Eugene Peterson's "The Pastor"
Still not sure what a pastor is, but... I'll bet I'll recognize one when I see them.
I first came across the name Eugene Peterson when I was in the religious/spiritual “danger zone” between teenagerdom and young-adulthood. Somebody handed me a copy of his translation (or “paraphrase”) of the Bible, The Message, and if memory serves, it was the first time I read the Bible cover-to-cover. It was also the only Bible I really wore-out to the point of requiring duct tape to hold the binding together. There are challenges with The Message, no doubt, but for all those challenges, the fresh language and vivid poetry of God’s word was made manifest to me in hitherto unprecedented ways, and I’ll be forever grateful for how it lured me more deeply into scripture at a time where I could have just as easily gone the other way.
That being said, though I’d known his name from his work on The Message (and his infamous interactions with Bono), I knew virtually nothing of his life story. That is, until I picked up his 2011 memoir, aptly named The Pastor. As I worked through it, I was struck again by the beauty of his writing, and was struck for the first time that he saw himself (first and foremost) as a pastor, and that his writing was always, in a sense, pastoral. In fact, the germ of what eventually became The Message was a translation of Paul’s letter to the Galatians that he made specifically for his congregation, to help the truths leap off the page to people who found themselves in such a wildly different context than the original hearers. He says this about an epiphany he had a few years into his pastoral ministry:
"...I realized this about myself: pastor and writer. Not writer competing for time from pastor. Not pastor struggling to integrate writer into an already crowded schedule: pastor and writer, a single coherent identity" (pg 238).
He exemplifies this relationship by unpacking the John-of-Patmos (the pen-name of the author of Revelation) who heard the words, "Write in a book what you see..." (Revelation 1:11) and then did so. It’s funny that I never put it together before, but Peterson takes it for granted that this John was a pastor to the seven churches who receive dictated letters from Jesus Himself in Revelation 2-3. Aside from a moving example of the writer as seer, it’s also (if accurate) a helpful paradigm of the pastor as writer, or the writer as pastor.
Typically my wont for these book reflections over the last little while has been to just unpack them linearly here. But as soon as I realized I needed to wrestle with Peterson a little, I knew I’d need to tag-in the heavyweight in Petersonianism, sir Steve Dunmire. So, the majority of those reflections ended up over here as an interview (audio as a podcast, video on YouTube). That being said, I’ll still take just a few minutes here to nod to a few uncovered thoughts, and then cap-out the article with an unnecessary amount of notable quotables from the book.
Aside from Peterson’s penchant for reinforcing people’s sense of individualism (perhaps noble work in his younger years, but now arguably a tide that can hardly be stemmed), the biggest question mark that loomed over the majority of the text was “What, in Peterson’s opinion, is a ‘pastor’?” That’s what Steve & I spent most of our time talking about. It was obviously wildly unfair for me to ask someone who’s never met the late pastor (Peterson passed away in 2018) to try and answer for him, but Steve has read & reflected upon enough of his corpus to make any of his guesses of the educated variety.
In Steve’s view, Peterson likely would have thought the primary role of the pastor was to help people pay attention to the things worth paying attention to:
"My 'work' assignment was to pay more attention to what God does than what I do, and then to find, and guide others to find, the daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get this awareness into our bones...” (pg 45).
This is a beautiful picture, and one that might help describe a primary activity of someone who is a pastor, though it does not clear up for me what might have made them a pastor. It might sound like semantics, but I suppose a way of framing the question for me is: Is pastor something one is, or something one does? We’ll have to leave that question for another day.
Steve brought out an image that Peterson used elsewhere (though the main line of thinking is alluded to in The Pastor as well), namely the juxtaposition of a shepherd & a shopkeeper. The former cares for the sheep, the latter utilizes / utilitizes the herd. Peterson uses the shopkeeper metaphor for “big church”, and frankly, his view of such “communities” is pretty scathing. Oftentimes, people who end up working in larger churches employ an “end justifies the means” type of approach to some of the more problematic aspects of our ministries. Programs over people, etc. Peterson would likely say something like “There is no right way to do a wrong thing”. Or, to borrow the borrowed words of Richard Rohr, “How you get there is where you arrive”.
