The Pastor Theologians Podcast
A theology podcast for the church. The pastor theologians podcast consists of conversations and teaching resources at the intersection of theological scholarship and life and ministry in the local church. The vision for this show is to help equip pastors to be theologians for today’s complex world.
The Pastor Theologians Podcast
Becoming a Pastor Theologian | Joey Sherrard
In this episode of the CPT Podcast, Zach Wagner and Joel Lawrence talk with CPT fellow Joey Sherrard, discipleship pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church. Joey shares his story of coming to faith, studying theology at Rhodes, Duke, and St. Andrews, and discerning his calling as a pastor-theologian. He reflects on the influence of mentors, the challenges of growing up in a non-Christian home, and how thinkers like Augustine and T.F. Torrance shape his ministry today—including a preview of his forthcoming book The Augustinian Pastor (March 2026).
The gift of my father in my life, he gave me a love of learning and of reading, a love of books. And he continued as long as he was alive. You know, he continued to really just kind of be this presence in my life. I was kind of curious, skeptical, but he engaged me, which I'm grateful for. Hey,
SPEAKER_02:everybody. Welcome to another episode of the CPT Podcast. I'm Zach Wagner. I'm joined by CPT President Joel Lawrence. Hello, Joel. Hello, Zach. Good to see you. We just finished a conversation with CPT fellow Joey Sherrard, who serves as discipleship pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church in Georgia. I'm not kidding. I'm right about
SPEAKER_01:that. Just outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but it's across the border, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:yeah, yeah, yeah. What are some things that stood out to you about this conversation, Joel?
SPEAKER_01:Unique story that Joey has in terms of kind of his background and his undergrad experience, which we dig into a fair bit, which, you know, kind of in a quote unquote secular university, post-Christian, doing religious studies and how that really shaped him in important ways. That was really, really good to hear that side of his story. as we get to at the end, and you'll hear in the interview, he's got a book coming out on Augustine as a pastor, and really excited about that book as a resource for pastors, and looking forward to having him back on next year when that comes out to talk about that. Fun to hear kind of how his theological studies, his work in Augustine has both been shaped by and shaped his understanding of the calling of a pastor theologian.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and you also see the various institutions and people that he's been exposed to and been taught by. He went on to study at Duke and then later at St. Andrews and the way those spaces and people were influential in his life as well was really cool to hear about. So enough from us. We'll get right into this conversation with Joey Sherrard.
SPEAKER_01:Joey, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here with you guys.
SPEAKER_01:I'm
SPEAKER_00:looking
SPEAKER_01:forward to the conversation, the opportunity to get to know you as we like to introduce our fellows to the podcast listening audience. And so looking forward to hearing about your life and ministry. So why don't we begin at the beginning? Tell us a little bit about your early life. Where were you born? Did you grow up in the church, coming to faith? if that happened during that time, all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Yeah. So my father was a college professor. And so a lot of my early life sort of centers around his vocation, born in Virginia. And then when I was eight, moved to Mississippi following him. He was an engineering professor. He and my mom, I would say were deeply moral people. But my home, I would not describe it as a Christian home, sort of in how my experience of it and how it felt. And my time at home was one where I experienced a lot of gifts from my family, which I'm grateful for. But also my family was a place where I experienced a lot of pain as well. And for me, kind of, Coming to faith was the experience of really being welcomed by a family. I can remember distinctly receiving an invitation to go to a friend's youth group and showing up there and the experience of being in that place and just the warmth and the belonging just really drew me in. My home often felt pretty dark. pretty lonely and the welcome that I received there I mean it was it was really just a beautiful gift to me and I often think about just the significance of that invitation in my life. My student ministry directors like very quickly became sort of mentor figures to me. And I just knew that like what was happening in those spaces was like something that I really deeply wanted to be a part of. So for me, I really think belonging preceded belief in some really significant ways. And I think that really gave me a deep love for the local church and my experience of it. I would say I did not, my ability to articulate the gospel really came much later and experience working at a Christian camp and having the campus or the camp minister walk me through the book of Romans and reading Martin Luther's experience of kind of coming to grasp the gospel through Romans 1, 16 and 17. That for me was really the culminating experience of kind of coming to faith is kind of realizing what the righteousness of God was and what it meant for me. And just the freedom I felt. My home was very performance-based. I felt a lot of pressure to succeed, to perform. And when I heard the gospel in that encounter, it was just, it was the best thing I'd ever heard.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. I'm curious how your family responded to your going to church, to, kind of this sense of belonging that you were feeling maybe outside of the home and how what did they think about that did you talk to them about that what did that look like
SPEAKER_00:yeah both my parents had different responses my mother immediately was very concerned with the depth of my engagement there like I can distinctly remember her asking me like if I understood that like I like that. My behavior was kind of cultish, you know, like, um, and yeah, I think she was concerned about it. My father always had in
SPEAKER_02:fairness, like youth group can be, you know, it can definitely, it can definitely have that vibe.
