This book examines the pastor's friendships as they impact a pastor's effectiveness in ministry and his or her personal well-being. Because friendships require high levels of self-disclosure, friendships introduce potential conflict for the pastor as personal self-disclosure may conflict with the pastor's expected role. Taking a qualitative approach, this study looks at how pastors navigate the areas of friendship both inside and outside their congregations. The research involved interviews with ten congregational pastors and reports themes that emerged from the interviews. The researcher developed four friendship types that assist the pastor in balancing pastoral role expectation with expression of vulnerability.

When it comes to talking about the activity of directing the church, the language of leadership and leaders is increasingly popular. Yet what is leadership – and how might theological narratives better resource the discourse and practice of leadership in ecclesial contexts? In identifying and critiquing managerialism as a dominant narrative of leadership in the Western church, this book calls for an alternative approach founded on the concept of friendship. Engaging with the wider field of leadership studies, the book establishes an understanding of leadership activity and brings it into conversation with an incarnational ecclesiology. The result is a prophetic reimagining of ecclesial leadership in terms of a relational, kenotic praxis. This praxis of mutuality and love is framed here in the rich language of Christian friendship. The book also wrestles deeply with the embodiment of such a praxis, making explicit the power behaviours typical of friendship-leadership and offering constructive guidance for practitioners in the task of implementation within a complex and fractured world. This book offers a new vision of the centrality of friendship to leadership of a healthy church community. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of practical theology, ecclesiology and leadership, as well as practitioners in church ministry.

Boundaries are healthy and necessary parts of life and ministry. Staying in Bounds provides straight-talk guidance to ministers and other leaders of churches and faith-based organizations on the what, why, and how of relational boundaries. Provides guidance on identifying, implementing, and enforcing healthy boundaries, with a special focus on ministry settings. The author develops the concept of boundaries from psychological and theological perspectives, discusses the benefits of boundaries, and then explains the importance of healthy boundaries in the church.

Contents Part IThe Grave New World of Christian Counseling Liability Part IISexual Misconduct in Christian Counseling Part IIIConfidentiality and Its Many Exceptions Part IVThe Counseling Process: Managing Liability Risk Part VSpecial Counseling Modes and Controversial Cases Part VICorporate Risks and Counseling Credentials Part VIIThe Maturation of the Christian Counseling Profession

The clergy today faces mounting challenges in an increasingly secular world, where declining prestige makes it more difficult to attract the best and the brightest young Americans to the ministry. As Christian churches dramatically adapt to modern changes, some are asking whether there is a clergy crisis as well. Whatever the future of the clergy, the fate of millions of churchgoers also will be at stake. In Who Shall Lead Them?, prizewinning journalist Larry Witham takes the pulse of both the Protestant and Catholic ministry in America and provides a mixed diagnosis of the calling's health. Drawing on dozens of interviews with clergy, seminarians and laity, and using newly available survey data including the 2000 Census, Witham reveals the trends in a variety of traditions. While evangelicals are finding innovative paths to ministry, the Catholic priesthood faces a severe shortage. In mainline Protestantism, ministry as a second career has become a prominent feature. Ordination ages in the Episcopal and United Methodist churches average in the 40s today. The quest by female clergy to lead from the pulpit, meanwhile, has hit a "stained glass ceiling" as churches still prefer a man as the principal minister. While deeply motivated by the mystery of their "call" to ministry, America's priests, pastors, and ministers are reassessing their roles in a world of new debates on leadership, morality, and the powers of the mass media. Who Shall Lead Them? offers a valuable snapshot of this contemporary clergy drama. It will be required reading for everyone concerned about the rapidly shifting ground of our churches and the health of religion in America.

For religious communities to have integrity and credibility they must flourish as places of love and respect. Every aspect of church life is defined and protected by essential boundaries: boundaries around space, time, thought, speech, will, emotion, and behavior--both for clergy and church members. Lack of awareness and attention to boundary keeping diminishes the integrity of the church and harms its mission, whereas insight and vigilance about best practices lend freedom and energy to the calling of the church to care for others and to reach out to the world. In a flourishing Christian community, a wide array of boundaries must be recognized, celebrated, and navigated--from the boundaries that define and protect us as individual persons to role boundaries and the boundaries that define essential communal functions, such as worship. This book is no conventional account of boundaries. It takes a comprehensive approach to the challenge of understanding and creating healthy boundaries. It applies the lessons from the emerging field of behavioral ethics to the rich and rewarding complexity of boundaries in church life, helping us to be more loving and responsible in how we think, speak, and act, so that the church can be true to its identity and mission.

Brad Hoffman and Michael Todd Wilson present this workbook designed to be used by people in vocational ministry, alongside their peers, to safeguard them from burnout, moral failure and spiritual exhaustion.

Contains over one thousand alphabetically arranged articles that present information about topics related to psychology from a Christian point of view; covering the areas of personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy and other treatment approaches, major systems and theories of psychology, and the psychology of religion.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the “true religion” turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for “a global history on a small scale,” the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.

At a time when concerns for misconduct, abuse scandals, and liability have brought pastoral ministers under greater scrutiny than ever before and have threatened to undermine their morale, Just Ministry offers a positive perspective on the vocation of pastoral ministry and wise ethical guidance to foster integrity in ministry. This is a helpful training and evaluative resource for those involved in pastoral ministry as ordained clergy, religious, or lay ministers. Key concepts are illustrated through case studies and practical strategies for acquiring and developing virtues, as well as preventative education for pastoral ministry in avoiding misconduct. By examining the professional aspects of a ministerial vocation, this book provides a guide for ministers to be accountable in offering their pastoral service with expert knowledge and skill and with good moral character. It builds upon a theology of vocation, a covenantal model of ministry, and a vision of professional identity. Book jacket.