Tag: relational ministry

Student Culture, Trends & Issues, The Campus Minister

A Pastoral Presence Online

Campus — today — is not what it use to be.

Technology continues to advance at a staggering pace and social media is making personal and mass-communication (of a new kind) very accessible to whoever wants it… and our students are well-versed in most of it.

About a year ago I had the chance to step away from campus and spend some time with campus ministers from across the U.S. (and Canada!), thinking about our shared work with college students. On our final morning together I was asked to lead our group in a conversation about what is happening here at Faith ON Campus, but I quickly found us expanding the conversations to explore what it meant (and means) to be a pastor in this digital age.

Spiritual Formation

Every Step An Arrival

I’ve been sitting with this phrase today… every step an arrival.

It’s the subtitle for Eugene Peterson’s Memoir entitled: The Pastor. I read this book for the first time last summer, and am planning to reread it this summer (and probably every summer to come — it’s one of those books).

Peterson credits a poem written by Denise Levertov, in which she gives an account of her development as a poet, for the origin of the phrase. As you might deduce, Peterson now uses it as a way to encapsulate his vocational unfolding as a pastor.

Every step an arrival.

Every step.

An arrival.