: “It’s short, unimportant and uninteresting.” That will show him! (
I’ve been meaning to post this for a few days, but it’s been busy, as you can tell from my low level of blogging. Geoffrey Lentz is the associate pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola, and a former student of mine. In fact, I met Geoffrey in the first class I taught for youth in a United Methodist church when he was just 14 and I had been a Methodist less than a year.
No, I’m not going to go into all the embarrassing youth stories. Suffice it to say that everyone realized then that Geoffrey was going to be a minister, and that never changed. I now attend his Wednesday Bible study on the Lectionary passages and really enjoy learning from him. He has become quite conversant with church history and especially early church fathers, and makes extensive use of that knowledge in teaching. Since my training and inclination starts from the opposite perspective, i.e. I tend to study the Bible as a piece of ancient near eastern literature, I find his study to be a nice complement to my own.
I have long tried to persuade Geoffrey to start blogging, and finally he has. His blog is at GeoffreyLentz.com, and I’d call attention to his thoughtful first post, What is a Preacher to Do?
He also just wrote a study guide for the Participatory Study Series published by my company, Energion Publications. You can find out more about this excellent new guide to the Gospel According to St. Luke on its catalog page.
I’m curious: what makes someone a potential minister?
I’m not planning to join the clergy any time soon myself, but it occurs to me that the qualities that make a good minister are likely to be useful in lots of other situations.