Pastor's Library

The word “hospitality” can often create various levels of anxiety because of the perfect images of fashionably dressed hosts and impeccable homes that media and culture bombard us with.  Yet, Rosaria Butterfield, in The Gospel Comes with a House Key, casts a far more reassuring and ordinary vision for what hospitality should actually look like. Using engaging stories from her own experiences of being on the receiving end of radically ordinary hospitality, Butterfield shows how one’s simple, but authentic, welcome can become a bridge for the gospel to reach the lost friends and neighbors in your life. This type of hospitality views our homes as God’s tools where authentic love and grace can be seen in action, revealing what true Christian faith looks like.

Some Pastors and Teachers is a volume for every minister's study and indeed for the bookshelves and bedside tables of everyone who has a concern for the ministry of the gospel and the well-being of the church in the twenty-first century. In many ways, it reflects the biblical vision of what every minister is called to be: pastor, teacher, counselor, and example - but also a man who is growing spiritually, both in understanding and in character, before the eyes of his congregation.

In five sections and thirty-nine chapters, Sinclair B. Ferguson writes on pastor-teachers whose lives and work have left an indelible mark on his own life, and then leads us in a series of chapters on the teaching of John Calvin, John Owen, and the seventeenth century Puritans. This is followed by studies of Scripture, the ministry of the Spirit, the nature of Biblical Theology, the work of Christ, adoption, the nature of the Christian life and other important doctrines. The final section discusses various aspects of preaching, including preaching Christ from the Old Testament, the importance of theology, reaching the heart, and concludes with a decalogue for preachers. All this, as the epilogue makes clear, is set within the context and goal of doxology.