Pete’s Pick
November, 2020
Diary of a Pastor’s Soul
M. Craig Barnes
Publisher: Brazos Press/ 2020
Fiction; Pastoral Theology
Introduction: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a pastor? As in being the pastor of a church? This book gives you a glimpse into the everyday life of a pastor in a way that allows you to see the humanness of the person, the professional challenge of the position, and the amazing way in which God is at work in the life of the pastor as well as his or her parishioners. You don’t have to be a church insider to read this. Just be open to a great adventure of storytelling and getting to see people being themselves.
Author
Dr. Craig Barnes is the current President of Princeton Theological Seminary. Before coming to Princeton, he was a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Dr. Barnes has served churches in Colorado, Wisconsin, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. He received a PhD in Church History from the University of Chicago. He is the author of seven previous books and countless articles published in a variety of periodicals.
Story
This book is the fictionalized recounting of the last year of a pastor’s ministry before he retires. When the year is over, he will have served that church for 28 of his 43 years of pastoral ministry. The pastor decides to keep a weekly journal of his last year as a pastor. Journaling is not something he has had as a habit, but decides it is important for him to capture some reflections of each of his last weeks in pastoral ministry. We get to read his journal which is organized by months, starting in July and ending the following June. Each month contains two or three pages for each of the four or five weeks in that particular month.
In reading through this journal, we are privy to the pastor telling stories of the significant events or encounters he has had during that week and we get to hear his reflection on how that resonated with him, or challenged him, or irritated him. If you go to church as I do, you probably don’t think of any interactions you have with the pastor as being out of the ordinary or even significant. Yet, following this pastor through his last 52 weeks provides an eye-opening view to what Barnes calls the pastor’s soul. Ordinary moments for most people become memorable, soul-searching moments for a pastor who is open to reflecting uncritically on the context and circumstances in which they take place. We get to see the pastor fussing about a long Property Committee meeting at church one week or an encounter with one of the church ladies who is always at work whenever the church has any social gathering. We get to see the pastor at work when someone dies or a marriage falls apart. We get to listen to him reflect on fractious family conversations with wife or daughter as plans are laid for upcoming special events or having to change them because of an unexpected emergency at the church. Craig Barnes has always been a storyteller in his ministry as a pastor and in his writings in all his previous books. He has a unique ability to see his everyday experiences and encounters as events in the story of what is happening in this place and time on a grand level. It is this compilation of stories that make up what Craig Barnes calls the soul of the pastor. For most people, they are just stories. For Craig Barnes, they are holy moments.
Evaluation
I am personal friends with Craig Barnes, by way of being totally transparent. I was on the pastor search committee that brought him to National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC to be the senior pastor at the young age of 36. During the nine years he served as senior pastor at National Presbyterian, I was his church administrator. I was introduced to Craig’s writing during the search process that brought him to Washington, DC because he had already written two of his books. I read his books Yearning: Living Between How It Is & How It Ought to Be and When God Interrupts: Finding New Life Through Unwanted Change while we were doing the search and his way of story telling just spoke to me in a way nothing ever had. It was a time of change for me as I was getting ready to retire from the Army and figure out what I was going to do next. In reading this book, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul, I enjoyed being reminded of how Craig liked to work and how he interpreted the things that happened on a day-to-day basis. I hope you will find insight into the inner workings of the life of a pastor in a church setting. Maybe it will inspire you to even go to church.