Pray for someone else's child, your pastor, the military, the police officers, the firemen, the teachers, the government. There's no end to the ways that you can intervene on behalf of others through prayer.
As a pastor, I addressed the sorts of issues I see people struggling with most and the issues talked about most directly and most frequently in the New Testament. That leads us to recurring concerns with sexual immorality, relational sins, and vices associated with the breaking of the Ten Commandments.
I believe in God - not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.
The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do.
There's this old saying that, if you aren't particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don't want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don't know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I've never regretted it.
The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.
Being a pastor is pressure because we have to counsel people.
The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, 'Let us worship God.' If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor.
I got put out of my church choir because my pastor said, 'We can't have baby sister singing the blues and coming in here and singing on Sunday morning.'
A 'real pastor' is not preaching of their own; they are speaking what God put in their heart by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is using them at that very moment to speak to the congregations situations -past, present, and future.