Pastor in the Present Tense

Eugene Peterson has, over the course of his distinguished career, been a poet, professor, Bible translator, spiritual director, and bestselling author. It's easy to forget his principal calling: pastor. In his new memoir, The Pastor, Peterson takes readers from his idyllic childhood in a lakeshore cabin in Montana, along his winding journey to the pastorate, and through his subsequent years in ministry, pausing at each turn to share rich reflections on what it means to be a pastor. We talked with Peterson about the book, his calling, and the role of a pastor.

Why did you write this memoir?

I had no interest in writing a memoir. And I didn't know how to do it. But enough people said enough things about writing it that I thought I should really consider it. I've always had a text to work from when I write. This time, however, my life was the text, and I didn't know how to do that. So for six months I wrote stuff and then threw it away. I just couldn't get the hang of it. Then I began to think about my childhood, working in my father's butcher shop, all of that was instrumental in my calling as a pastor. That was a revelation to me. And my years in New York City when I thought I was going to be a professor, and later writing The Message. It all played a part in my journey.

Is calling a one-time thing, or something that evolves over a lifetime?

For me it evolved. I was 25 years old when I knew there was a name for what I'd become "a pastor." It's different for everybody. Some feel called to be a pastor from an early age. And there are people who discover their calling in midlife. So there's not always a lot of clarity. But I believe God takes the things in our lives—family, background, education—and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.

I always thought I'd be a professor. And for the first two years or so in the church, I was acting as a professor, giving people knowledge and telling them what was true. I finally realized this is not what pastors do. Church is not like a classroom where subjects are cut and dried, black and white, and true or not true. Everybody's living a life that contains ambiguity and complexity. My task is to enter that world, find a language, and preserve the ambiguity without giving up the truth.

As pastor, what is your essential role?

My task as pastor was to show how the Bible got lived. Of course it's important to show that the Bible is true, but we have theologians and apologists for that. I just accepted the fact it was true and didn't bother much about that. I needed to be a witness to people in my congregation that everything in the Bible is livable and to try to avoid abstractions about big truths, big doctrines. I wanted to know how these ideas got lived in the immediate circumstances of people's lives at work, in the town, and in the family.

The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract. And so that's why, for me, a small congregation was so essential. It enabled me to know the people I was preaching to, teaching, and praying with.

For a pastor who's trying to live the gospel and see that it's lived among the congregation, where does your authority come from?

Well, it's certainly not a top-down, hierarchical authority. The authority of the pastor comes from immersion in a community, from giving witness to the fact that this is livable stuff.

That is our task, not just to say it but to live it and to cultivate relationships that have integrity. It's not telling people what to belief and what to do, which is part of it, but to live it with them. We're participants in what they're doing. That's the unique part of a pastor's task.

We need to be discerning about the way we use our authority because it can be a very powerful position. Some people look up to us and trust us, and they may not even know us.

The life of Christ is developed in community. And if we don't enter the community ourselves, we abdicate our relational authority with our people. It's a red flag when pastors don't want to be with their people. There are many pastors in America who never visit their congregations. "That's not my job," they say. "That's the elders' job. That's the deacons' job."

That's pretty telling. If that's your attitude, you're not in community. I know pastors who won't go visit the sick, won't visit the dying, because it takes too much time. They think in terms of roles and responsibilities. They may be doing church work, but they're not being a pastor. That requires relational time.

Someone once observed that the pastor does not serve the sheep; the pastor serves God by guiding the sheep. Would you agree?

I'd nuance that a bit. I think it's very dangerous for pastors to develop some kind of an authoritarian stance that essentially says, "I'm the spokesman for God and you're going to listen to God through me." We're a body of Christ and we only have one Shepherd, and that's Jesus. And so we do this in community not through a line-of-command approach. The way we understand our authority, and the words we use to convey it, have to be thoughtful and accurate.

Since you entered the pastorate, how have perceptions of pastoral authority changed?

One of the most devastating changes to occur has been the depersonalization of the pastor into a talking head, or vision-caster. The pastor has been reduced to playing a role.

If people don't know their pastor, it's easy to put the pastor on a pedestal and depersonalize him or her. It's also easy for pastors, who don't know their congregations, simply to classify congregants as saved or unsaved, involved or not involved, tithers or non-tithers. These impersonal designations allow you to treat people not as they are, but as sociological or psychological categories. One of the worst things to happen to the church is its adoption of the Myers-Briggs (a popular psychological assessment tool) formula for understanding people. You don't listen to people or get to know them; you give them a test and herd them into a group and have them wear these little labels on their shirts to display their personality types.

The danger is that we pastors stop listening well because we have these categories with which to handle people. A word I'd like to eliminate from the church's vocabulary is "dysfunctional." It's ugly. Bicycles are dysfunctional; people aren't. The minute we start using that kind of vocabulary, we train our imaginations to think of a person as a problem. People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored. I'm not saying there are no problems to be solved. But we don't merely fix things. We're not therapists. The way the pastor goes about things has to do much more with relationship, with forgiveness, with grace, with healing, with understanding, with redemption, with patience. These are the virtues that we should be cultivating.

Should pastors have goals for their people? Like wanting them to know Christ, to come to a living faith, to grow in and share that faith?

