For Phase 2, twelve authors were selected to write books on the themes identified in Phase 1. An overview of the proposed books by each author can be found below. The working title for this series is “For the Facing of These Days”.
Sammy Alfaro: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jubilee
A fragmented U.S. church needs both theological grounding and practical guidance, contends Sammy Alfaro, theology professor at Grand Canyon University and Latino Pentecostal pastor at Iglesia Nuevo Dia in Phoenix. Drawing from his co-vocational perspective and extensive teaching in the Book of Acts, Alfaro explores the event of Pentecost as a blueprint for understanding the nature and mission of the church in relation to the world it inhabits. In calling for a reclamation of the Spirit of Jubilee, who can liberate a polarized church for its mission to a polarized society, Alfaro offers a “pneumatologically infused ecclesiology” that can provide a much-needed spiritual resurgence for the facing of these days.
M. Craig Barnes: Pastoral Ministry in a Day of Fear
Craig Barnes, Presbyterian pastor and president emeritus of Princeton Seminary, knows pastors need more than leadership techniques for navigating congregations through unprecedented rates of social change into an uncertain future. He offers a theological rudder in Jesus’ conviction that fear, not doubt, is the enemy of faith—and that only perfect love can cast out our fear. That love was proclaimed to us when Christ identified with our humanity in his baptism. Barnes then builds practical insights around Christ’s wilderness temptations following his baptism, which also tempt pastors to make deals with the devil – the fear of not having enough, of not being certain, and of failure. These fears, which grip both congregations and pastors, no longer possess us only when we believe we too are the beloved of God. But where will that love take us?
Willie James Jennings: Pastoring Difference
Writing as a professor of theology at Yale University and an ordained Baptist minister, Willie Jennings calls pastors to combat the cult of sameness. Shunning alien others has become a mark of the church—the false promise of safety, comfort, and normalcy is the opposite of God’s desire for the gathering of the multitude. Through vignettes, poetry, art, and theological reflection, Jennings prompts pastors out of their comfort zones into a theology of pastoring difference. He casts a vision for a crucial role pastors can play in overcoming the strong pull toward segregation and homogeneity. The pastor as “under-weaver” embodies and relentlessly presses God’s revelation, weaving new life for the church from the ground of difference.
John Kartje: The Monstrance in the Pews
We tend to presume that encounters with divine transcendence—a sense of sudden and profound connection with God in religious practices or mystical experiences—are extra-ordinary, but they are embedded in everyday life, says John Kartje, Rector of Mundelein Seminary, who oversees the formation of Roman Catholic priests and lay ministers. Kartje’s seeks to dismantle the false dichotomy separating mundane activities of daily ministry from dramatic manifestations of divine encounter. His luminous depiction of transcendence as flowing constantly and directly from God’s triune nature empowers pastors to reclaim it boldly from the pages of abstraction. By calling them to restore it to the heart of their vocation, Kartje broadens their understanding and expectations of the stream of life-changing liminal moments when God reaches across to us.
David Kim: Hopeful Intelligence
As pastor and co-founder of the nonprofit Goldenwood, David Kim has been working with leaders and communities to cultivate a new vision of work revived by love. Here, he targets the pastoral gap at the heart of the contemporary church’s reactions to Artificial Intelligence. The need is not for strategies or deployments, he asserts, but rather a renewed capacity to understand human engagement with AI in the light of God’s love, resisting both dystopian fear and technological utopianism. Kim equips pastors to approach AI with a Gospel-informed spiritual imagination. This imagination is anchored in theological insights about humanity, the purpose of work, and what intelligence truly requires: not mere computation, but the capacity for love. His purpose is to empower pastors with a restorative vision that the church is uniquely positioned to offer the world—a beautiful and timely calling in these dehumanizing days.
Amy Peeler: A Theology of Delight
What is the relationship of cost to abundance in pastoral calling? Amy Peeler, associate rector at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and New Testament professor at Wheaton College and Graduate School, probes this question with vignettes of God’s call in the New Testament including Mary of Nazareth, the twelve disciples, Mary Madalene, and Paul. She illuminates her insights by tracing a profoundly transformational shift in her own pastoral experience from a transactional to a relational view of ministry. One fractures pastors with performance requirements; the other invites surrender of the whole self—skills, hopes, fears, and failures—in dying to the idea of instrumentality and awakening to the reality of being loved. As we embrace the God who does not need but wants ministers to participate in the Kingdom work of the church, Peeler affirms, we discover true delight in our call.
