal

#22. Pope Gregory believed that successful pastoral leadership required a balance between the contemplation of the isolated ascetic and the action of the well-trained administrator.

Gregory The Great

#23. Sheep are not the docile, pleasant creatures of the pastoral idyll. Any countryman will tell you that. They are sly, occasionally vicious, pathologically stupid. The lenient shepherd may find his flock unruly, definant. I cannot afford to be lenient.

Joanne Harris

#24. I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.

Andy Goldsworthy

#25. My life often feels like a whirling dervish of kids, writing, speaking, and pastoral ministry.

Kevin DeYoung

#26. I spent the first 18 years of my life in the pastoral town of Vernal, Utah, in the shadows of the Book Cliffs and the Uinta Mountains.

Gordon Gee

#27. Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

George Carlin

#28. Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.

Andrew Bird

#29. What's happening outside church walls is happening inside church walls. It is all part of the human experience. Ignorance and lack of education about sex, sexual orientation, gender identities, and human sexuality in general have led to harmful assumptions and poor pastoral counsel.

Kathy Baldock

#30. There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.

Alice Oswald

#31. I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.

Nicola Griffith

#32. Pastoral ministry is a sacrificial call with unique challenges. We are called to take the Gospel to those with hard hearts and blind eyes.

C.J. Mahaney

#33. I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.

John Piper

#34. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like ... a version of pastoral.

Philip Larkin

#35. It is important to draw out the pastoral consequences of the Council's teaching, which reflects an ancient conviction of the Church. First, it needs to be said that in preaching the Gospel a fitting sense of proportion has to be maintained.

Pope Francis

#36. I am always a beginner. I only try to include different parts of life; the pastoral, the tragic, et cetera.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

#37. The great appeal of baseball, among the great appeals, it's a game without time. It is a pastoral game that is separated from time.

Mike Pesca

#38. You could remove the powerful preaching from our church and it would still continue. You could remove the administration of pastoral care through the cell group system and the church would still continue. But if you remove the prayer life of our church it would collapse.

David Yonggi Cho

#39. Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.

Nick Hornby

#40. We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#41. Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.

Reinhold Niebuhr

#42. Preparation for marriage is very important. It's very, very important because I believe it is something that in the Church, in common pastoral ministry, at least in my country, in South America, the Church it has not valued much.

Pope Francis

#43. The contemporary music of Tina Turner might make you feel powerful and energized. South African music provides a mind-boggling choice of styles from folk tunes to jive. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony has the magical ability to transport you to a country scene and trap you in a driving rain storm.

Jason Harvey

#44. Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

John Ortberg

#45. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral - into the indigenous American berserk.

Philip Roth

#46. The task of pastoral ministry, above all else, is to arrange contingencies for an encounter with the divine.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#47. O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm Of green days telling with a quiet beat.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

#48. ...it is a fundamental mistake, in my opinion, to try to abolish the mobility of pastoral man which has been the single most important factor in his successful mastery of a very difficult environment.

David Keith Jones

#49. No one presumes to teach an art that he has not first mastered through study. How foolish therefore for the inexperienced to assume pastoral authority when the care of souls is the art of arts.

St. Gregory Dialogos

#50. One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn't life-altering, it was life-shattering.

Paul Kalanithi

#51. If you live in a dirty big city, it means that you surely need a pastoral life to make yourself clean!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#52. Pastoral work is a commitment to the everyday: it is an act of faith that the great truths of salvation are workable in the ordinary universe.

Eugene H. Peterson

#53. From his first hours as pope, Francis has re-enacted or spoken of the great pastoral transformation of Vatican II as his own agenda.

Eugene Kennedy

#54. I actually think one of most profoundly and deep pastoral moments between a pastor and his church is what happens between them before God in the context of preaching.

Tullian Tchividjian

#55. The so-called spirituality that was handed to me by those who put me to the task of pastoral work was not adequate. I do not find the emaciated, exhausted spirituality of institutional careerism adequate. I do not find the veneered, cosmetic spirituality of personal charisma adequate.

Eugene H. Peterson

#56. In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove."
"So I have been informed, sir."
"Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I'm going into the Park to do pastoral dances.

P.G. Wodehouse

#57. Our Pastoral solicitude induces us to earnestly protect and preserve in everything and especially in the sacred rites of the Church the best and old norm.

Pope Clement VIII

#58. Next to the pastoral came the agricultural life. When you add to that the manufacturing phase of development, society begins to fill out, and needs but wings to fly, and commerce is its wings.

Henry Ward Beecher

#59. The patient and active virtues of a soldier are insensibly nursed in the habits and discipline of a pastoral life.