SPEAKER_00:And I threw myself in, I mean, I just, the church door was open. Like I wanted to do
SPEAKER_02:beautiful things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Uh, and my father always had like a very kind of, um, sort of agnostic response to it. Like as my faith grew, he clearly was interested, but always from a different kind of perspective. And so he would kind of, you know, push different books across my way. Like I have, you know, a copy of like a book by Paul Tillich that he, you know, he had given me and things like that. So he was like the gift of my father in my life. It may, it was not, you know, that he gave me the faith that I now have, but that he gave me a love of learning and of reading, a love of books. And he continued, as long as he was alive, he continued to really just kind of be this presence in my life. I was kind of curious about skeptical, but he engaged me, which I'm grateful for.
SPEAKER_01:It's really interesting to hear different stories of people when they come to faith. Their parents aren't people of faith. How different parents respond and what that looks like. You're kind of growing in your faith through high school into the youth group cult. They're indoctrinating you more and more. That's right. Where did you go to college? And then tell us a little bit more about camp and your experience there. And then at what point did a sense of a call to ministry start to come into your thinking?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I went to Rhodes College, which is a liberal arts school in Memphis, Tennessee.
SPEAKER_01:I've got a good friend who teaches theology there.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine as well.
SPEAKER_01:Nice, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And Rhodes, I sort of already had the voice of my mother kind of in sort of guiding me. As soon as I saw what it is that my kind of youth directors were doing, I was like, I don't know what they do, but I want to do that, right? And my mom's initial response was, you're too smart to be a pastor. And so I thought, well, how can I help people and make lots of money while doing it? And so I initially, well, I'll just be a doctor. And so I pursued that. And Memphis, you know, has St. you. It's kind of right around the corner. I thought pediatric oncology or something like that. Pretty quickly, my biology classes kind of disabused me of any aspirations that I would be a doctor. Plan B. Yeah. Rhodes was started as a school that trained Presbyterian pastors. And I there was a very large endowment that had been set up to do that. So it had probably 14 people in the religious studies department. Every student was required to take two years, either on the Bible or the values of Western civilization. As the school departed from its Christian moorings, it had sort of reinterpreted some of that calling. And so not many of my professors were Christians or trusted in, you know, Jesus or believe that the scriptures were, you know, divinely inspired. And so they had kind of reinterpreted that. And so a lot of people lost their faith in those classes. But for me, I, you know, my experience at Rhodes, it just kind of, as those four years unfolded, it was, I initially knew, I found the classes just fascinating. And even when I couldn't quite articulate why I disagreed with my professors, I was just intrigued and interested. And as my vocational kind of journey unfolded, I knew that I wanted to, that I was enjoying these classes a lot. And so I ended up becoming a religious studies major. And I just had such a gift of an experience, both in the classroom and the kind of voices that supported me outside of it. So I had wonderful professors. I'm guessing the person who's our mutual friend, Steve Haynes. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:Bonhoeffer guy.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yeah. Steve, I took a class from him on Christian responses to the Holocaust. Wow. That was just a class. that really challenged me to think more deeply about what it is that I believed and the kind of blind spots that Christians can have. I took a class on the theology of the civil rights movement from another professor there. This is all undergrad. Yeah, it was a great experience. And that similarly, you know, there's the experience of what the German church did during the Holocaust. And there's the experience of thinking about what the white church did during the civil rights movement. So those were really valuable experiences that I had. I also took classes on the Old Testament from a professor who had clearly lost his faith during his doctoral program. But I just learned to engage over the course of my four years in ways that I'm really grateful for. I played basketball with these guys, you know, at lunch on Tuesdays and got to know them. And then just had other voices that helped me kind of think through these things. I spent a summer, a couple weeks of a summer at LaBrie outside of Boston. And by the time that I finished, I was deeply grateful for the education that I had received. And that's really kind of what but began to lay the seeds of kind of the pastor-theologian vision for me. I had kind of two vocational paths that were sort
