Some Thoughts on the Ministry

Abstract

"THIS. ARTICLE IS an abridged version of a paper given to a Baptist Ministers' fraternal in Leeds in 1963. I chose not to speak about psych'iatry and how it was relevant to the ministry, but to use my psychiatric knowledge in the service of my Christian faith, to see what light it shed on a minister's work. I am not ashamed to speak of emotional experiences for we c.annot develop into healthy men and women without having passed through many phases of emotional development. Our personalities are formed by internalising, building up inside ourselves psychic images of our parents as those who cared for us, and then of the significant persons in our lives. The effectiveness of your ministry will depend as much on your ability to present human relationships and an emotional life, in other words to. make Christ come alive, as on anything else. It is much more important to be a real person, blemishes and all, than a polished stereotype of a parson, " a whited sepulchre " in our Lord's phrase. Much of the therapeutic power a doctor or a parson exerts comes from his personal influence in replacing what may have been inadequate parental influences earlier"