Ryan, a listener to the podcast who is also a pastor, writes in with a very good question.

Pastor John, how much of the news should I read?

I'm a pastor and a very average reader in terms of speed.

I want to stay up on the news to be a good citizen and an informed leader.

I want to help my congregation think biblically about major cultural trends and issues when relevant,

but I could spend hours every morning reading different online newspapers and opinion pieces

perhaps to the neglect of my Bible and solid theology books.

So my question is not whether to read the news but how much of it to read.

Is there any practical advice you can give from your years as both a Christian and as a pastor

that would help discern how much is too much and how little is too little?

I do have one main piece of advice from my experience and it might be partly owing to my own limits

and reading slowly and things like that but more important for your people, our people

and their ability to be Christ exalting husbands and wives and community participants and civic

contributors and vocationally effective.

More important for all those things than a pastor's being widely read and culturally up to date

on lots of fronts is the way he deals in preaching and leading and living with a few key social

issues like three or four or five over his ministry say and the principal have in mind here

is the same one that drives me in understanding the aims of education in school and the principal is

to impart to your people by the way you preach and teach and the way you think biblically and

culturally you impart to them a way of thinking, a way of dealing with issues, a way of reading their

Bible, a way of applying their Bible on various issues so that you don't bear the burden of thinking

you have to be the expert on all the issues you have to model for them how they become the expert

...