Pastor John, here's a question for you about academics and pastoral ministry.

More than once you've said that God seems to give special help and insight into the

Bible to pressured pastors because they are preparing meals for his bride, the church.

Did that have anything to do with your leaving academics and did this ultimately prove

true for you in the 30 plus years of pasturing at Bethlehem?

One of my fears, Tony, in leaving academia was that losing the relative leisure to study.

What I mean by that is once you've taught the same course several times, it's easier.

And so you have more time and you have summers.

And so the academic life seemed to have to offer a kind of leisure to study.

One of my fears was that in losing that I would lose the joy of discovery.

In biblical texts because I knew that for me those discoveries required a lot of looking

at the text, a lot of time.

But in retrospect, it didn't turn out that way.

There are other factors besides time in the pastoral ministry.

There's not as much freedom to study, that's true.

But there are two other more than more than compensating factors.

One is the relentless pressure to preach and teach and give devotions and write newsletters

and speak to classes and youth events and seniors events and marriages and funerals and on and on.

And at least for me, the pastoral life was a never-ending pressure to feed a group of people

with a meal from the scriptures.

And I suppose I could have viewed it differently than that.

I could have collected stories and told all kinds of things.

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