No Ordinary Servant

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson
by D.A. Carson
Reviewed by Robert McDowell

Dr. Don Carson, Professor of New Testament at our Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is a world-class evangelical scholar who has produced dozens of scholarly books and probably hundreds of scholarly articles both adding to our understanding of the Bible as well as defending it from attacks upon its authenticity and authority. He was also a seminary mentor of our Pastor Saaman.

Dr. Don opens to the reader many entries from the personal diaries of his father, an English Canadian Baptist pastor struggling through the particularly challenging years of the 1940's and 50's to share the Gospel and plant churches among the French speakers in a very hostile Roman Catholic Quebec while supporting his wife and children. Dr. Don does this very effectively by both giving an historical background to the religious situation in mid Twentieth-Century Quebec (well worth the read for those of us who live near the Border) as well as weaving the journal entries with his own reminiscences as a protestant pastor's kid growing up in a challenging milieu.

The journals present a very modest pastor who is quite aware of his shortcomings and the ongoing sin in his life and the continuing grace of our Lord, and Dr. Don shows how his parents taught him to depend on God for the fruit during many years of frustration. And to me this book gave a glimpse into how God used this very humble, very ordinary pastor to bless his Church through the many whose lives he touched, including the very productive theologian who wrote this book. I recommend this book but suggest having some tissues nearby.