SPEAKER_02:of... Yeah, you could tell your mom, like, no, there are smart pastors. That's
SPEAKER_00:the thing. That's right. Yeah. Well, yeah, but that voice was still there for me in some ways. But I thought, okay, well, here are two different things that I can imagine. One is I could imagine working in gospel ministry. I had gotten involved in a college ministry with some friends while at Rhodes. We had started a ministry to the Greek system and just that experience was such a gift. Like just thinking through these things from the ground up in ways that I look back and I think we're sort of like equally foolish and also equally just exciting and invigorating. But then I also thought about a lot of people who might be in the shoes that I was in coming to a more or less secular institution and looking at the teachers that they had and wondering who can help guide me through this. And so I thought two vocational paths were in front of me. One is pastoral ministry. The other was getting a PhD and serving in a school not unlike Rhodes. And yeah, that's kind of the two paths that forked kind of in front of me. And I thought, well, how can I kind of keep both of these open for as long as possible? So I spent the year after I graduated from Rhodes, I was at like a nine-month kind of fellows-like experience. It was called the Trinity Forum Academy. It doesn't exist, but it was kind of attached to the vision of the Trinity Forum and so Oz Guinness was deeply involved but it was just such a unique situation such a unique place I it's based on the eastern shore of Maryland like not long not far from D.C. and so we spent time you know with various people in the D.C. area we also spent like at the time David Bentley Hart was living on the eastern shore and so
SPEAKER_02:no way
SPEAKER_00:we had lunch with him. I just kind of emailed him out of the blue. But out of that experience, I thought, okay, I still see these two vocations kind of unfolding. And so I decided to go to Duke Divinity School as kind of a place where Duke was a place where I could both trust that my professors believed the creed and confessed it without crossing their fingers. And also, if I decided to do doctoral work work like I wouldn't I could kind of enter back into a like a liberal arts institution you know kind of space and people would people wouldn't flag me as a you know as an evangelical and kind of disregard me immediately
SPEAKER_02:Joey there's so much to that story and I think it's unique I was struck by the kind of like youth group kid with ambivalent parents
SPEAKER_00:and
SPEAKER_02:heading off to undergrad, not at Bible college or a Christian kind of liberal arts school or something like that, which I think tends to be more typical of our fellows had some sort of experience like that, or they majored in something else in undergrad at a state school and then kind of got redirected to seminary and grad school. The religious studies program, as you were describing it, that I just think is a unique experience to be like an evangelical kid in a religious studies program um and then you go to duke and like you feel like okay everyone here believes in god like i think a lot
SPEAKER_00:of opposite
SPEAKER_02:where they're like you know conservative kind of uh dispensational bible college and then maybe they end up at duke and they're like do these people even believe in god um so uh you know we have we love duke we have lots of friends at duke and all of this but um yeah i just want to you to talk a little bit more about that dynamic it seems like it was a really rich experience for you but being the kind of like eager beaver evangelical youth group kid in a religious studies program reflect maybe just a little more on were those things ever felt like a tension were there other kind of evangelical influences in your life at the time that were kind of like well be careful what those people are saying in that religious study like
SPEAKER_00:right
SPEAKER_02:just curious
SPEAKER_00:yeah yeah you know I just feel my experience was so unique. I have many friends who have come through evangelicalism and are so grateful for its blessings, but also feel as if there are also wounds that they carry or things like that. I always felt on the outside of that experience. Growing up in a mainline I came to faith through a mainline youth group in Mississippi that was evangelical in the sense that they love Jesus. But I didn't get a lot of the kind of cultural baggage that some people
SPEAKER_02:experience.
