This site takes its name from The Country Parson, George Herbert's small handbook for pastors, written in 1632 and published twenty years after his death. Herbert set out to draw “the form and character of a true pastor, that I may have a mark to aim at.” That is the aim here too.

I serve as an elder in a small country church. What appears here is what comes out of that work: reflections on Scripture and prayer, notes on the books that shape the pastor's mind, and a series marking seventeen hundred years since the Council of Nicaea.

“Do you love me?… Feed my sheep.”

Herbert called the pastor's labor “a good strife.” It is a phrase worth keeping close at the end of a laborious week. If anything written here is useful to another undershepherd, or to any of the sheep of God's pasture, thanks be to God.