Yes. Those are fine as goals. Though you have to be careful about how you present those goals. Are they something abstract that you use to label people and to decide whether they're in or out? Life is a lot more complex than that. Yes, I have a goal. I want to introduce people to Jesus. I want them to accept him. But am I willing to wait around and listen and see where he's at work? I had some people in my congregation who hadn't accepted Christ after 20 years. I waited for them. And I didn't badger them. I just knew that they hadn't done it yet. But it's surprising how many did. I just think goal-setting can destroy our imaginations. We start to focus too much on goals.

I ran marathons for a number of years. If you start thinking about the goal when you're running a marathon, you ruin the whole thing. You go too fast, and then about halfway through you have to quit. To run a marathon well, you have to stop thinking about the goal. You try to understand your body, the weather, the training. This business of being a Christian is a marathon. It's "a long obedience." I tell pastors, "Be patient. You're in too much of a hurry."

What is the role that only the Holy Spirit can accomplish? And what is the role that God asks pastors to play in that process?

The Holy Spirit is the center of it all in terms of communicating, bringing energy, a sense of repentance, of love. As a pastor I want to be there, to be able to assist, to speak at the right time, and pray the right prayers. But I don't think we do much. What we do is sometimes clarify, sometimes rebuke. I'm not against rebuking, telling people they're doing something wrong, and giving them directions on how to do it right. But I think we're co-receivers. We're doing this together.

Pastoral Identity in a Consumer Culture

From the introduction of The Pastor

In the process of realizing my vocational identity as pastor, I couldn't help observing that there was a great deal of confusion and dissatisfaction all around me with pastoral identity. Many pastors, disappointed or disillusioned with their congregations, defect after a few years and find more congenial work. And many congregations, disappointed or disillusioned with their pastors, dismiss them and look for pastors more to their liking. In the fifty years that I have lived the vocation of pastor, these defections and dismissals have reached epidemic proportions in every branch and form of church.

I wonder if at the root of the defection is a cultural assumption that all leaders are people who "get things done" and "make things happen." That is certainly true of the primary leadership models that seep into our awareness from the culture—politicians, businessmen, advertisers, publicists, celebrities, and athletes. But while being a pastor certainly has some of these components, the pervasive element in our 2,000-year pastoral tradition is not someone who "gets things done" but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to "what is going on right now" between men and women, with one another and with God—this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful "without ceasing."

This way of understanding pastor can't be measured or counted, and often isn't even noticed. I didn't notice for a long time. I would like to provide dignity to this essentially modest and often obscure way of life in the kingdom of God.

Along the way, I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life: the pastor's emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives—these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops, and comes to birth is unique to each pastor.

Witness, I think, is the right word for a pastor. A witness is never the center but only the person who points to or names what is going on at the center—in this case, the action and revelation of God in all the operations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I have neither authority nor inclination to tell anyone else how to do this. Those of us who enter into this way of life, this vocation, this calling, face formidable difficulties both inside and outside congregations—idolatrous expectations from insiders, a consignment to irrelevancy by outsiders.

A society as thoroughly secularized as ours hardly knows what to do with a life that develops out of a call from God and is lived out within the conditions of God's revelation. But a witness might be useful.

—Eugene Peterson

Planters on Peterson

Three church planters share how the writing of Eugene Peterson has shaped their ministries.

Slow Cooker Recipe for the Soul

Last night my wife prepared a lamb stew in our slow cooker. It was fall-off-the-bone delicious. This morning I chased it down with a microwaved Hot Pocket. It didn't compare. I decided that food is better when it's cooked slowly.

It's the same with ministry. In a 2005 Christianity Today interview, Eugene Peterson said soul work "is slow, slow work." Five years ago we planted a church in Austin, Texas. Our experience has reflected Peterson's recipe for soul work. Sometimes it's slower than a footrace between John McCain and Kim Jong Il. But God's work tastes so much better when it is slow-cooked instead of microwaved.

No wonder Peterson prefers his books to be sold in the cookbook section.

—Gideon Tsang, Vox Veniae, Austin, Texas.

The least, the last, and the lost

No author has influenced our church and our ministry as profoundly as Eugene Peterson. His books Five Smooth Stones, Working the Angles, and his spiritual theology series have impacted our entire leadership and redirected our entire journey to serve the least, the last, and the lost.

Peterson's latest work, The Pastor, has also empowered me personally as a senior pastor and church planter in one of the poorest congressional districts of the United States. By encouraging us to look beyond merely doing church work to being the church, all of Peterson's work is a goldmine of wisdom for those called to professional ministry.

—Michael Carrion, Promised Land Covenant Church, South Bronx, New York.

Strategist or Companion?

Methods, programs, and strategies obsess the mind of the church planter. Questions about the "target audience" and whether the new church will be attractional or missional are fodder for sleepless nights and daydreams of another vocation.

Into this confusion steps Eugene Peterson, a church planter himself, with a very different vision. In his memoir, we learn that Peterson's church began in the early years of the church growth movement, a time when numerical growth was promised to pastors who followed the right steps. Pushing against this ecclesiastical sale pitch, Peterson chose instead to, "live in the ambiguities of congregation in which growth was mostly slow and mostly, at least for long stretches of time, invisible."

These days, when I am tempted to see myself as a strategist, I hear Peterson urging a different view of my vocation, "a companion in searching out the sacred mysteries of salvation and holiness." For this I am exceedingly grateful.

—David Swanson, New Community Covenant Church in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.