Top Highlights

• Time spent in study is never getting away from daily work but getting into daily work. The hours of study bear directly and immediately on who the minister is and the minister’s influence by word and action. It is in the study that so much of the minister’s formation of character and faith takes place.
• Study will protect the parishioners from the excessive influence of the minister’s own opinions, prejudices, and feelings. Study is getting a second and third opinion before diagnosis and treatment.
• No minister has to do the world’s thinking over again, but every minister needs to spend time with the writings of those who have for a lifetime wrestled with matters of importance.
• To know one’s subject and to believe it is important is to be free, and it is freedom that permits all one’s faculties to have their finest hour in the service of speaking and hearing.
• One of the ironies in the history of the church is the fact that the person who is expected to speak every week on issues of ultimate importance—God’s will and human freedom, evil and suffering, grace and judgment, peace and covenant—has been in many quarters begrudged the study time necessary to prepare.