The pastoral office has always been a difficult calling. Today, the pastor is often asked to fulfill multiple roles: preacher, teacher, therapist, administrator, CEO. How can pastors thrive amid such demands? What is needed is a contemporary pastoral rule: a pattern for ministry that both encourages pastors and enables them to focus on what is most important in their pastoral task. This book, coauthored by three experts with decades of practical experience, explains how relying on a pastoral rule has benefited communities throughout the church's history and how such rules have functioned in the lives and work of figures such as Augustine, Calvin, Wesley, and Bonhoeffer. It also provides concrete advice on how pastors can develop and keep a rule that will help both them and their congregations to flourish.

The author shares a record of his life's footprints with future generations of his family who can never know him or witness historical events and paradigm shifts as he has over the past eight decades. He describes the hardships of growing up on a working farm in rural Alabama in the mid-twentieth century and later his educational and professional accomplishments after overcoming the disadvantages of poverty and other adversity. He honors his colonial ancestors and their descendants, including Revolutionary War soldiers, by remembering and writing about them and includes extensive family trees for his Walkers,Whites, Smithsons, Slatons, and Paynes. His military exploits are more properly described as escapades. He talks about his brushes with the technological and scientific innovations and reaction to major social and cultural shifts as one who understands the historical import of this most unusual age in our country's evolution.