One of Peterson’s most famous phrases is one that references the life of faith: “A long obedience in the same direction”. I was SHOCKED to learn in this book that that line was actually adapted from Friedrich Nietzsche! Not exactly a go-to source for motivational Christian material. But that’s Peterson for ya; he shunned the obvious and scoured the obscure, seemingly believing that God really might be on the fringes. If God is on the fringes, and we’re to be with God… well, I guess that might explain his aversion to hanging out in the obvious spots, with the obvious people. We need people like Peterson, of that I have no doubt, even though I believe we also need people unlike Peterson. Whether he was 100% right about everything is less important than the fact that he was 100% passionate about the things that seemed to matter the most.
Notable Quotables:
“In effect, I placed pastors on the margins of my life. I didn’t take them seriously. I took scripture seriously. I took Jesus seriously. I took church seriously. I took prayer seriously. But not pastors. For the most part, pastors seemed tangential to all that.” (pg 3)
“As an adolescent, I envied the people who could tell stories of their dramatic conversions from lives of drink and drugs and assorted debaucheries.” (pg 3)
“The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ in a country that ‘knew not Joseph.’” (pg 4)
"... my seminary experience later germinated into the embrace of a vocational identity as necessarily minority, that a minority people working from the margins has the best chance of being a community capable of penetrating the noncommunity, the mob, the depersonalized, function-defined crowd that is the sociological norm of America." (pg 16)
"[My mother] was a wonderful storyteller, telling stories out of scripture and out of life. She elaborated and embellished the stories. Later in life when I was reading the Bible for myself, I was frequently surprised by glaring omissions in the text. The Holy Spirit left out some of the best parts." (pg 29)
"Throughout my childhood, in my mothers telling of the story, I became David. I was always David. I’m still David." (pg 32)
"The way we learn something is more influential than the something that we learn. No content comes into our lives free-floating: it is always embedded in a form of some kind." (pg 33)
"A church can never be reduced to a place where goods and services are exchanged. It must never be a place where a person is labeled. It can never be a place where gossip is perpetuated. Before anything else, it is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus’ name." (pg 40)
"When I finally did become a pastor, I was surprised at how thoroughly [my uncle] Sven had inoculated me against 'one answer' systems of spiritual care: 'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong' is the warning posted by H. I. Mencken. Thanks to Sven, I was being prepared to understand a congregation as a gathering of people that requires a context as large as the Bible itself if we are to deal with the ambiguities of life in the actual circumstances in which people live them." (pg 59) // Can’t really summarize his Uncle Sven story, but… it’s a doozie.
"It is not just pastors who get surprised, but it is easy for pastors to harbour the presumption that when we are wrong or ignored or dismissed, God himself is being blasphemed…” (pg 78)
"...unrelieved intellectual work, especially theological intellectual work, can shrivel your soul." (pg 85)
"You need a church in which you have responsibility to your peers and affirm an established theological tradition. Professors as well as pastors need a support system to which they are accountable. Professional ministry, whether as professor or pastor, is no place for lone wolves--there are too many pressures, too many seductions." (pg 91, from Bill McAlpin)
"... a Carmelite nun [who was] a good friend by that time, was visiting in our home. She had entered the convent when she was eighteen, having wanted to be a nun from an early age. Jan told her of her early desire to be a pastor's wife. Sister Genevieve said, 'If I had been raised Protestant, that's probably what I would have wanted. And if you had been Catholic, you probably would have aspired to being a nun. It was our respective ways of entering holy orders.'" (pg 95)
"…pastor as a vocation for me seemed like being put in charge of one of those old-fashioned elevators, spending all day with people in their ups and downs but with no view." (pg 96)
"Pastor was not a vocation negotiated privately between me and God. There was a third party -- congregation. As it turned out, the congregation and I didn't have much in common... What I wasn't prepared for was the low level of interest that the men and women in my congregation had in God and the scriptures, prayer and their souls. Not that they didn't believe and value these things; they just weren't very interested." (pg 104)
“… this understanding of church; a colony of heaven in the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already-inaugurated kingdom of God.” (pg 110)
"I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books at the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it." (pg 112)
"Churches are not franchises to be reproduced as exactly as possible wherever and whenever..." (pg 119)
"God gave us the miracle of congregation with the same sign he gave us the miracle of Jesus, by the descent of the dove. The Holy Spirit descended into the womb of Mary in the Galilean village of Nazareth. Thirty or so years later the same Holy Spirit descended into the collective womb of men and women, which included Mary, who had been followers of Jesus. The first conception gave us Jesus, the second conception gave us church." (pg 127)
