PREPARATION FOR MINISTRY
By Allan Harman
Banner of Truth. 117 pages. £6.22
ISBN 978 1 848 716 230
I thoroughly enjoyed this little primer for anyone considering theological training with a view to pastoral ministry. It covers the period from first considering ministry and assessing God’s call on our lives through theological study and into the first days of leading a church.
Allan Harman has distilled his vast experience down into a short, practical, realistic book that no prospective pastor-teacher could fail to find helpful. Coming from his Presbyterian tradition I expected to learn somewhat more about preparation for ministry in a Presbyterian setting. In fact the book is admirably general and useful across evangelical tribes.
Passion
You can’t turn a page without sensing Harman’s passion for ministry that is centred on ‘the divinely ordained task of preaching the gospel of God’s grace in Christ’. Short chapters are full of practical checklists to help assess, for example, a call to ministry in down-to-earth ways. I was encouraged by the insistence that ministry training should take place in the context of personal spiritual growth and the exhortation to theological students to connect their study with their devotional life and rootedness in the local church. I was slightly bemused to find the appendices are longer than the book! They consist of a useful bibliography, a short guide to preparing a sermon which seems tangential and doesn’t add a great deal, and two longer pieces: Spurgeon’s The Minister’s Self-Watch and Warfield’s The Religious Life of Theological Students. Both the latter are valuable in their own right but no context or explanation is given for their inclusion. They feel rather tacked on. But there again you can scarcely go wrong with Spurgeon and Warfield and anyone picking up this volume will benefit from them regardless.
In short, a really useful pre-flight check for anyone thinking about theological study as preparation for local church ministry.