Edward Gibbon

#60. A nation which lives a pastoral and innocent life never decorates the shepherd's staff or the plough-handle; but races who live by depredation and slaughter nearly always bestow exquisite ornaments on the quiver, the helmet, and the spear.

John Ruskin

#61. It is best to think of a pastoral transition as a blended family in which former effective ministries are adopted by the new pastor while new ministries are birthed as well.

Carolyn Weese

#62. It is not creativity, however pastoral it may be, or meetings or planning that ensures our fruitfulness, even if these are greatly helpful. But what ensures our fruitfulness is our being faithful to Jesus, who says insistently: "Abide in me and I in you" (John 15:4).

Pope Francis

#63. Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'

Susan Stewart

#64. I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

Andrew Sean Greer

#65. I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

Bayard Taylor

#66. The pastoral itch to be where "the action is" should be resisted.

Eugene H. Peterson

#67. I am not loitering" said the Major. "I am simply indulging in a few moments of pastoral solitude"...

Helen Simonson

#68. Over four decades of pastoral ministry - I got started early - you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging.

Ken Wilson

#69. And in my own pastoral and personal Christian experience, I can say that I've never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline.

Donald S. Whitney

#70. In many places an administrative approach prevails over a pastoral approach, as does a concentration on administering the sacraments apart from other forms of evangelization.

Pope Francis

#71. The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

Pope Francis

#72. When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.

Haskell Wexler

#73. Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral.

Quentin Tarantino

#74. Most English houses, grand or small, nestle in an intimate pastoral setting.

Nicholas Haslam

#75. These pastoral-poet guys with their bleating goats and oaten pipes can stuff their phalaecean hendecasyllabics where the sun don't shine.

David Wishart

#76. The forties are very cool and very pastoral. The fifties look like they're pastoral, and then you get a bit more turbulence.

Pierce Brosnan

#77. The main task of pastoral ministry, according to Paul's address to the Ephesian elders, is not the quantitative growth of the church, but the maturity of the believers.

Eckhard J. Schnabel

#78. My first pastoral letter's gonna be a condemnation of light beer and instant mashed potatoes
I hate those two things.

Timothy M. Dolan

#79. I don't want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.

Eugene H. Peterson

#80. Missional leaders are comfortable in the own skin.

Gary Rohrmayer

#81. Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

Laurie Lee

#82. Leaders are passionate learners. Leaders are always seeking ways to improve themselves by sharpening their skills. They fully embrace the fact that growing leaders lead growing organizations.

Gary Rohrmayer

#83. Pastors and Bible teachers go about their work in communal settings, where they listen to as well as deliver sermons, hear as well as speak, and gain biblical insights from their parishioners as much as they pass them on.

Peter J. Leithart

#84. The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession.

Thomas C. Oden

#85. [R]eal prayer is not an excuse for laziness but, in fact, is one of the most arduous engagements I know of in ministry. Prayer is not a replacement for hard work but, in most cases, empowerment for even more fruitful work.

Daniel Henderson

#86. A prayer culture is fueled by experience not explanation. A passion to seek the Lord in prayer is more caught than taught.

Daniel Henderson

#87. For every Gospel action, there is an opposite and devious demonic reaction. We see this in the book of Acts. It appears in church history. We experience it in our personal journeys.

Daniel Henderson

#88. There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.

Eugene H. Peterson

#89. You must read to lead. Reading feeds. It opens our souls to a long line of counselors.

Dave Harvey

#90. I am not an 'elder', 'deacon', nor a 'pastor', and I do not have any ambitions to become one!".

~R. Alan Woods {2012]

R. Alan Woods

#91. Great leaders are teachable leaders.

Gary Rohrmayer

#92. Whereas the public means of grace (such as church services) will do a lot of good to other Christians, those of us who are pastors have to rely a lot more on the private means of grace.

Thomas K. Ascol

#93. My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

Eugene H. Peterson

#94. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers.

Philip Roth

#95. When a leader is at their limit the last thing they want to hear is that they need to change even more. Maintaining good rhythms of rest, exercise and fun create more energy for a leader to be willing and open for change.

Gary Rohrmayer

#96. One trains the eye of confession most closely on what is hurting. If sin is present it will be aching. Confession begins where the raw anguish of conscience is rubbing against the primordial awareness of God's holiness.

Thomas C. Oden

#97. The aim and the result of faithful, fruitful, and fulfilling service is to make God famous.

Don Cousins

#98. We don't forget that we are Christians. We forget that we are human, and that one oversight alone can debilitate the potential of our future.

Wayne Cordeiro

#99. An angry leader is a scared leader or a hurt leader or a frustrated leader but most of all they are a vulnerable leader.

Gary Rohrmayer

#100. She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.
Her hands asleep beside her.
Her hair draped on the lawn
like a mantle of cloth.

Roman Payne