The care of souls within the congregation, including counsel, visitation, and accompaniment in life's critical passages.
A collection of Leith's Christmas letters to his former ministerial students at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. The letters grew lengthier and richer through the years, and are gathered here for others to enjoy.
David Willis-Watkins works from Calvin's commentary on John 10 to recover what the Reformer himself meant by pastoral care, showing how Christ remains the only shepherd while pastors serve in a subordinate role, and drawing constructive implications for contemporary ministry.
Donald K. McKim engages William Bouwsma's portrait of Calvin as a man riddled with anxiety about death, then offers a fuller account of how Calvin's theology of death, funerals, and prayers for the dead in Geneva places dying within the wider network of Christian doctrine and worship.
Farley presents three previously untranslated documents from Calvin's Consilia in the Corpus Reformatorum, illustrating the practical pastoral and ecclesiastical advice Calvin gave through letters to colleagues, churches, and civil authorities.
Charles Cooke, a physician, surveys Calvin's lifelong medical afflictions and considers how his persistent illness and exhaustion shaped his sense of Christian vocation, drawing on Bouwsma and earlier biographical scholarship.
Readings include Augustine's On Christian Teaching, Calvin's Institutes IV.3 on church officers, Chapter 18 of the Second Helvetic Confession, and Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor. The bibliography traces the Reformed tradition's theology of ordained ministry from patristic foundations through the Reformation and into the Puritan period, with attention to the character, calling, and responsibilities of the pastor as teacher and shepherd.
Primary texts are Calvin's Instruction in Faith (1537), selections from the Institutes covering all four books, Calvin's Ecclesiastical Advice, and Elsie Anne McKee's edition of Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety. The bibliography serves as an introduction to Calvin's thought as a whole, tracing his theology, his pastoral practice, and his vision of the church through a carefully selected range of primary sources.
In the fifth Warfield Lecture, Dr. Leith examines pastoral care as a theological discipline, rooted in the gospel and exercised through the particular relationships of congregational life.
The second Warfield Lecture examines the nature of the church and its ordained ministry within the Reformed theological framework, drawing on Scripture and the classic Reformed confessional tradition.
Better Preaching, Better Teaching, Better Pastoral Care.
