I reviewed my seminary notes and found nothing to help. I must have skipped that day too! I realized that I had never been in a conversation about pastoral identity that went beyond “preacher.” Desperately I searched for contemporary literature on pastoral ministry. It was not an easy search. I had to start from scratch since, curiously, my training ignored the literature in the field. I read about “change-agents,” “poimenics,” “pastor-teachers,” “relational theology,” “the pastoral director,” “the sacramental person,” “the Reformed pastor,” “player-coaches,” and “the pastor as manager” — all recent models for the ministry. These were a few of the twenty-or-so contemporary models of ministry available at the time. I identified with none of them. They were remote from small-town church life and my emerging pastoral experience. My colleagues in churches large and small, rural and urban seemed as confused as I was. The question grew larger, “What is a Christian pastor at the end of the twentieth century?”