SPEAKER_00:And then coming to Rhodes and they're just kind of voices that were a part of that time. Of course, there were things like, you know, they were kind of the outskirts of purity culture and things like that. But I pretty quickly started reading Lewis when I was at Rhodes, just kind of on my own. And that was a voice that there was sort of a depth and perspective to that voice that I was really grateful for. And I think my experience with my professors at Rhodes, I knew they were intelligent men and women. Mm-hmm. And the questions they were asking, you know, about like the documentary hypothesis, you know, and things like that were, I knew I needed to deal with it. I couldn't just dismiss those things. But they were also, I'm grateful for that. They were not like overly aggressive in that. Eventually, as we came to respect one another, I realized, okay, these are things that I need to deal with. I think particularly because I had also the kind of the voices of those classes that I already described, like how Christians responded to the Holocaust. I knew that I couldn't ignore these deeper questions, but I'm just really just grateful that I had other voices as well. And also, for me, it was kind of one of those John 6 type moments. moments like, where else can I go? Who else has the words of life? And I knew that who Jesus was had made such a difference in my life, given my experience of my home and the kind of darkness there that I'm just grateful that there was kind of the patience to live in the tension of those moments and then to trust that there were answers on the other side that helped me hold these things together.
SPEAKER_01:So talk to us about your experience at Duke and kind of this sensing the, trying to figure out the path ahead. And so both on the intellectual side at Duke, what did you study? What did you work on there? And then also on the kind of vocational side, working that out at Duke.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Duke, the moment I was at Duke, the kind of the two main figures were Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Hauerwas. And they sort of loomed large over that in such a way that I think was unique at a kind of tier one research institution. My first year, I lived in an intentional Christian community with some of, it was a kind of a weird variety of people, including some of Stanley Harawas' PhD students and things like that. So it was a fun place to be. I had a great Bible education at Duke, particularly through Kevin Rowe. Kevin was just finishing his PhD and was coming on faculty there and just a great man and really helped me think about reading the Bible. And all of my professors, they thought that the Bible was the inspired word of God and maybe came to different conclusions about different things. But I just found Duke to be a good place to work out a lot of the things, particularly in the Bible department. I was really grateful for that experience. My first semester at Duke, I took a class called The Vocation of the Pastor that was taught by the dean and his wife, so Greg Jones and Susan Jones. And then my pastor, my pastor for all three years there, a man named Alan Poole. And it was about halfway through that first semester that kind of my vocational discernment, like academy or pastorate, it kind of conclusively landed like within the church because we read two books back to back. We read a pastoral rule by Gregory the great. And then we read working the ankles by Eugene Peterson.
SPEAKER_01:That's a great combo right
SPEAKER_00:there. Yeah. And it was, yeah, it was, you know, I still had that kind of voice in the back of my head for my mom. You're too smart to be a pastor. And I realized it's like during that class, like, no, this, this vocation will challenge me, you know, in every single way, and not just intellectually, but also spiritually, also relationally. And so I really didn't question where I would end up from that point on. I knew I would end up in the local church, even while I still felt kind of this tug to think about doctoral studies throughout my time at Duke. And I was just so grateful to serve under a pastor in Allenpool who just modeled for me a lot of this kind of thing. When he, when I, I interned at his church for a couple of years and he would kind of let me in to his sermon preparation and his kind of how he thought about pastoral leadership. And it was, it was just theological through and through. And so it just kind of gave me a vision for the vocation that I'm so grateful to have received from them.
SPEAKER_01:So, So what happened after Duke? Did you go pursue the PhD shortly thereafter? Was there a ministry stop along the way? What's your
SPEAKER_00:journey from there? So I got married after my first year of seminary. And so my wife and I, as we sort of stood on the sort of at the end of my third year of my MDiv program, I was 100 percent ready to go back to school and see what was next. And my wife wisely kind of said, well, we've done a lot of school right now. What else is there? And so kind of listening to her wisdom, I went back to the place where I'd grown up, back to Starkville, Mississippi, and served at the Presbyterian church that I had grown up not attending. This was the church that my parents were distantly involved in. And I served there for six years, and those six years were really a long training in the work of love. I mean, I had great experiences, undergrad and Rhodes and Duke, but I really was kind of a brain walking around on a stick. And so I spent a lot of time in that community working with people who, this is the kind of pastoral cliche, but they didn't care what I knew until they knew that I cared. And four and a half years of their working as an associate pastor, the senior pastor left. And so I stepped in as the interim senior pastor for the next year and a half. And it was... just a long and beautiful season of marrying and burying and baptizing and a lot of time in, you know, hospital rooms and on people's front porches and just really grew in just some really needed ways that when I eventually went to get a PhD, I was just a very different person because of that experience. So that was a wonderful community and There were seasons there that were really hard, particularly as we were kind of doing denominational discernment. It was a mainline church that eventually left the mainline. And I was a part of that process and sort of learned a lot through conflict and things like that. But it was just a great season. And that church, First Presbyterian Church of Starkville, Mississippi, is just a really special place to us and our family.
