Quotes About The Pastoral

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Eugene H. Peterson

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Ian Hamilton Finlay

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. The deeper irony is that the evidence of sin that are always found in and around the body of Christ may become indirect intimations of its holiness. It could not be a holy church if it had clean hands, as if severed from its task of saving sinners and healing human hurt.

Thomas C. Oden

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Our enemy attacks the conscience little by little seeking to wear us down and then wears out a leader's resolve to fight the good fight.

Gary Rohrmayer

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Don Cousins

#25. 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

#26. ...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

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Helen Simonson

#32. 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

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

David Wishart

#34. The prayer level of a church never rises any higher than the personal example and passion of the leaders. The quantity and quality of prayer in leadership meetings is the essential indicator of the amount of prayer that will eventually arise among the congregation.

Daniel Henderson

#35. There is nothing worse for a young convert than to be thrust into leadership without mentoring and ongoing coaching because the devil relishes these vulnerable souls.

Gary Rohrmayer

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. Sometimes all you need is one person with a guilty conscience to come forward and do the right thing. Often, the miracle you need resides inside of yourself, when you humbly ask for forgiveness.

Shannon L. Alder

#41. Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.

Wayne Cordeiro

#42. If a church is good at making disciples it will be good at making leaders because in the end, a good spiritual formation plan will lead to an accelerated spiritual multiplication.

Gary Rohrmayer

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

John Keats

#47. 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

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

Edward Gibbon

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. [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

#52. 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

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

Zack Eswine

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Susan Sontag

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

C.J. Mahaney

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Gary Rohrmayer

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

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

Daniel Henderson