Excerpts from Eugene Peterson on Pastoring...

These are taken from an interview of Eugene Peterson by Jeff Bailey in "Cutting Edge". These thoughts have been water to my thirsty soul. A long post, but worth the read.

(JB)"How would you suggest pastors today go about thinking through their vocational identity?"

(EP)"Basically, we simply have to get our identity from the Bible, from this Biblical story. And Americans are not very good at that. We assume we are living in a Christian country, and everybody’s on our side. So we let the culture shape what we’re doing because it seems so benign, and then we think, “We can Christianize it.” But we can’t. The church is a totally counter-cultural movement. We are a marginal people. There is no way we can be a success in this culture on their terms.

American pastors don’t want to hear this, though. They want to know how they can grow their church, as though if you have the right technique and enough water and fertilizer, it’s going to go. But here’s the thing: all the stories of spiritual leadership that we have in our scriptures are failures. Every one. I can’t think of one that in our terms we would call a “success.”

Look at Moses. He spent forty years taking his congregation through the wilderness, finally gets them to the Promised Land, summarizes all of God’s teaching, puts it all together in this incredible sermon called Deuteronomy, and then as he gives his last speech, God speaks to Moses and says, in effect, “Moses, these people can’t wait until you die. They are itching to jump into this whole Canaanite, orgiastic, sex-and-religion stuff. They can’t wait until you are out of here so they can just get to it. So here’s what I want you to do: teach them this song, and teach their children this song. Then when they have forgotten about you, their children will remember the song and they will have the story.” And he teaches them the “Song of Moses.” And as soon as he dies, that’s just what happens: everything is just a mess. How would you like, at the end of your ministry, to have God say, “I just want you to know, pastor, they didn’t learn a thing from you.”

Isaiah, at the beginning of his ministry, gets this glorious call, with all the smoke and angels and holy, holy, holy stuff. But then God says, “You are going to preach to these people and they aren’t going to listen and they aren’t going to do a thing you say.” How would you like to hear that on your ordination day? Isaiah says, “How long, Lord?” and God says, in effect, “for the rest of your life. The country is going to get cut down, and just be a field of stumps—but there is a seed in the stump.” That’s not very hopeful.

So it goes in every story. As pastors, we have to be ready to be a failure in the eyes of the culture, and if we’re not, we’re seduced by the culture to “being religious” in the culture’s way. Some people think I’m out to lunch because we don’t do that in America. We do something big and influential and cost-efficient. Well, a pastoral life is not cost-efficient, I’ll tell you. You don’t spend three hours in a nursing home and come away feeling like you’ve been cost-efficient.

I think the most important thing a pastor does is who he or she is. We do a lot more by the way we live than by the way we are conducting ministry. This means that people are watching us, and if we are, for instance, highly mobile ourselves, we don’t give people any kind of alternative to their own mobility. If we are harassed and hurrying and busy, even for all the right reasons, it gives them no place to say, “Oh, there is another way to live!” To see us modeling something different.

This is a dangerous thing to say, but this is why—all other things being equal—the longer you can stay in one place, the better. You are countering the mobility of our country just by staying. The other thing—not being in a hurry, not rushing—is that people need somebody who shows them that it can be done. You can live this way. The pastor who keeps a Sabbath, who is leisurely about what he does, who has space in his day for people to interrupt him…. when I taught at Regent College in Vancouver, I lived just a block from the school. If I had an appointment, say, at 2:00 pm, I’d leave at 1:30 because there’s kind of an open place in the middle of the school with a coffee shop and a bookstore, and I found out pretty soon that it would take me a half an hour to get through there—unless I just brushed people off. People wanted to talk, five minutes here, ten minutes there. It made a world of difference to the way that community developed, if there were a few people who were not in a hurry.

The pastor can do that. We are some of the only people left in our society who can do that. We have more control over our time than anybody else, except maybe the unemployed. Yet we use that freedom not for space for relationship and intimacy, but rather for packing a lot of stuff into it in the name of ministry. When I left my congregation after twenty-nine years, one of the things that utterly surprised my wife and me was how many people, during the four month lead-time they had before we left, came by to say good-bye, including some who I would have considered marginal to the church – they would show up every third or fourth Sunday, no crises in their lives like death or divorce. I was stunned to hear how many of them considered my wife and I to be two of their best friends. They felt an intimacy, closeness. These were not “leadership material” folks. They were not the ones who made the church run. They were not the ones who made me feel good about what I was doing. Every once in awhile I would think, “How can I motivate them better?” You know what it was? It was the way we lived. Our family lived with a kind of open house, with a lot of people through it all the time. It was that leisurely quality. If you stay in one place long enough, people start noticing."

(JB)"If someone were to come to you and say, “I want to immerse myself in this way of pastoring and living—give me a way to start doing this,” how might you direct them?"

(EP)"There are basic things like developing a prayer life and keeping a Sabbath. I think keeping a Sabbath is a big thing, because it breaks the cycle of obsessiveness when, one day a week, you aren’t going to do anything.

Here’s one thing that I’ve done with a few people and I think it’s worth thinking about. I tell these men and women, “Wherever you are, pick five people in your congregation who might be considered ‘losers.’ They don’t contribute anything to the church. They are apathetic. They are eccentric. Nobody particularly likes them. Now make them your best friends. Spend a lot of time with them. Get to know those people as children of God. They are not going to help you build your church. They are not going to give you any emotional gratification. That is your training ground for paying attention without a reward. Actually, it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not a huge expenditure of time. You visit these people once every two weeks. But your view of what a congregation is changes radically when you do that."

(JB)"How so?"

(EP)"Well, our culture says you go after the winners. You get the glamorous people. You find the people who are going to help you develop a church. So spend your time with the leaders. That is a basic leadership thing in our country. But what did Jesus do? He hung out with the losers. I remember we had a financial campaign for our building. We went through three building campaigns while I was with this congregation. One of my elders came to me and said, “Now Eugene, this is really important. I want you to visit the people who have the capacity to give. I want to you really work with them. We’ve got to get this campaign going.” I went away from that and thought, “You know, I don’t think I’m going to do that.” So for the next six months I didn’t visit anybody who had any leadership ability or ability to give. I spent my time with the widows, the unemployed, just to break the seduction of that. It didn’t make any difference; we still got the money we needed. But I think it would have hurt me; every time I looked at somebody, I would have been thinking, “How much can we get from him?”

Full Interview