Reformed Christian Studies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bucer Posted at The Reformed Reader : Martin Bucer’s (d.1551) pastoral theology book Concerning the True Care of Souls is a wonderful resource.  I recently came across this section that I had marked up – it’s a good reminder for those of our readers who are pastors! When St. Peter is asked for the third time if he loves the Lord, and himself for the third time protests his love, then for the third time the Lord says to him: ‘Feed my sheep.’  It is as if he were saying: ‘If you love me so much and want to show this by your actions, feed my sheep, because there is nothing you can do for me which is preferable or more pleasing to me.’  If we really love Christ, he is everything to us; therefore if anyone is called to this ministry, whatever unpleasantness, sufferings and crosses he may have to bear in the course of his ministry, he will be upheld and strengthened against all unpleasantness, sufferings, and crosses only by the fact that the

Posted at 5 Minutes in Church History : Martin Bucer was one of the leading lights of the Reformation in Strasbourg. He was born in 1491 and died in 1551, and he, like Martin Luther, was an Augustinian monk. In 1518, he found himself in Heidelberg at the Augustinian chapter house with Luther himself. In October 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, beginning the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s brothers in the Augustinian order wanted to take him up on his invitation to debate, so they invited him to the Augustinian chapter house in Heidelberg. Luther arrived in April 1518, and rather than presenting the Ninety-Five Theses, he drafted a new set of twenty-nine points for debate. Bucer was just a young monk in the audience. Seeing the debate had a significant impact on Bucer, and sometime in the next year or two, he was converted. He was one of the first Reformers to leave the monastery and get married. In 1523, he was invited to Strasbour