Peterson's Approach to Pastoring 1

In Living the Message, today’s message (March 3) is Lived like a Vagabond. Peterson wrote,

“It’s difficult to recapture by an act of imagination the incongruity of a person self-designated as the Son of Man, hanging pierced and bleeding on a cross. The incongruity is less dramatic but even more offensive when the Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax-collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high-achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees. Jesus juxtaposed the most glorious title available to him with the most menial of life-styles in the culture. He talked like a king and acted like a slave. He preached with high authority and lived like a vagabond” (p. 69).

Today’s devotion gives me a vivid picture of Jesus’ pastoral identity and style. He carried a title of honor; he lived in opposition to what people expected of Him with that title. Jesus’ way of pastoring is a paragon of pastoring. The title pastor is a title of honor. To be addressed as my pastor is even more honorable. The title implies certain kind of style: the Jesus’ style. Jesus’ style is subversive in a sense that it’s entirely different from what we are used to know and what the culture informs us. As Henri Nouwen said,

“Our lives in this technological and highly competitive society are characterized by a pervasive drive for upward mobility. It is difficult for us even to imagine ourselves outside of this upwardly mobile lifestyle. Our whole way of living is structured around climbing the ladder of success and making it to the top. Our sense of vitality is dependent upon being part of the upward pull and upon the joy provided by the rewards given on the way up” [The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the Spiritual Life (Orbis, 2007), p. 23.]. 

A pastor ought to “live like a vagabond.” It’s a reminder of today. 

Here is another interview with Eugene Peterson. It's taken from Subversive Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Vancouver: Regent, 1997), pp. 216-235.

Here is Part 1:  

You see yourself as a pastor, not an administrator. How did you develop that view of your pastoral role?

Peterson: One of the worst years I ever had was in the early days of this church. Our building was finished, and I realized that I wasn’t being a pastor. I was so locked in running the church programs I didn’t have time to be a pastor. So I went to the session one night to resign. “I’m not doing what I came here to do,” I said. “I’m unhappy, and I’ m never at home.” The precipitating event was when one of my kids said: “You haven’t spent an evening at home for thirty-two days.” She had kept track! I was obsessive and compulsive about my administrative duties, I didn’t see any way to get out of the pressures that were making me that way. So I just said, “I quit.”

How did they react to that?

Peterson: They wanted to know what was wrong. “Well,” I said, “I’m out all the time, I’m doing all this administrative work, serving on all these committees, and running all these errands. I want to preach, I want to lead the worship, I want to spend time with people in their homes. That’s what I came here to do. I want to be your spiritual leader; I don’t want to run your church.” They thought for a moment and then said, “Let us run the church.” After we talked it through the rest of the evening I finally said, “Okay.”

I’ll never forget what happened because of that talk. Two weeks later the stewardship committee met, and I walked into the meeting uninvited. The chairman of the group looked at me and asked, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust us?” I admitted, “I guess I don’t, but I’ll try.” I turned around, walked out, and haven’t been back since

Although now I never go to committee meetings, it took a year or so to de-program myself.

Don’t you have to be moderator of the session, though?

Peterson: Yes. I do moderate the session. And I tell other committees that if they want me to come for a twenty-minute consultation on a specific problem I’ll be happy to do that. But I haven’t been to a committee meeting now, except in that capacity, for twelve years.

You’ve been in Christ our King Church now for eighteen years, and for the last twelve, your elders have successfully fun the church. To what do you attribute that?

Peterson: I suppose the mutual trust. They don’t always do it the way I want them to, but when I decided I wasn’t going to run the church, I also had to decide that if they were going to run it, they would have to do it their way, not mine. They listen to my preaching, are part of the same spiritual community, and know the values being created and developed; so I trust them to run the church in the best way they know how. Sometimes I do get impatient, because it’s not the most efficient way to run a church; a lot of things don’t get done.

Why is that? Because they are volunteers?

Peterson: Partly. Some of the leaders aren’t fully motivated. A congregation elects elders and deacons and sometimes chooses them for the wrong reasons. Some are only marginally interested in the life of the church, so they have neither the insight nor motivation to be productive. I can either give them the freedom to fail, or else step in and train people to be exactly what I want them to be. I’ve chosen to let them alone.

You’re saying your first priority has to be your pastoral ministry? And that some other good things, such as making the administration of the church more efficient, must be left to others? There’s nothing you can do about it because your priority is your ministry?

Peterson: That’s right.

Walk us through one of the inefficient things you allowed to happen, even though many leaders would see it as an administrative lapse.

Peterson: I recall the case of a woman who was working in a voluntary capacity coordinating several closely related programs. When she started out, she was excited about it and did a good job. But as time went on, she dipped into other things and began doing her job indifferently. I was dealing with her as her pastor on family problems, and I felt it was important for me not to criticize her administration or ask her to resign. So I didn’t do anything.

Matters became worse. I had many phone calls and listened to many complaints. I said, “I’d like to improve the situation, but I can’t promise anything.” I just waited with it and kept on being a pastor to her. I felt that to keep from compromising my position as a pastor to her, I had to let the programs in a sense fail that year and suffer with poor administration. Now, many pastors wouldn’t have permitted that, and for their ministry styles it might have been correct for them to step in and administratively handle the situation. I’m not against that kind of efficiency by any means, but I need to know what I’m good at. I have to pay the price of being good at certain things and not be a jack-of-all-trades.