Surely the pastoral life is more given to narration than many other vocations are. A pastor works at the teeming intersection of the divine and the all-too human—which, if nothing else, is an interesting place to be. A pastor’s life is awash in stories, from the biblical story to the stories of the members of the congregation.
The pastoral life itself also requires narration, largely because it does not make sense in the ways we normally calculate things. The challenges and frustrations of pastoral ministry are many, the material rewards are few. That is, it is not the sort of vocation that someone likely would pick out at a jobs fair or in response to a classified ad. So a pastor’s life requires some kind of narration, a story that helps make sense out of this work. Of course, the gospel story is foundational for the pastoral life. Beyond that, however, pastors also need to articulate their own stories in light of that meta-story. That is one reason why candidates for ordination are repeatedly asked to share their “call story.” That request is itself an invitation to begin to narrate the pastoral life.
It is interesting, then, how few fine memoirs have been written by pastors in our time. To be sure, there are the self-promoting memoirs written by pastors who successfully “grew” their churches. Such books resemble the campaign autobiographies popular with politicians running for office. They have obvious designs on the reader. They tout success in an attempt to breed more success. But with a few notable exceptions (Heidi Neumark’s Breathing Space and Richard Lischer’s Open Secrets come to mind), honest and nuanced pastoral memoirs are rare. Why is that? Perhaps it is because so few pastors write well, or because they cannot shake the influence of one form of writing—the sermon—when they attempt to shift to a very different genre. Or perhaps they don’t know how to tell the story of their vocation without betraying the confidences of others. Whatever the reason, there are not many pastoral memoirs that are as interesting as the vocation they aim to reflect.
That is one reason why Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, is so welcome. Quite simply, it is a beautifully narrated pastoral life. Peterson is the author of some thirty books; he is also well known for his multi-million-selling translation of the Bible, The Message. In his memoir, however, Peterson gives little attention to his life as a writer and devotes only a few paragraphs to his famous translation. Instead, Peterson keeps the reader’s attention on his vocation as pastor, particularly his 29 years as pastor of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in a Maryland suburb. Even his celebrated writing is set within the context of the vocation of pastor. It is the story of someone being continually shaped by the vocation he came to love. Without downplaying the challenges inherent in such a life, Peterson’s reflections on his vocation as pastor are laced with a sense of abiding wonder. He makes clear that the pastoral life is a singular one. In his narrative even the word pastor is frequently distinguished from the words around it by the use of italics.
To be able to narrate the shape of a pastoral life, however, Peterson had to wrest the narrative that is forwarded by others. The first image of pastor he had to shake was his own from childhood. In his Assemblies of God church growing up in Montana, “I took scripture seriously. I took Jesus seriously. I took church seriously. I took prayer seriously. But not pastors.” Visiting evangelists and missionaries, at least, were interesting, while pastors were not to be taken seriously. They seemed largely ineffectual: “They arrived and left like migrating geese.”
Peterson’s call to pastoral ministry came from a number of different directions. He started out pursuing an academic career. There he began to read Karl Barth with appreciation. Of all the great theologians of the 20th century, Barth was most consistent and persuasive in emphasizing the importance of the church. While pursuing graduate studies in Manhattan, Peterson agreed to work at a church by coaching their basketball team. The pastor of that church was George Buttrick. Only after Peterson accepted the position did he learn that Buttrick was recognized as one of the great preachers of his day. Every Sunday morning he heard Buttrick preach, and on many Sunday nights he would join a handful of young men at the pastor’s apartment for free-flowing conversation. Through those experiences, “The term pastor was gathering associations that felt personal and congenial.”
Still, Peterson was drawn to the academic life. The pastoral vocation, he recalls, “seemed like being put in charge of one of those old-fashioned elevators, spending all day with people in the ups and downs but with no view.” The strongest pull toward the pastoral life was not his love of God. Rather, it came through his love for a young woman: “By this time I also wanted to marry Jan—who wanted to be a pastor’s wife. Something was going to have to give.” Peterson gave up his aspirations for a career in the academy and sought ordination in the Presbyterian church.
When he became a pastor, Peterson learned that there were others who had their own narratives of the pastoral life that had to be resisted. There were the church executives who, as they supported the new church where Peterson was pastor, seemed interested only in church growth and institutional development: a story told in numbers. Then there were the pressures in the culture to tell the story of the pastoral life in terms of the consumerist culture. Success in this narrative is measured by how well a church delivers what people are looking for. Every Tuesday for years, Peterson and other pastors met in a seminar led by a psychiatrist, and here he encountered a more subtly skewed understanding of the pastoral vocation. Although he found the sessions valuable, he increasingly rejected the therapeutic presuppositions that resided there, a narrative in which a pastor approaches people as problems to be fixed.
In his own search for a guiding narrative for his pastorate, he turned to the Acts of the Apostles: “If the story of the first church is told in the form of story, we are given encouragement to understand our new church also in the form of story.” Peterson is quite articulate about the power of this approach. Even so, without expecting him to write a “how to” book, at certain points I did find myself wanting a clearer sense of what “the church as story” actually looks like in the day-to-day life of a congregation. I would love to hear more on this from so perceptive a pastor.
Throughout the book, Peterson seems determined to counter the narrative that views pastoral ministry as a beleaguered, perhaps impossible, vocation that cannot be lived in a healthy and generative way. There are times when his description of his pastorate seems to hold up an impossible ideal. His wife, Jan, was not only happy in the life of a pastor’s wife but actually felt called to it from an early age, as if to “holy orders.” After they were married and serving a church, each Monday, their own personal Sabbath, they would walk in the woods in silence. They would break that silence at lunch and share what they had observed along the way. The congregation supported Peterson’s sense of call to writing, allowing him to devote each morning to that task before engaging with parishioners. When he felt too consumed by evening committee meetings, the congregation encouraged him not to attend, and to leave the “running of the church” to them. He writes, “Occasionally I would offer a suggestion or write a note. But no more committee meetings.” When he left his congregation after almost 30 years, he found the parting “surprisingly easy. Effortless almost.”
Some readers, particularly pastors, who read these passages might dismiss them in the same way in which they dismiss the Christmas letters of friends, in which the circumstances of their lives sound simply too good to be true. I had a different reaction. If there were a hint of boastfulness in Peterson’s memoir, I might be tempted to dismiss such passages myself. But he makes clear at every turn that he is not the hero of his own story. Instead, the main character in this drama, and the true hero, is the Holy Spirit, who can enliven and guide the life of a pastor and a people in ways that otherwise would be beyond them. So Peterson’s narrative is animated by a sense of awe at how God can work through the ordinary stuff of church life. That, perhaps more than anything else, makes The Pastor a portrait of a well-lived pastoral life.
Martin B. Copenhaver is senior pastor of Wellesley Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Massachusetts. With Lillian Daniel, he is the author of This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers (Eerdmans).
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
