Meet Dr. Tom Worth...
Being a pastor is a great privilege and a burden. It is like being a father or a mother. In such a calling, one doesn’t clock out or clock in. You are what you are in people’s lives by the grace of God. I have the privilege to represent the presence of the Good Shepherd to my flock at all the major steps in life, at birth, at death, at marriage, at conversion and baptism. Also I am there for the smaller transitions and milestones needing prayer and celebration. And I am there when folks go through difficulties and troubles. In my pastoral ministry of preaching and teaching, I try to point people to Christ, who is the real pastor in their lives.
Being a poet is like being human. I suspect we all have a poetic nature to one degree or another. Otherwise how could people receive and appreciate the poems I share with them? Every poem takes two poets: the poet who writes it and the poet who hears or reads it. I write in both structured forms and in free verse. I sniff something in the wind and try to capture it with my writing. If I succeed, it’s a poem; if I don’t, it remains an unfinished draft or a beginning and nothing more. Much of my poetry is based in Scripture, but not all of it. Some matters I just observe in life and write them down. I suppose my feel for metaphor leaks into my prose and preaching.
I enjoy teaching. I thrive in the give and take of a classroom, but nowadays, my classroom has become more the written page. As I take the church through various books of the Bible, I write down into commentaries and sermons the things I have taught. Since 2006, I have written and taught extensively on Luke, Acts, Romans, Mark, John, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jonah and Hebrews. I hope to publish the fruits of these labors. In teaching I have the great privilege to share what is most important to me, what is most meaningful. And if it stirs something in me, I find that something is stirred in those who hear me… and now, in those who read what I write.
About Dr. Tom Worth
Thomas Worth has been a minister of the Gospel for over forty years. He grew up in a God-fearing family, but had no personal experience of the Savior until his late teens. Through the witness of his best friend and the influence of the Presence of God over a two- or three-year period, he underwent a marked conversion, infilling of the Spirit, and surrender to Christ. In the early 1970s, he received his grounding in the Scriptures and in the Spirit at Pinecrest Bible Training Center in upstate New York, where he also met and married the love of his life, Marsha. Around 1980, he experienced a further work of conversion where Christ’s work on the cross became the gravitational center of his thought, devotion, and ministry. The Person of Jesus has been a major theme with him ever since.
For over thirty years, he taught many Bible subjects at Pinecrest/Bethany on a full-time and adjunct basis. He was campus and community pastor there from 1983 to 1993. Over the years, he has taught in short-term missions to Jamaica, Peru, England, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Czech Republic. Since 1991, he has made mission trips almost every year to Bulgaria where he teaches in the churches there. He and Marsha have two daughters who are married and who have supplied them with five precious grandchildren. He holds the M. Div. from Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY. He earned his D. Min. from the same, where he developed material on how the Psalms can be a school for prayer. Since 1996, he has been serving as the pastor of Community Covenant Church in Manlius, NY.
Worth has a narrative/poetic style of preaching and teaching. Although he has mainly ministered in Charismatic/Pentecostal circles, he has a classic message which fits well in many different churches. He has preached and taught in many venues, from Baptist to Anglican, home groups to conventions, prisons to homes for the elderly, street missions to seminary—always seeking to point people to Christ.