Eugene Peterson's Pastoral Ministry 3

Hope that you enjoy reading Eugene Peterson so far. I found out three weeks ago that there is a new book written by him. It's called The Pastor: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2011). It will come out in February. You can imagine how excited I am. 

Here is Part 3:

How has the pastoral life shaped your family life and how has family life shaped your pastoral life?

Peterson: I think the most significant influence on my pastoral life has been my family. Early on I determined that I was never going to treat my parishioners better than I treated my family. So it was in the context of our family life that I learned forgiveness, grace and discernment -- all the things that influenced everything I did in the parish.

The life of the parish did not shape our family life as much as our way of being a family shaped the life of the parish. The influence went from the family outward rather than from the parish inward. As I see it, my kids were lucky. They had 20 uncles and aunts and grandparents. It was a wonderful place for them.

We often had people living with us -- runaway kids, abused women, people who needed a place to live for a short time. The unintended consequence of this effort on our part was that it became a witness to the congregation of the practice of Christian hospitality. It took about ten or 12 years of living this way before the congregation began to practice this same kind of hospitality. Without me ever saying anything, they started doing it. How we live as pastors can have a real impact on our congregations -- for good or for ill. All too often our family lives appear just as hassled and harried as everyone else’s. But then we just contribute to the general ill.

What you’re describing makes me think that we need to begin thinking about such a thing as "the vocation of the pastoral family." For example, in your case, it’s impossible for us to understand your life as a pastor apart from your life as a husband and a father.

Peterson: That’s true. Without that context, you wouldn’t know anything. And Jan has functioned as a pastor. I mean, there’s a pastoral quality to her life. It’s a shared life and we both liked it.

But I don’t think we could have lived this kind of a life in a large church. There must be ways to do it in a large church, but I haven’t worked that out. If the gospel is basically relational, if what we know of God through the Trinity means that knowledge of God is fundamentally incarnational, then shouldn’t pastoral life have an incarnational cast to it? Shouldn’t it be intensely relational?

There is a lot of talk these days about communication, understood mainly as a technology. In this case, people are not talking about conversation. They’re talking about getting out words that are either motivational or informational.

One of the advantages of being in a place a long time is that you realize that the most important stuff you do doesn’t feel all that important when you’re doing it. That is what it means to be a witness. Your life speaks when you’re not looking or speaking. As a pastor, you’re a witness -- but you’re mostly a witness when you don’t know you’re being a witness.

In Under the Unpredictable Plant and in other books as well, you have written of the necessity of staying in place over time in order for the pastoral life to develop the kind of capacity for "witness" that you’re describing. You talk about the pastoral life as requiring a "vow of stability."

Peterson: I don’t want to sound dogmatic about this because there can be so many exceptions. Some congregations are truly neurotic, and you’ve got to get out to save your life and your family’s life. There are circumstances that change, illnesses, different seasons -- these realities need to be taken into account. But, all other things being equal, the longer you can stay the better.

Now it can happen that a long pastorate just puts you to sleep. That’s not good for either the pastor or the congregation. Hopefully, in those circumstances, a bishop or some church leader will step in and say, "Get out of here fast!"

But those situations are still the exceptions. Dwelling in one place over time makes all the difference. A place is what allows stories to develop. Even when people would leave -- go to California or Texas -- they maintained a connection with our congregation in Baltimore. Over the years, the congregation dispersed because of the way companies move people around, but for the most part these folks never lost that connection with me or my family or with others in the congregation.

You write about wanting to leave your congregation at different times and even trying to. But you worked through those times and now are obviously grateful that you did.

Peterson: I think the primary reason for wanting to leave was boredom. After one episode of boredom, I realized that the boredom was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention to things. It was like I was walking through a field of wildflowers and not seeing any of them because I’d seen them 500 times before. So I learned to start looking. For me, writing helped me see what I was missing. My writing became a partial cure for the boredom, because it made me look more closely.

Another cause of my unrest was -- I’m ashamed to say it -- ambition. I was in an obscure place and nobody seemed to be noticing me. I just thought, "Well, I’m 40 years old -- I’d better make a move so somebody notices me.

Is ambition a bad thing? You’ve written a score of books over the years -- that strikes me as an ambitious endeavor.

Peterson: In the best sense, ambition is wanting to do your best. But sometimes ambition can be simply the need to be noticed. And I think, in me, there was that kind of ambition in my restlessness. But fortunately I had a good spiritual director who punctured that balloon. Then, after I was about 42, I was OK. The issue never really came up again. I was saved.

It seems a real challenge to discern when that restlessness is just part of the journey one is on and when it’s a sign that one is on the wrong path.
Peterson: It is a challenge. Our capacity for self-deceit is enormous. I wouldn’t trust myself to make those decisions. That’s why it’s important to have a spiritual director.

I think there are people who can be pretty good pastors for ten years and then realize that this is not their vocation. Such a decision has nothing to do with success or failure. Some people do a really respectable job, and may be gifted as pastors, but they are never really given to it -- their heart is never in it. They’re following somebody else’s directions, doing what their parents wanted them to do, or what their professors wanted them to do. In such cases getting out is the honest thing to do, and should be done without guilt.