“Pastors ought not to consider that their ministrations in the gospel are to be confined exclusively to their own congregations. There is an important sense in which the field to which they are appointed is the whole world.

But then, in company with their co-presbyters, they are to look upon the district of country covered by their presbytery as the portion of that great field which has been specially entrusted to them. Each pastor should regard the immediate vicinity of his church as his peculiar charge. Then the whole territory of the presbytery lies before him and his fellow-members, and by their counsel, their work and their prayers it is to be leavened by the saving influences of the gospel. Here each one should put forth his most strenuous as if the whole work depended on himself. The district in the midst of which he lives has been committed to the minister for his gospel efforts by the providence of God, which has placed him in it as his post of duty and toil. It has also been entrusted to him by the Church, which has called him and ordained him and settled him there to do her work, not merely in the midst of his own particular fold, but also in all its vicinity. For the cultivation of that part of the field he is accountable to the authorities which had such confidence in him as to place him there.

Not many pastors are so happily located but that in their immediate vicinity, or at least within the bounds of their presbytery, there are places which are in need of the stated ordinances of the gospel. There are some communities where, if proper investigation were made and efforts put forth, it would be found that churches could be planted to great advantage. There are neighborhoods where great good could be done by establishing Sabbath-schools and holding occasional preaching and prayer meetings. Everywhere there are multitudes living in utter neglect of the ordinances whose case should never be forgotten, but plans of various kinds be devised for bringing them to the knowledge of the truth. In almost every presbytery there are destitute fields where colporteurs might spread the gospel through the printed page and gather the nuclei of future congregations. That no field, no opportunity, no agency, for extending the truth as it is in Christ, shall be neglected should be the rule with every minister and every presbytery.” — Thomas Murphy, Pastoral Theology (1877), pp. 478-479