Gathering Up the Threads

“T.S. Eliot has claimed that every culture needs minor as well as major poets. The major poets, who are few and far between, provide enduring expressions of the deep truth of life. Minor poets have the more modest goal of inculcating that truth to particular people in particular places . . . The vast majority of pastors are not major but minor poets whose humble calling is to spend their lives making sense of the major lines of poetry they have inherited from the sacred tradition for a specific gathering of people called the local congregation” (M. Craig Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, pp. 24-25).