The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart. By Harold Senkbeil. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019.
If you asked the proverbial man on the street “What is a Pastor?”, you would undoubtedly get a wide swath of divergent and potentially confusing answers. This same confusion is reflected even among clergy today, although perhaps to a lesser extent. Harold Senkbeil’s The Care of Souls serves as an answer for those who do not know what a pastor is, but it also serves blessed reminder to all of us who may have a clearer understanding of what it means to be a pastor but so easily forget. Senkbeil’s explicit goal is to make the reader fall in love with the care-of-souls model of ministry and help cultivate the sort of pastoral heart and mind that operate according to it. Contrary to its gnostic-sounding title, this ancient model is focused on the care of the whole person. “Biblically speaking, humans don’t have souls, they are souls.” (64) Pastors are the soul’s physician. Through careful listening and attentive diagnosis, pastors treat spiritual ailments with a careful application of the word and sacraments. In the process of laying this model of pastoral care, Senkbeil also provides us with a compendium of pastoral wisdom and insight gleaned from five decades of ministry.
The book broadly follows three movements. In the first two chapters, Senkbeil defines what a pastor is and how all of his work is rooted in the Word of God. The middle chapters address various topics in the care of souls, including diagnosis, treatment, guilt, holiness, spiritual warfare, and mission. In the final three chapters, Senkbeil encourages pastors towards tending to their own souls and steadfastness in the ministry.
In defining a pastor, Senkbeil starts with the identity and work of Jesus. “The premise of this book is that action flows from being; identity defines activity. … When ministry is rooted in Jesus and his gifts, then that ministry will be all the more fruitful” (16). The sacramental presence of Jesus is the very bedrock of all pastoral work. Built on this foundation, the pastor practices his craft, where the application of word and sacrament are the means by which he cares for the sheep.
Once Senkbeil moves into the more pragmatic (but still theological!) middle section, his pastoral insight truly shines. One of the greatest strengths of this book is its clarity about soul-treatment. In contrast to an age that relies too much on either modern psychology or modern medicine, Senkbeil reminds us that real pastoral treatment of the wounded soul is putting the individual into the presence of Jesus via word and sacrament, whereby Jesus’ own holiness touches our unholiness and renews us. This soul treatment certainly does not exclude the aid of skilled doctors or therapists, who can be marvelously helpful, but their treatments cannot treat the ills of unholiness, guilt, sin, and a bad conscience before God.
Although Senkbeil is strong on the joys of ministry, he is not Pollyannaish; he knows the difficulties and hardships that pastors and their families face. In the final section, he encourages the pastor to tend to his own soul by word and prayer. He also urges us towards discipline and to seek out care from other pastors. Although it is easy to wring our hands over a crumbling society that has lost its bearings, we preach an enduring and unchanging message of Christ crucified for all.
Overall, it is an excellent book, although there are peculiarities. The volume reads a little like a series of mini-essays all topically connected, but not written as continuous prose. If it is a strike against the volume, it is not much of one. It does, however, take a little getting used to. But perhaps one of the strongest contributions of this volume is how it teaches pastors to provide concrete pastoral care and counsel to the flock without succumbing to shallow spiritual “how-tos” and checklists. In other words, Senkbeil shows the reader that pragmatic and pastoral are not mutually exclusive categories. He demonstrates (as best as one can in a written volume) how to use confession, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, and even the practice of blessing as pastoral care.
In the final analysis, this book is a blessed reminder to every pastor whom we serve and how we serve, not as solo artists or self-made men, but as undershepherds. The inevitable hardships of ministry are not ours alone to bear. The Kingdom of God does not rest on our shoulders; we are simply those who have been called as pastors to serve in it. “We are not nostalgia freaks, trying to retreat to a more comfortable past. We move confidently into an uncertain future emboldened by our Lord who gives us his word of hope and life to preach to a world lost in despair and death.” (272)
Jeremiah Johnson
Plymouth, MN