Here is Part 4:
Aren’t you neglecting the unchurched people of your community?
Peterson: We’re not the only church in Bel Air, and I’m not the only pastor. Few places in America are unchurched. Am I going to trust the Holy Spirit to do his work through other churches in my community, or am I going to think that if we don’t do it, it’s not going to get done?
A great deal of arrogance develops out of the feeling that when we have something good going, we have to triple it so everybody gets in on it. Many different ministries take place in the community and in the world, and it’s bad faith on my part to assume the Holy Spirit isn’t just as active in them as in my ministry.
Some people would probably say at this point, “All right, you’ve been in your church for eighteen years; yet you obviously have very little sensitivity for the need of evangelism. If every church acted like yours, how would the world be evangelized?”
Peterson: My answer is that the Lord has many other people. I have to learn how to use my gifts. I’m not an evangelist, I’m a pastor. Some people in my congregation are evangelists and do a good job. I’m not much good to them; I don’t know how to direct them. Another pastor would be able to do a better job with them. I believe evangelism is an essential work, but that doesn’t mean I should make it the entire focus of my church. My gifts lie in other areas.
Many pastors want to focus their ministries, but when they try, pressures from various groups in the church who want other things keep them from it. They become reactors to their church environment.
Peterson: That’s true, and the pressures are real. I don’t think anybody can do it alone. It helps to have colleagues who are experiencing the same things, friends you can share with.
Do you have a close group of colleagues?
Peterson: I meet with a group of twelve pastors of various denominations every Tuesday from 11:30 to 2:00 for prayer and Bible study. Since we all use a lectionary, we preach from the same passage. Our discussion relates to our pulpit ministries---we exegete the passage, discuss it and suggest ways we might preach from it. We’re all committed to preaching, so we don’t talk about church programs, problems, or how to run the church. When someone is going through personal difficulty, we scrap the agenda and deal just with that. But we don’t let anything else intrude.
How does this sharing of ideas affect your preaching?
Peterson: It gives it depth. It insists on a certain discipline and gives it priority; you can’t put preaching off until Saturday. I’ve had rare weeks when all the sermon preparation I did was in that weekly meeting. Everything fell apart that week, with deaths and other crises, but I was able to stand in the pulpit and have a respectable sermon.
A while ago you pointed out that preaching is in some ways much more difficult now than it was a century or two ago. What has changed to produce this effect?
Peterson: Preaching a hundred years ago was a kind of literate and sophisticated conversation between pastor and people. The people knew the Bible as well as the pastor did, and they all shared the same culture. Today most people are biblically illiterate; they enter the Sunday morning service unsettled, not with maturity and wholeness, but ripped apart by all kinds of things. The Sunday morning congregation is a hospital, and you just can’t do the same things done years ago.
You know it’s a hospital because you’ve been involved with people, you’ve seen trauma and pain first-hand during the week?
Peterson: Yes, you know—the alcoholic, the adulterer, the family whose kid just ran away from home. It’s all sitting right in front of you. Saturday nights I go to the church, walk through the sanctuary for an hour, and think ahead to Sunday morning and the diversity and chaos represented. It can be discouraging. It’s something that Alexander Whyte, one of the great preachers of the last century, didn’t have to face. He stood in the pulpit and his sermon was a conversation with the people who were well versed in Scripture and who read the same books. He made his people read books. He took them into Pilgrim’s Progress, William Law, Saint Theresa, Dante. He was their schoolmaster as well as their minister.
The people I preach to watch television, listen to the radio, take night courses, and go to special seminars for their work. They’re just bombarded. They don’t need me to say, “You must read this book.” I need to say, “Let’s worship God,” and then lead them into Scripture and make that a privileged time in their lives. But on the other hand, there’s an electricity in preaching; you’re suddenly breaking into the humdrum, technological, rat-race world, and you have something really fresh, a new dimension to share. That’s exciting.
What counsel would you give to pastors who are in struggling situations, or who are in small churches, and are judging themselves as failures?
Peterson: That’s tough to answer. I’m convinced many pastors as actually doing a really good job.
But they don’t necessarily believe they are?
Peterson: They don’t know it—that they are preaching and counseling and leading well. They don’t expect to be perfect, but they’re doing a good job. I guess it goes back to the other themes we’ve talked about. A person has to be content to do what he is good at and offer it constantly to the Lord. If you keep trying to do what you’re not good at, you’re bound to fail. Nobody from the outside knows what the work of a pastor is, so they keep asking us to do things—things we’re not good at—and then we end up feeling guilty for not doing a good job.
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