What do you think?
Rate this book
Help! I'm a Pastor: A Guide to Parish Ministry
Richard Armstrong and Kirk Morledge present this practical guide for pastoral ministry, offering counsel about a wide range of topics related to a pastor's professional ministry and personal life. Topics include beginning a new ministry, balancing one's personal life and ministry, wrestling with conflict, worrying about church finances, and preaching. This introduction to ministry can function as a textbook as well as an invaluable handbook or desk reference for pastors in the midst of congregational ministry.
232 pages, Paperback
First published March 22, 2005
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 16, 2020
I’m the daughter of a rabbi and training to be a rabbi myself, so I was very curious how much of the pastoral experience is universal and whether I could learn some tricks for doing it better via this book. The style is very focused on Christians—Jesus and the apostles as the only paradigms of spiritual leadership, a section on how important it is to maintain a relationship with your bishop—but a lot did feel pretty universal.
The chapters focus on general categories: navigating friendships and boundaries with congregants, avoiding burnout, money matters, etc. While there are some nuggets of practical advice, a lot of the book is just describing the issues and reassuring the reader that they’re not crazy or incompetent, everyone wrestles with certain problems. It’s also easy to tell that this started out as a seminary class, because there’s a lot of questions about hypothetical situations with no answers given, so the reader can think about problems before they arise and decide what their response might be, such as all the things that can go wrong with a congregant offering you services from their business.
I’m very lucky in that between my childhood and the training I get at my seminary, very little of this was new to me, and I think a lot of seminaries these days are trying to do a better job of preparing ordainees for the field, but I can imagine new pastors who have had less training finding this book useful in avoiding burnout.
The chapters focus on general categories: navigating friendships and boundaries with congregants, avoiding burnout, money matters, etc. While there are some nuggets of practical advice, a lot of the book is just describing the issues and reassuring the reader that they’re not crazy or incompetent, everyone wrestles with certain problems. It’s also easy to tell that this started out as a seminary class, because there’s a lot of questions about hypothetical situations with no answers given, so the reader can think about problems before they arise and decide what their response might be, such as all the things that can go wrong with a congregant offering you services from their business.
I’m very lucky in that between my childhood and the training I get at my seminary, very little of this was new to me, and I think a lot of seminaries these days are trying to do a better job of preparing ordainees for the field, but I can imagine new pastors who have had less training finding this book useful in avoiding burnout.
February 6, 2018
I read parts of this book initially as part of a seminary course, but found it very helpful to read again in the first year of ministry. This book offers a lot of practical, helpful tips for people in ministry.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews