The Teaching Church: Congregation as Mentor

Despite efforts by conscientious and gifted educational institutions, ministers invariably discover in their first church that they still have a great deal to learn. The question they face is how they are to learn it. . . . —from the foreword by Fisher HumphreysAfter realizing that much of daily pastoral work can only be learned as ministers begin their first pastorate, Christopher M. Hamlin and Sarah Jackson Shelton decided to ask more than eighty of their colleagues what their churches had taught them. Their primary question was this: Could it be that the church, its people, and the life events experienced within the context of the faith community become the educational experiences that mold and shape ministers into pastors? Collected in The Teaching Church: Congregation as Mentor are the stories of the pastors who shared how congregations have shaped, nurtured, and, sometimes, broken their resolve to be faithful servants of God.

Christopher M. Hamlin is a native of Macon, Georgia, and a graduate of Morehouse College, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, and United Theological Seminary. He has served as administrative assistant to the pastor at Trinity Missionary Baptist Church in Pontiac, Michigan, and pastor of the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Chris currently serves as pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Birmingham and works as chaplain/education specialist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham's 1917 AIDS/HIV Outpatient Clinic. Sarah Jackson Shelton is a native of Birmingham, Alabama, and a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. She has served as youth minister and minister of education at Brookwood Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; director of volunteer services at Samford University; and associate pastor of Riverchase Baptist Church in Hoover, Alabama. Sarah currently serves as pastor of Baptist Church of the Covenant in Birmingham.