I am a follower of Jesus Christ. The Bible is my primary way of knowing Him and what it means to follow Him. And I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.
Adam Hamilton
As a pastor, I have a deep desire to lead people to God and encourage people to pray, read the Bible, and carry their faith into every part of their lives.
I am a pastor, and I teach and preach the Bible to my congregation every week. But the Bible is not a manufacturer's handbook. Neither is it a science textbook nor a guidebook for public policy.
When I was ordained as a pastor, I walked away from secular music for seven, eight years. It took me that time to learn that God is love.
Al Green
There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.
Alice Oswald
My dad's a pastor and a seminary professor; my mom, she has such great faith.
Allyson Felix
When the pastor's up there, they do this thing called looping. They are literally riffing and spitting in the key of the organ. When looping, you're in key, you're in a rhythm, you're in a pocket, and that's where James Brown was pulling from, and so that's where I'm pulling from. The only difference is I'm coming at it under hip-hop.
Anderson Paak
I'm a pastor. I say, 'Let the church say amen,' and that settles it. Everything has been said, you know; it's like we have to agree with God.
Andrae Crouch
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, and they all seem helpful.
Andrew Sean Greer
As a pastor, I've spent 30 years talking to people and heard every kind of story imaginable.
Andy Stanley
I live my life not to please my pastor or my church or fellow Christians. I live my life according to my own convictions and morals and core values and principles, and a lot of times, that's not going to add up to other Christians.
Anjelah Johnson
Don't try to be anybody else, because that's what I do. I do me. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm not trying to please my pastor at church. I'm not trying to even please my mom, to be honest.
We're being challenged to do something so profound, it's unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn't be more at stake. It's not even our species at stake; it's the whole dream of life on earth that's taken 4.5 billion years to realize - all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.
Anohni
Bernice King, daughter of MLK, is an assistant pastor at New Birth.
Anthea Butler
In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favourite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible: you read devotional books and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed.
Pope Francis has mentioned several times in public prior to 'Amoris Laetitia''s release that lack of work was keeping young people from marriage. He has also riffed on married life and 'mothers-in-law,' but this document shows that, even more than a theologian, he is a pastor.
The decision to allow clergy to perform same-sex marriages at the discretion of the congregation poses challenges for seminaries training new pastors who come from denominations fundamentally opposed on biblical grounds to same-sex marriage.
The shooter's choice of Emanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given the church's storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, who would go on to lead a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston.
Graham functioned as a megaphone for conservative biblical ideas that dovetailed with conservative politics, including family, sexual morality, and adherence to laws. He was not only an evangelist, he was also an enforcer: enforcing conservative white Christian social beliefs and evangelical ethical claims as 'America's Pastor.'
Most of the early monks were not ordained. It was the pastoral work they undertook with the faithful that, over the centuries, gradually led to the present situation in which most monks are ordained priests.
Basil Hume
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.
My dad was a pastor, so we were in church all the time.
There's this old saying that, if you aren't particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don't want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don't know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I've never regretted it.
I grew up Protestant. My dad was a Charismatic pastor of the Families of God denomination. Often, we noticed that - during a lot of his evangelistic-type services - that some of the Amish and Old Order Mennonite couples would come and stand across the street from the church and look in the door.
Malayalis tend to be nostalgic about rustic storylines, pastoral themes and ordinary folk who lead a simple way of life.
When I was a kid, during those days, you couldn't use instruments. It was against the pastor's religion, so all the singers would make these instruments with their voices. It was just unbelievable. I couldn't explain it.
My dad's a pastor; I grew up in the church, and it's really easy to just have a healthy respect for what some people might be sensitive to.
Pastoral ministry is a sacrificial call with unique challenges. We are called to take the Gospel to those with hard hearts and blind eyes.
Pastoral ministry is about an ongoing confrontation with the god of this world, with blindness, hardness of heart, remaining sin.
I had a lot of conversations with my family, my close friends, with my pastor, with God, and kind of came to a revelation that maybe I should be honest with myself about who I am and let that person - this woman who has lived inside me for my entire life - finally have an opportunity to live.
One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.
I certainly respect other people's opinions, but I would not vote for a woman to be the pastor of a church.
You can't tell a woman who is called by God to teach that she cannot teach the Word of God... So I think the distinction is that there's a difference between the authority of a pastor and a Bible teacher.
My grandparents went through a bad experience themselves; they invested money in a church and got burned - the pastor had his own agenda - and my grandfather lost interest in the church after that. That was when I had the option to not go. 'Grandpa ain't going; I'm gonna stay with Grandpa.'
When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.
My parents are both pastors. In the '80s and '90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman - especially a married woman and a mother - to be a pastor.
It certainly was unusual growing up with two fairly well-known pastors as my parents.
My mother is a pastor. I think she has her moments where she's like, 'Dani, what are you getting into,' but at the end of the day, she really supports me as an actor.
My dad was a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, and from an early age I was put off by being force-fed a belief system.
A group is as healthy as its 'social contract' is clear; a congregation as faithful as its covenant is mutually understood; a pastor as effective as the pastor's and people's commitment to trust and integrity is honored, guarded, and fulfilled.
Dr. King, if he were alive today, probably would simply be a minister, a pastor. His initial intent was, indeed, just to be a preacher. He didn't have any egotistical desire or need to be a public figure or celebrity. He got drafted - or, really, dragged into it - initially in Montgomery.
Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.
I teach metaphysics and pastor a church.
It's clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there's no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the 'Beethoven Pastoral Symphony'.
I'm not a pastor; I've never been on staff at a church.
Pastors can lead the way in motivating the faithful to wise stewardship of their citizenship responsibilities. Without a healthy culture and civil society, limited government and ordered liberty will be impossible.
The woman pastor would often be, especially for women and children, a better minister than the clergyman; for them also, the woman judge might often surpass the man in penetration and understanding.
First of all, do I think there's some racists in the Tea Party? Yeah. I'm an ordained United Methodist pastor; there's some racists in the Methodist church. I don't know if there's a body that does not have some racists in it.
If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers.
The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.