Travis Stanley

“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, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work

“It seems those most likely to miss God’s work in the world are those most convinced they know exactly what to look for, the ones who expect God to play by the rules.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“One of the reasons that people need pastors is precisely because God is always present but usually not apparent. It takes a poet to find that presence beneath the layers of strategy for coping with the feeling of its absence. Thus, the parish minister's soul becomes a crucible in which sacred visions are ground together with the common and at times profane experiences of human life. Out of this sacred mix, pastors find their deep poetry, not only for the pulpit, but also for making eternal sense out of the ordinary routines of the congregation.”
― M. Craig Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life (The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies

“It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example, counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination