Love Big, Be Well is Winn Collier’s fictional account of rural ministry.
Here he puts the question a country church puts to prospective pastors.
Do they love a program, or people?
At its best the answer is not either/or.
Love for pastoring people is the engine, though.
We’d like to know if you’re going to use us. . . . Is our church going to be your opportunity to finally enact that one flaming vision you’ve had in your crosshairs ever since seminary, that one strategic model that will finally get this church-thing straight? Or might we hope that our church could be a place where you’d settle in with us and love alongside us, cry with us and curse the darkness with us, and remind us how much God’s crazy about us? In other words, the question we want answered is very simple: Do you actually want to be our pastor?
Love Big, Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, Winn Collier, Eerdmans (2017). pp.5–6
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