Peterson on Pastoral Theology

In The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperOne, 2011), Eugene Peterson notes:

For several years, I had been on the lookout for writers who would give me direction and affirmation for who and what I had become and was becoming as a pastor. I wasn’t coming up with much. I asked around for the names of the leaders in the field of pastoral theology. One name, a professor at one of our leading Presbyterian seminaries, camp up frequently.

I learned that he was giving a seminar in a church in Philadelphia, a little over an hour away, and drove up to spend a morning in his company. He was absolutely brilliant. I was absolutely impressed. He appeared to know everything and fluently articulate everything. There were about twenty pastors in the seminar. As we spent the morning talking about the life and work of pastor, I was totally awed by the clarity and probing insights he brought to the subject. For the first hour or so I was under his spell. And then I began feeling that something might not be quite right. What I was doing, working in a congregation characterized by interruptions, false starts, and unfinished work, seemed like a far cry from anything he was presenting. A fog worked its way into the room, obscuring the clarity of his words. I asked how we might extend the conversation after we left the seminar. What would he recommend? He recommended his books: “Stay in conversation with me through my books…”

When I returned home, I bought all his books—there were eight of them—and began reading. If he was the person who knew the most about pastoral theology in America, I wanted to be informed. After the second book and starting on the third, something didn’t seem right. I looked in the index under the heading “prayer.”  Nothing. Not a single reference to prayer. I went through the indices of the other books. Still nothing. I still had a great deal to learn about the vocation of pastor, but I knew one thing for sure: the work of prayer was at the heart of everything. Personal conversation with God had to intersect with everything I thought or said, whether in the sanctuary or on the street corner. And here was a man who, I was told by many, was our leading pastoral theologian, writing eight of the most influential books on being a pastor in America in the twenty or so years preceding my becoming a pastor—and not a single reference to prayer.

I looked for references to congregation, the workplace of pastors. For church. For worship. For preaching. For scripture. These were subjects high on the interest level of the Company of Pastors. I remembered the reluctantly divulged item in Philadelphia of the famous professor’s meager one year of experience in pastoral work. And this was my generation’s leading authority on pastoral work? His brilliant works on pastoral theology obviously had little or no grounding in the pastor’s workplace, “this damned church.” I felt gypped.

I took the books to the landfill and dumped them. Pastoral theology without prayer and without congregation? Nobody in my neighborhood was going to read these books if I had any say in it. (pp. 149-151)