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Preaching and catechization were the primary responsibilities of Basel’s Reformed pastors. Rural pastors preached twice weekly; by the end of the 16th century, church attendance on Sundays was satisfactory although the clergy still complained about weekday attendance. Catechism instruction was also held more frequently than before. Although pastors in rural parishes complained that teenagers did not attend catechism instruction, many were satisfied with their parishioners’ knowledge of the catechism. The general level of religious knowledge at the end of the century was much higher than it had been in the decades immediately following the Reformation. Enforcement of edicts requiring attendance at worship and catechism instruction played a key role.

The study begins with the story of Evergreen Baptist Church and its transformation from a pan-Asian church into a multiethnic one. The factors that influenced the church's pastor, Ken Fong, to take Evergreen in this direction and the tools he used to frame the church's new identity in appealing ways are identified. While Pastor Ken has been very successful at this task, the work of selling his vision to the congregation is ongoing.

This chapter examines how race matters for the leadership structure of interracial churches. Highlighting how the case‐study church responds to a recent loss of key church leaders, this chapter reveals how race and possessing white cultural capital are particularly important criteria for senior interracial church leaders.

This chapter looks at how, in U.S. churches, political influence operated through a broad set of opinion leaders, not just through ordained pastors or media elites. Previous research has identified local pastors as key opinion leaders who help bridge the gap between political elites and the general public, by preaching on political topics, sending partisan cues, or proclaiming official church stances on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Other scholars argue that Christian Right elites increasingly reach individuals directly, through targeted mailings, Fox News, and Christian radio, without the need to work through their personal networks and congregations. But previous work has largely ignored the political influence of volunteer, non-ordained religious leaders.

This chapter describes a survey of Christian pastors and church members about money and stewardship in order to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, and meanings of American Christians that might affect their financial giving behaviors. In-depth, face to face interviews were conducted with twenty-six Christian church pastors and fifty-one church parishioners in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and California. The interview respondents came from many Christian denominations representing different kinds of conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, and Catholic churches. The interviews revealed that the issue of financial giving is one that seems to matter to American Christians, yet about which they are not clear and settled but rather uneasy if not uncomfortable. Many American Christians are less than fully contented with the practice and amount of their voluntary financial giving, but most seem content to live with whatever underlying guilt, confusion, or uncertainty they feel about it. Many American Christian pastors also struggle with varying degrees of discomfort and frustration over the issue of giving in their churches.

This chapter examines the results of a focused mental experiment wherein a nationally representative sample of American Christians was asked to ponder their response to the idea of their churches raising expectations on the financial giving of Christians. The idea in doing this is that having ordinary Christians all over the United States run this mental experiment in their heads will provide yet another angle on understanding how Christians think and feel about the issue of religious and charitable financial giving. The results showed that American Christians are ready and waiting to give ten percent of their after-tax income if only their churches were to ask them firmly to do so; earning higher incomes does not make American Christians more generous with their money; and racial differences among American Christians influence the matter of raising expectations of financial giving.

The journals and correspondence of young men entering the Protestant ministry reveal their anxieties about undertaking pastoral work in general and their discomfort and frustration in ministering to women in particular. Formal coursework in the seminary provided insufficient field experience and left the novice pastor deeply worried about his manner, manners, and efficacy. Encounters with women were exceptionally painful, especially when they resisted the clergyman’s exhortations, argued with his theology, or appeared too eager to entertain him. Questioning their own abilities or that of women, young men retreated and avoided women. Even the search for a suitable wife to whom he could delegate his ministry to women generated apprehension, since he was acutely aware that she could “make or mar” his career in the ministry. Whether novices or veteran pastors, many men experienced distance, rather than intimacy or an alliance with women.

When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541, he was entrusted not just with the Ecclesiastical Ordinances but also with leading the committee to write what would become Geneva’s first, post-Revolutionary constitution. Significantly, he would also be involved, near the end of his life, with the drafting of the city-state’s second constitution. The chapter shows that the Genevan Reformation was powered by a level of political and civic activism and involvement that explains not only many of the problems it faced but also why fishwives felt free to discuss the things of faith—albeit not always with a level of discernment pleasing to the Company of Pastors. On the international level this made Geneva an exhilarating and inspiring model to follow.

This chapter details the author's pilgrimage with his wife—as the 300th anniversary of Edwards's birth approached on October 5, 2003—to experience the places that had occasioned the Northampton pastor's highly sensual understanding of the spiritual life. Edwards provides a middle way between Aquinas and Barth, employing what we might call an “analogy of desire or delight” (analogia delectationis). Of all the mysteries in the cosmos, it is the yearning of creation that most points us to God. He argued that echoes of God's glory are received and returned in the creature's knowing, loving, and delighting in a world that mirrors the divine. While he thought this occurred in its fullness only among those blessed with a new spiritual sense, the world evokes a definite—if imperfect—delight in God's beauty for all those created in God's image.

This chapter examines the sexual behavior of pastors, priests, and ministers in the United States. Every church requires exemplary behavior and most of them require clergy to vow compliance at ordination. However, secret worlds were being opened and liberalized ethics were being espoused and some clergy declared a God-given right of “justice-love”, which means consensual sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage. This chapter discusses the many fractures of the ministry fault line over human sexuality including sexual abuse, promiscuity, and ordination of homosexuals.

This chapter begins with a scene painted by the North African rhetor Julianus Pomerius, in his On the Contemplative Life, composed in southern Gaul in the early years of the sixth century. Although rarely recognized as such, the work is cast as a dialogue. As Robert Markus has emphasized, what Pomerius in fact composed was a handbook for pastors, encouraging them to participate in an ascetic understanding of moral authority and pastoral responsibility. These priorities are announced at once: having promised to define ‘in a few words’ the nature of the contemplative life, Pomerius offers to consider ‘whether one charged with ruling a Church can become a sharer in contemplative virtue’. This question in turn leads on to a host of others, all of which presume a concern with the moral exercise of episcopal office. Taken together, the evidence generated around Pomerius reveals a network of rich and cultured clerics and laity in southern Gaul and beyond, with particular interests in the ascetic life and its promotion throughout the Catholic Church.

The number of black women pastors is so small — less than 10% in the mainline denominations. So black women can be truly said to be often seen in the pews but seldom called to the pulpit. The struggle of black women for the priesthood today is still reflective of the legacy of the legendary Jerena Lee, first black woman ordained to the ministry. This chapter specifically discusses the story of Jerena Lee. After Jerena Lee, the doctrinal, intellectual and social rationale that prevented black women from being fully accepted in the ministry was swept away. In general, the task would seem to be for black men and women to see their common predicament more clearly, to cling to each other more dearly and to fight the common foe more fiercely together.