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by Christina Le Moignan

Pastor John is a book that makes connections. The author’s primary concern is that readers of John’s gospel should be able to connect with what they read. They are offered twin approaches in making this connection. One is a reader-response approach to the text, in which the emphasis is on what readers personally find in the text as well as on the more detached analyses of academic writing. The other approach, coupled with the first, is a psychodynamic approach, which encourages readers to examine their own interior “feeling” responses to what they read, and to use the responses to grow in their own self-understanding and in faith. This growth is shown to involve connections between people’s emotional being, their personal identity, and their spiritual lives.

Thus, whilst Pastor John recognises the relevance of the narrator’s relationship with and pastoral concern for his own community, the primary focus is about the way in which John’s gospel can be used pastorally today. Throughout this book, the fundamental question addressed is how, through our reading and sharing the gospel text, Jesus gives himself to us.

The author is a Methodist minister who has sixty years’ experience in that role. As both preacher and pastor, he has consistently sought to connect biblical exegesis with pastoral care. He has also given particular emphasis in his ministry to developing group work; hence a connection made throughout this book between group study of a text and the personal development of its members, both individually and as a group.

Fruitful as all these connections are, they are not always easy to make. This book will make demands of its readers, not only in making intellectual links between ideas which may be new or unfamiliar, but in the more personal challenges of the self-examination which readers are invited to make. People are more than once exhorted to “have courage!” They will be well rewarded if they do. For the connection that this book most fundamentally has been written to facilitate is the one between its readers and the Christ whom Pastor John presents to us.