Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be unapologetically urges clergy readers to develop practices that will help them become more excellent ministers. A long-time field educator, now serving as a denominational staff person responsible for ministerial formation, Barbara Blodgett believes excellence is a matter of doing simple things with care and consistency. Ministers who commit themselves to excellence will grow and flourish, and even become happier in ministry. Blodgett urges ministers to resist praise and instead to ask for feedback, to seek the company of mentors who are better than the reader is at what he or she does, to be vulnerable before their peers in order to learn from them, and to define themselves as a leader who does not merely take activist stances but risks entering into deep, transformative relationships. Improvement in ministry, Blodgett argues, comes about not through extraordinary leaps and bounds but rather through adoptingsimple habits and carrying through on small but thoughtfully made choices. Addressed to ministers, ecoming the Pastor You Hope to Be is also a valuable resource for discernment committees, Christian educators, leaders of continuing education and lay education programs, and all those who partner with theological schools to help form ministers, both lay and ordained.

Barbara J. Blodgett is Minister for Vocation and Formation for the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio. She was previously the director of Supervised Ministries at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. A former pastor ordained in the UCC, she is also an ethicist who speaks and writes on moral issues in the ministry. She is author of Lives Entrusted: An Ethic of Trust for Ministry and Constructing the Erotic: Sexual Ethics and Adolescent Girls.