Eugene Peterson's Pastoral Ministry 1

This is Eugene Peterson's interview. It's only part of it. 


I sense from reading your books and conversing with you that you are generally filled with gratitude for the life you have lived and grateful also to have been a pastor. Is that right?

Peterson: I’ve loved being a pastor, almost every minute of it. It’s a difficult life because it’s a demanding life. But the rewards are enormous -- the rewards of being on the front line of seeing the gospel worked out in people’s lives. I remain convinced that if you are called to it, being a pastor is the best life there is. But any life can be the best life if you’re called to it.

How did you become a pastor?

Peterson: I think I was attracted to the intense relational and personal quality of this life. At the time I decided to become a pastor, I was assistant professor at a seminary. I loved the teaching, but when I compared it with what I was doing as an associate pastor, there was no comparison. It was the difference between being a coach in the locker room, working out plays on the chalkboard, and being one of the players on the field. I wanted to be one of the players on the field, playing my part as the life of Christ was becoming incarnate again in my community.

That’s interesting, because if there’s one life that many pastors idealize, it’s the academic life.

Peterson: That’s strange, isn’t it? When people say, "I don’t want to be a pastor, I want to be a professor," I say, "Well, the best place to be a teacher is in a congregation." Everything I taught during my tenure at Regent College was first developed and taught in my congregation. At Regent, of course, I embellished it. I put in footnotes. But the motivation of the people in the classroom was different from those in the congregational setting: they were looking for a degree, whereas in the congregation, people are looking for how to live the next day.


Many people think there’s a crisis in ministry today -- a crisis of morality or of morale. How do you see it?

Peterson: My sense is that many people take on the role of pastor without ever learning it from the inside out. As I said, I do think for those who are called to it the pastoral life is really a good life. Not an easy life, but one full of resonances with everything else that’s going on in creation and in history.
I get the sense these days that many of my colleagues have external rewards in view. How do I become a good leader? How do I get published? How do I do this? How do I do that? Those are questions that are beside the point.

We’re not a market-driven church, and the ministry is not a market-driven vocation. We’re not selling anything, and we’re not providing goods and services. If a pastor is not discerning and discriminating about the claims of his or her vocation and about the claims of a congregation, then the demands or the desires of the congregation can dominate what he or she is doing -- and that creates the conditions for nonpastoral work.

And then you can lose your morals and your morale, because you’re not working at anything that has any biblical order to it. One’s experience lacks, if I could use a fancy word, any trinitarian inclusiveness or integration.

If you look at the numbers and money, American churches in some ways are the most successful churches ever. And yet, I think it could be argued, we’re at probably one of the low points because of the silliness and triviality that characterize so much of church life these days. This is one of the reasons I think pastoral work is best handled in a fairly small setting.

What do you mean by "fairly small"?

Me: Don't you want to read Part 2 tomorrow? :)