Kara N. Slade: The Proclaiming Word
Kara Slade, Associate Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton and Canon Theologian of the Diocese of New Jersey, focuses on the debilitating consequences of ignoring or misunderstanding the unique calling of preaching. When the sermon veers away from its primary task of proclaiming the Word of God, she observes, it flattens into externalized political and social agendas or internalized constructions of anthropocentric psychology. This book is her call for a new path forward in rediscovering the preacher’s role of announcing God’s work in Christ. She builds a theological foundation for clarifying the role of the sermon in its liturgical context, for grounding its content in the doctrine and active presence of Jesus Christ, and for releasing its formational power in cultivating divine-human encounters.
Betsy Swetenburg: Dying to Be Church
How are we to comprehend being called to serve a church with no guarantee of its future? Betsy Swetenburg, senior pastor of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, NC, offers an honest and hopeful account of ministry in a time of institutional anxiety. Writing from her experience as a millennial pastor, she names the insidious pressures to unequally yoke faithfulness to God’s call with accomplishing the material survival of the existing church. In reframing pastoral vocation not as the work of sustaining an institution but as faithful participation in God’s ongoing call, she invites pastors to rediscover the joy of ministry for such a time as this—and to become a part of the new church struggling to be born.
Jonathan Tran: Come and See: Called to the Pastorate
Duke theologian Jonathan Tran bets the house by calling Christians into the pastorate. He wagers that many Christians are called to pastoral ministry but are scared off by church decline, demise and rot, and so they employ the everyday work of pastoring (guiding, leading, teaching, counseling, organizing, creating, building, etc.) without the vocation of the pastor. But what if pastoring requires the vocation of the pastorate, like Christianity requires the church? And what if the very decline, demise and rot blocking Christians from the pastorate turn out to be paths for their calling into the pastorate? By inviting pastors to seek the living among what God is already doing, Tran leads them from apocalypse to awakening.
Andrea White: End of the World and Divine Promise
Climate crisis challenges pastoral ministry with a crisis of hope, explains Andrea C. White, professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary and Theologian-in-Residence at The Riverside Church in the City of New York. Catastrophe tends to trigger pastoral reflexes that reduce Christian hope to therapeutic strategy, emergency measure for managing eco-anxiety, or shortcut to theodicy rationalizing God’s power and purpose amid climate injustice. Instead, White invokes the more difficult hope of the resurrection event, which embraces despair and lament and dares to look evil in the face. This more precarious hope insists on the grievability of the earth and hears creation’s groanings as grieving the Spirit. Resurrection hope springs from divine promise, however imperceptible to our eyes and fragile in our hands.
Andrew Ray Williams: The Limits Are the Gifts
When does pastoral burnout signal a theological disorder at work? Andrew Williams, lead pastor of Church on the Hill in Fishersville, Virginia and an adjunct professor, addresses pastoral exhaustion as a confusion about what it means to be human—or a striving to be more than human. Delving into scripture, Bonhoeffer’s theology of creaturehood, poetry, and Christ’s non-coercive use of power, Williams argues that pastors are worn down by assuming burdens that belong to God: holding congregations together, securing outcomes, remaining endlessly available. He invites pastors to reframe finitude, dependence, mortality, and limitation not as obstacles to overcome but as gifts of creaturehood to receive. This book frees pastors from trying to be Christ by calling them to be centered in Christ who alone holds all things together.
Will Willimon: Trouble Is Jesus’ Middle Name
Most literature on managing congregational conflict, observes Will Willimon, views discord as a problem to be skillfully managed with good organizational insights. However, deploying them requires discernment and understanding about the nature of the contention. In decades as pastor in several congregations, campus minister and seminary professor at Duke University, and bishop in the United Methodist Church, Willimon has seen a great deal of church conflict. But he also sees in the New Testament a church that has never been, nor should it ever be, conflict-free. Naming, engaging, risking, and working through conflict has always been a way the church grows and remains faithful to the mandate of Jesus Christ. The most interesting, potentially dangerous, life-giving, and saving conflict is the one initiated in the church and the world by Jesus Christ—and despite its perils, Willimon affirms, this can be one of the most invigorating ways of following Christ into his chosen means of reconciliation with his contentious creation.
The Project Director will write a Forward to the twelve books, introducing the vision of the Theologies for Pastoral Ministry project as it pertains to each book.