Augustine Was a Pastor First

For most of his afterlife in the Christian imagination, Augustine has been a theologian first, a philosopher second, and everything else a distant third. What tends to get lost is that he spent nearly forty years as a working pastor. In this episode, Joey Sherrard, pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church and author of the new book The Augustinian Pastor, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk about Augustine as a pastor for pastors, discovering not a distant theologian but a fellow pastor who had shepherded his own congregation through a world coming apart at the seams.

The conversation moves through some of Augustine's most enduring insights for those in ministry today: why restlessness isn't a problem to fix but a signpost pointing us home, how pride can dress itself up in the language of Christian virtue, and what it means to order our loves rather than simply renounce them. Joey also talks about pastoral loneliness, and about the Ambrose Collective, a weekly practice of friendship he built with fellow pastors, and what it looks like to build a rule of life without a monastery, a vow, or a bell tower.