SPEAKER_01:Were you ordained there, ordained in that
SPEAKER_00:process? was not interested in moving our family, you know, to get a PhD program. And so we had these like, this like cycle of date nights where we would go out to dinner and I was sort of, I wouldn't ruin the date at that point, but then we would like go out to dessert and I'd be kind of like, so. And, you know, she, she was not interested. And in the process, you know, I was accepted to, uh, a handful of PhD programs in the UK to sit for theology. And I deferred. And I deferred for University of St. Andrews, which was one of my first choices, because we felt really called to stay in this church as they were discerning their denominational identity and there was conflict and things like that. We just felt like this was the place to be. And so a lot of times, uk programs don't really allow deferrals like they kind of say well thanks you know but no thanks but we just kind of said well we know this is the next step and so over the course of the next year um we eventually things moved where they were calling another pastor at that point it was clear that in order for for him to kind of really step into his role it'd be helpful if i if i left because i had been serving in the senior role and moving back to an associate OSHA pastor would probably have been difficult for all of us. And then we got an email notification. Like I can clearly remember kind of feeling like stuck and praying and then going for a run, coming back home, opening my email to a notification that we'd received like a scholarship for the university of St. Andrews.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. St. Andrews.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. So it
SPEAKER_02:doesn't usually do that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, it was that, that was part of it. And it was, it was, St. Andrews was celebrating its 600th anniversary. And so when we got the 600th... Were William and Kate there
SPEAKER_02:at the time?
SPEAKER_00:What's that?
SPEAKER_02:Were William and Kate there at the time?
SPEAKER_00:No, they had left. They were not there, but they were well-remembered. Well-remembered, I'm sure. Yeah. So the name of the award was the 600th Anniversary Scholarship. And I was like, well, these don't come around very often. You hit a It just felt like the Lord was... We haven't
SPEAKER_02:done this in 600 years, but we think just to celebrate, we might as well
SPEAKER_00:just this one time. But it felt like just the Lord's timing in that, that we said no to love this congregation for another year and then this provision. And over the course of the next three weeks, my wife went from being like, I'm not interested in this at all to like, let's do this. And it was such a great adventure. She enjoyed it more than I did. And I enjoyed it a lot. So I studied systematic theology. I was there for two and a half years studying with Alan Torrance. The topic of my thesis was T.F. Torrance. And St. Andrews was such a special community during that season. A lot of North American there at the time. What years were you
SPEAKER_01:there,
SPEAKER_00:Joey? It's there 13 through 15. Yeah. So John Webster arrived in the fall that I, that I arrived as well. And him and his, his students also, who had just come down from Aberdeen as well. I mean, it was just, Tom Wright was there at the time. Lots of dear friends who, it was just a great, great season. It's a beautiful,
SPEAKER_02:it's a beautiful space too. I think relative, like what it has going for it compared to a lot of UK universities, many of which are very beautiful, is the coast, it seems
SPEAKER_00:to me.
SPEAKER_02:I think that's pretty unique for folks thinking about places where you might want to go on a little PhD adventure or a master's degree for that matter. If you like the coast and the kind of... I mean, you can speak to it more than I. You live there for crying out loud. But I always thought that was something cool and unique about St. Andrews.
SPEAKER_01:And golf. And
SPEAKER_02:golf. And golf, yeah. If you like golf. I mean, where else could you go? Yeah, exactly. Speaking of John Six. Only St. Andrews. Yes,
SPEAKER_00:it was idyllic. I mean, I, we would, I would walk my kids a quarter mile to drop them off at school in the morning and then walk like another three quarters of a mile to the divinity postgraduate, you know, offices, which are right next to the cathedral rooms, which are right next to them. It's kind of hard to believe it happened. So you were
SPEAKER_01:there for, uh, you said 2013 to 15 and then, uh, came, Back to the States to a church
SPEAKER_00:calling? shown me the just the gift of kind of deeper education for the local church and so we ended up at the place where I currently serve Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church right outside of Chattanooga called to to do discipleship in this context.
