Will Willimon
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Changing My Mind
$15.99Add to cartYes, pastor, you can (and should) change your mind!
The context of ministry continually changes, the surrounding culture changes, and a living God demands constant movement and change. So, pastors and preachers must be prepared to change! Some of the current assumptions about how to persevere in ministry need to be questioned. What ideas and approaches do we need to change, in ourselves and in our ministries? And how, exactly, do we change our minds and practices, when we’re called to be steady, stable, and sure?
Will Willimon narrates of some of the twists and turns in his own journey as a pastor. These stories and “change-of-mind-and-ministry” points can be helpful to new pastors who are negotiating their own way into future ministry. Novice pastors can receive guidance and encouragement from hearing how a prominent pastoral leader, bishop, author, seminary professor, and well-known preacher for nearly five decades changed, grew, and adapted in Christian ministry. And longtime pastors will find assurance and encouragement as they continue to grow and change, too.
The book consists of guidance from an older, experienced pastoral leader to other pastoral leaders, especially young and new ones. Willimon frames the material around the ways he has changed his mind and offers crucial ways that he once thought about ministry compared and contrasted with how he thinks now. He depicts the pastoral vocation as requiring adaptation and revision by its practitioners. Along the way, the book includes conversations with First and Second Timothy as the precursor of this book, an older, experienced pastor (Paul) offering advice to a young, unseasoned pastor (Timothy).
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Gospel For The Person Who Has Everything
$16.99Add to cartSecure, content, competent, reasonably happy and fulfilled, such persons of strength go their own way without any apparent discomfort at having missed the benefits of the Christian faith. . . . What do you say to the person who says, through his or her neglect of the faith, “Thanks, but I don’t need it”?-from the book
Bishop William Willimon brings the Gospel of Jesus Christ to life for the person who has everything – happy, fulfilled human beings, who don’t feel the same level of need expressed by the downcast, the outcast, the brokenhearted, and the miserable. Willimon says that the church’s message to the wretched and sad must not exclude the strong and the joyous. In nine concise, inspired chapters, he discusses these ideas:
– Must one be sad, depressed, wallowing in sin and degradation, immature, and childishly dependent in order truly to hear the Good News? (See chapters 1 and 2.)
– “What do we say to the strong?” (See chapters 3 and 4.)
– Speaking to the strong and to the people who are weak and want to be stronger: a particular kind of evangelistic message. They have their sins, but these sins are not the sins of the weak (chapter 5).
– Worship which takes God’s strong love seriously (chapter 6)
– Ethics which arise out of our response to that love (chapter 7)
– Church as a place of continual growth and widening responsibility (chapters 8 and 9)