Review of Pastorals for Pastors in February Banner Mag

With fellow pastors in mind, Pastor Gary Brady has self-published a helpful running commentary on 1 Timothy, Titus and 2 Timothy, drawing on four decades of his own ministerial experience. Though he will occasionally make reference to his own Baptist context, such consideration should not hinder those from a different polity from deriving benefit. A little more distracting are not a few grammatical errors.*

The book itself is written with the encouragement that pastors might read through the pastoral epistles regularly and, if following Brady’s pattern, twice each year. The book itself is divided into thirty chapters. Each chapter is then subdivided into six sub-divisions labelled Jan/Jul, Feb/Aug, and so on. The purpose is to guide the reader to approximately a page of comment for each day for six months before beginning the process over again. If the reader follows the system suggested then he will be focused on 2 Timothy 4:16 on 30 January and then 1 Timothy 1:3–4 on 31 January.** By the same token the reader will be considering the question of the ordination of women on 4 March and then the reasoning Paul gives on 4 April with the argument for male leadership given on 4 May.

The desire to have pastors immersed in the pastoral epistles is certainly warmly encouraging but this reviewer would venture to suggest that reading through the text consecutively with the assistance of able commentators, especially those with the wealth of experience of pastors such as Gary Brady*** with his forty years serving a congregation,**** might prove more helpful than jumping day to day from one verse to another.

IAIN WRIGHT

* This statement involves the use of litotes. It is a strong way of saying the book is full of grammatical errors. As far as I am aware, that is incorrect. There are a few split infinitives and missing commas, perhaps.

** This is a little sloppy. There is no reading on January 31.

*** I'm sure that all my best comments come from such sources

**** The repetition of this makes it sound sneering but apparently that's just his way.

Iain Wright is a Scotsman pastoring in Illinois