SPEAKER_01:So talk to us about how you kind of understand yourself to be living out the vocation of a pastor theologian in your role. And then in that also, we want to give a sneak preview. You've got a book coming out next spring called The Augustinian Pastor. So tell us both about kind of your sense of working out your calling as a pastor theologian and then tease this book for us so we can get people excited to get a hold of that next year.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Those two things are definitely related for me. I think my thesis work on Torrance and the way that he thought about theology really formed me as well. He served on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh but was always deeply involved in the of scotland during his career and he gave me theological categories that were always kind of leading me to think about my local church ministry and then discipleship you know what that meant for me immediately was one of the first tasks i had was to kind of articulate our own vision for discipleship here at signal prez and a like a curriculum that would be used for And so for me, that meant looking back and asking, well, how has the church done discipleship over the generations? What's the catechetical vision that the local church has enjoyed and used? And so when I designed that curriculum, I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of main parts of the church's catechetical vision, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments. It has really helped me think about kind of the work of preaching as well. Yeah. And I'm grateful for different spaces in my life that are kind of always helping me kind of move back and forth between the kind of spaces that CPT often does. So being able to work to lead both a local theologian fellowship through CPT and also a student theologian fellowship. I do some teaching at RTS Orlando with, um, pastoral theology and then church and sacraments. And like, that's really helped me to think like always, like in every space and session meetings and new member classes and all these kinds of things, like there's just this abundance of resources. And I got to have two and a half years to like dig a really deep well for that work. And so, yeah, Augustine for me, I mean, I was not a patristics, you know, PhD at all, but, um, During the pandemic, I had a chance to lead a discussion group on confessions. And I think encountering Augustine again, I had read Augustine in undergrad and in seminary, but encountering him again and just realizing that... you know, that he had spent like almost 40 years as a, as a local church pastor. Yeah. It kind of gave me this curiosity to sort of think about him in ways. I mean, everybody claims Augustine, right? Like, you know, or like late antiquity scholars claim Augustine and, you know, philosophers claim Augustine and theologians claim Augustine, but he was a pastor. And so I just started digging and digging and he was really just kind of a mentor to me during that season. It still is. And just thinking about how he thinks about the person of the pastor, from the confessions to his vision for friendship in the pastoral life, to the ways in which he founded a community of pastoral monastics who shared a rule of life, to also the ways that he thought about the different things that the pastor does. He wrote probably the first manual of preaching in the history of the church in teaching Christianity. He wrote advice on catechesis and on the instruction of beginners. I mean, it was just this... wealth of resources. He was clearly a theological leader in his own time that people were looking to. And I just found so much. And so writing the book was just, you know, an opportunity to kind of put down all the things that I was learning from him and try to systematize that in some way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Great, great resource. What's the old line? Wherever you go in theology, Augustine's already been there. That's
SPEAKER_00:right. Have you heard that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's the, if all philosophy is footnotes on Plato. I think it's also all theology is footnotes on Augustine.
SPEAKER_01:But I like that you're, I'm excited about this book because I think bringing him really to the core, he was doing all of that, but he was doing that vocationally as a frontlines pastor and as a bishop navigating his theology wasn't just kind of sitting back and thinking theological thoughts. It was deeply engaged in the time and in the period. And I think that's such a vital resource to give to us today.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Yes. Yeah. So many of the things that are now for us givens in our tradition were him working out what it is that he understood scripture to be teaching in the course of local church issues, you know, like conflict and men and women who, you know, were showing up on a Sunday morning and one what it is that the Lord had to say to them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, really looking forward to that book coming out. So that's spring 2026?
SPEAKER_00:Late March
SPEAKER_01:26. And we'll plan on having you back on the podcast for a particular conversation about the book around that time. So folks can be looking out for that. But yeah, really great to have you on, Joey. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing your story. And we're so grateful for you, as you men You not only are a fellow, you also lead a couple of our other, a student fellowship, a local fellowship. Just appreciate how you are living out and investing in the pastor-theologian mission and movement. So really thankful for you, brother.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you. I'm thankful for you guys and the institutional space you make for this kind of work as well. So it's a gift to be a part of what it is that y'all do.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Troy. Great. God bless.
SPEAKER_02:Pastor Theologians Podcast is a production of the Center for Pastor Theologians. You can learn more about the CPT at our website, pastortheologians.com. You can also find us on Facebook, YouTube, and follow us on X. This show is produced by Seth Korch and Sophia Luke. The show is recorded and edited in partnership with Glowfire Creative, and editing is done by Seth Precorn. Hosting duties are shared by Joel Lawrence, Ray Paul, and me, Zach Wagner. Thanks for listening.