"The truth must dazzle gradually or every man go blind." (Emily Dickinson, pg 128)
"If problems were the problem, problems could be fixed." (pg 136)
"The people who made up my congregation had plenty of problems and more than enough inadequacies, but congregation is not defined by its collective problems. Congregation is a company of people who are defined by their creation in the image of God, living souls, whether they know it or not. They are not problems to be fixed, but mysteries to be honored and revered. Who else in the community other than the pastor has the assigned task of greeting men and women and welcoming them into a congregation in which they are known not by what is wrong with them, but by who they are, just as they are? … In the disordered times in which we live, pastors can't get along without [therapists like] Dr. Wall and Dr. Hansen. But their work is not my work. Knowing they are there to do their work, I am free to do my work. And my work is not to fix people. It is to lead people in the worship of God and to lead them in living a holy life." (pg 137)
"I liked helping people. I liked the feeling of being important to them. But ... I realized in myself a latent messianic complex which, given free reign, would have obscured the very nature of congregation by redefining it as a gathering of men and women whom I was in charge of helping with their problems… The messianic virus, which can so easily decimate the pastoral vocation once it finds a host (me!), is hard to get rid of. As with the common cold, there doesn't seem to be any sure-cure or preventive medicines. The best you can do is try to stay healthy on a decent diet and plenty of exercise in worship with the people of God." (pg 141)
"Our vocation made us invisible. A pastor in America is the invisible man, the invisible woman." (pg 149)
"... I can't be hired to be a pastor, for my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve but to the God I serve. As it turns out, the people I serve would often prefer an idol who would do what they want done rather than do what God, revealed in Jesus, wants them to do." (pg 165)
"We were getting it: worship was not so much what we did, but what we let God do in and for us." (pg 172)
"Without Moses, worship would soon degenerate into aesthetics and entertainment. Without Bezalel …, salvation would blur into generalities of heavenly bliss and fragment into isolated and individualized fits and starts." (pg 178)
"By placing the pews around the matrix of font-pulpit-table, we were making a statement: we can't hear God's love being spoken to us without at the same time looking into the faces of our neighbors, whom God also loves and commands us to love. When we come to worship, we are not isolated individuals, but a family of God." (pg 183)
"There are no 'pearls' out there that you can use--no scripture verses to hand out, advice to guide, prayers to tap into. As we live and give witness to Jesus to our children and whoever else, we are handing out seeds, not pearls, and seeds need soil in which to germinate. A meal is soil just like that... nothing is abstract or in general when you were eating a meal together." (pg 195)
"Ecstasy doesn’t last. But it can cut a channel for something lasting." (E. F. Forster, pg 208)
"Those mountains are magnificent. But they have 20 different ways to kill you. Just like the church." (pg 210)
"I learned, without being aware that I was learning, of the immense freedom that comes in pastoral relationships that are structured by prayer and ritual and let everything else happen more or less spontaneously. The competitiveness didn't exactly leave me, but it developed a root system that didn't depend on artificial stimulants or chemical additives, like 'start another building campaign.'" (pg 212)
"…every soul is unique and cannot be understood or encouraged or directed by general advice or through a superficial diagnosis using psychological categories." (pg 226)
"Oh, you Protestants. You are so naive about evil. You know everything about sin, but nothing about evil -- the prevalence of evil, the persistence of evil, especially in holy places, like this monastery - and like your congregation." (pg 229)
"I didn’t want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture." (pg 243)
"...pastors were invisible six days a week and incomprehensible the seventh." (pg 273)
"Matthew had compared what he was understanding the pastoral vocation to be to the life of an artist -- potters and musicians and writers... He was noticing a lot of parallel between poets working with words and pastors working with souls- that just as every poem is unique, so every soul is unique." (pg 284)
“Much (most?) pastoral work takes place when we don’t know we are being pastors. Meanwhile, the most visible thing I did each week was stand before the congregation in the sanctuary on Sunday and say, “Let us worship God.’” (pg 286)
“… the pastoral vocation consists in preparing people for ‘a good death’”. (pg 289)
“For pastors, being noticed easily develops into wanting to be noticed… a clamouring ego needs to be purged from the pastor’s soul. From every Christian’s soul for that matter, but pastors are at special risk.” (pg 292)
"You acquire the biblical story mostly through your feet, only peripherally through your eyes and ears… The way is made by walking." (pg 312)
"...being a pastor is unique across the spectrum of vocations. Not better, not privileged, not anything special, but unique in society as a whole, also (but maybe not quite so much) unique in the company of the people of God. Not much transfers from other vocational roles to who we are, what we do." (pg 315)