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About the Book
"Letters To A Young Pastor" by Calvin Miller offers practical and insightful advice for aspiring and current pastors. Through a series of letters, Miller addresses various aspects of pastoral ministry such as preaching, leadership, and personal growth. He shares wisdom and encouragement to help young pastors navigate the challenges and joys of serving in the church.
David Brainerd
Born to a farming family in Haddam, Connecticut, Brainerd soon turned his aspirations to the clergy and a life of study. The early death of his parents, combined with a naturally melancholy personality, caused him to be morose and to fixate on the brevity of life, so that his religious life was characterized by prolonged depressions punctuated by ecstatic experiences of God. He began to study for the ministry at Yale College in 1739. During his first year he showed signs of the tuberculosis that was to end his life prematurely. During the following year, the New Light preaching of George Whitefield and other itinerants such as Gilbert Tennent and James Davenport gained many adherents at the college, including Brainerd, and he became involved in a separate church founded by students. In November 1741 he was reported as saying that one of the local ministers who was a college tutor had “no more grace than a chair.” Determined to snuff out the New Light among the students, the Yale Corporation, led by its rector, Thomas Clap, expelled Brainerd for refusing to make a public confession.
Officially barred from the ministry, Brainerd nonetheless became an itinerant preacher, filling pulpits of New Light sympathizers throughout New England and New York. In the process he gained the admiration of many clergymen, including Jonathan Dickinson, a Presbyterian minister of New Jersey and commissioner of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge. Dickinson in 1742 first proposed that Brainerd become a missionary. To prepare himself, in 1743 Brainerd went to work with John Sargeant, missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. He was ordained by the Presbytery of New York in 1744. From 1743 to 1747 he ministered to the Indians in western Massachusetts, eastern New York, the Lehigh region of Pennsylvania, and central New Jersey. At the New Jersey Bethel mission (near Cranbury), he achieved his most notable successes. Out of his experiences here came the publication of two installments of his journals that described both the revivals among the Delaware Indians and his own spiritual turmoil and exultation.
Brainerd preaching to the Indians for all of his zeal, however, Brainerd’s constitution could not stand up to the hardships of wilderness living. In April 1747, seriously weakened by tuberculosis, he left New Jersey for the home of his friend Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he died in October.
In 1749 Edwards published An Account of the Life of the Late Reverend Mr. David Brainerd, drawn from Brainerd’s extensive diaries and supplemented by Edwards’s own commentary. Edwards sought to portray Brainerd as a model of Christian saintliness who manifested his faith in good works and self-sacrifice, expurgating many passages that recorded Brainerd’s depressions and enthusiasms. Over the centuries, this work has achieved international fame, has gone through countless printings, and has inspired many missionaries in pursuing their call.
Minkema, Kenneth P., “Brainerd, David,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 84-5.
This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998 Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
the single person’s search for intimacy
The other night, my best friend and I watched a show together from a thousand miles away. If I can’t fly to D.C. and she can’t come to Mississippi, at least we can fire up our laptops and enjoy Anne with an E  at the same time, texting our commentary to each other throughout. As a child, I was always enthralled with Anne’s relationship with her best friend, Diana. The two were kindred spirits, confidants through thick and thin, always advocating for one another. I always wanted a friend like Diana, and, by God’s grace, I’ve been given several friends who fit the bill. I needed these friends as a single person, and I need them now as a wife. When I was engaged, a friend of mine pulled me aside. “You are in a love haze right now, but don’t forget your friends. You still need them.” She was right. Marriage is not a self-sufficient island of Christian community. It’s one in a network of meaningful relationships that are in the business of conforming us to the image of Christ. Made for Others God made us for community. It was not good for Adam to be alone, so God made Eve. And while the story of woman’s creation is the first love story, it’s also a story about community. Adam was not made to fulfill his mission on earth alone; he needed Eve to help him. When she did, they began populating the world and filling it with more people who were called to worship God in community with one another. “Marriage is not a self-sufficient island of Christian community.” Adam’s need for Eve is a bigger story than a man’s need for a wife. It’s the story of man’s need not to live in isolation. It’s the story of man’s need for community. We need the entire body to grow in the image of Christ — not just our spouses. Ephesians 5 paints a beautiful picture of the intimate relationship between a husband and his wife, but that relationship is couched in the context of the previous chapter: we are a body of believers called to unity (Ephesians 4:1–3; 13). We are a family. This view of community not only puts our marriages in perspective and takes undue pressure off our spouses to be everything we need all the time; it also knocks against our tendency to isolate singles from our understanding of community. Intimacy Is More Than Sex This is good news. It means that marriage is not the only biblical means for gaining intimacy. Our society often equates intimacy with sex. We tease snidely that when people are tense, it must be because they need to “get laid.” We joke — with eyes bulging — about the woman who’s gone several months (or, God forbid, several years) without sex. We are uncomfortable with the idea of friendships between men and women because friendship leads to intimacy and intimacy leads to sex. We are uncomfortable with close friendships between people of the same sex for the same reason. In fact, we side-eye David and Jonathan for loving each other a little more than we’re comfortable with men loving one another (1 Samuel 18:1). “Marriage is not the only biblical means for gaining intimacy.” In a culture that so often equates intimacy with sex, it makes sense that singles in our churches feel isolated from intimate relationships. If sex is the primary means for intimacy in a relationship, and if unmarried people in the church should not be having sex, then single folks are out of luck. This is a hopeless position for people whom God made to long for fellowship with other human beings. We All Need Each Other In his message “Five Misconceptions About Singleness,” Sam Alberry said, “We just can’t imagine that there is a kind of real intimacy that is not ultimately sexual. . . . It’s a profoundly unhealthy way to think. We’ve downgraded other forms of intimacy because we’ve put all of our intimacy eggs in the sexual and romantic relationship basket.” Marriage is not the only road towards intimacy because sexual intimacy is not the only kind of intimacy. Nor is it the most important form of intimacy. Biblical intimacy among siblings in Christ is rooted in God’s love towards us. It is rooted in the fact that we have been invited into an intimate relationship with the Son (John 10:29). When we make marriage the primary means of intimacy in the church, we do a huge disservice to the singles in our fellowship and the idea of Christian community as a whole. Marriage is not an island that we move to in order to bring glory to God; it’s just one picture (and a very prominent one) in a gigantic network of human relationships meant to deepen our understanding of Christ. We All Need Christ When we understand this, we unflatten our definition of intimacy and realize that its purpose isn’t ultimately about our own sense of self-fulfillment, but about God’s glory. Our relationships are not in the business of completing us — from marriage to friendship to fellowship — but rather, they are a tool God uses to conform us to his image (Romans 12:1). “Marriage isn’t the only road towards intimacy because sexual intimacy isn’t the only kind of intimacy.” Ultimately, the person that we need is Christ. And every other relationship in our life is designed to point us back to our need for him. Anne of Green Gables often called Diana her kindred spirit . I love that term. A kindred spirit is someone who understands you more deeply than any other person. And what better place to find those spirits than in the body of Christ, as siblings in him? What better people to remind us, single or married, that we were not made to live alone, but to partner together to spur one another on for God’s glory?
