This book will encourage anyone interested in pursuing a life in ministry. It helps you look at the stories of your life and view them as messages and nuggets from God. The Pastor was easily one of my favorite reads thus far. It is a memoir of Eugene Peterson’s life. Specifically, he discusses how he came to be a pastor. He himself describes the book as a discussion on the “formations as a pastor and how the vocation of a pastor formed me.” The book had led me to consider my own experiences and think about how each and every one of them have shaped me for a life in ministry. I’ll summarize the stories and emphasize the lessons I walked away with throughout the journey.
During my time in The Fellowship Residency Program, I read a long list of powerful books. To read more about my residency experience click here. One aspect of my assignments is to summarize and write key takeaways from each of the books. This is a summary of "The Pastor". by Eugene H. Peterson.
Growing up, Peterson felt left out by the stories of people who grew up churched and suddenly found God. This made him utterly confused on the role of pastor. He discusses how being a pastor involves a lot of ambiguity around what to do and how to do it. He recommends that pastors take the role of witnesses who don’t take center stage but instead point people towards God as center. Finally, He urges the reader to consider the place and time of their process right now. “Pay attention. Be ready. Repent. Believe.”
Chapter 1: Montana – Sacred Ground and Stories. Eugene describes a sacred place that was quiet, solitary, and told of the glory of God that he often visited. In that space, he was allowed to develop into who he would become. This particular idea has led me to consider where my own “sacred place” exists.
Chapter 2: New York – Pastor John of Patmos. In this chapter, Peterson discusses that the “most effective strategy for change…comes from a minority working from the margins.” This was one of the most comforting lines of the enter book. Often times I feel like a minority working within the margins, particularly in ministry. However, he encouraged me to continue working in that space as a champion for change. He discusses an interesting point of how when God calls Abraham and Sarah to be the ancestors of the faith, the defining moment for them is becoming parents. This too was a big moment for Eugene. Finally, he describes ministry as an unpredictable time of working for people who are in the trenches. The only predictable part of the job was the hour on Sunday morning that was planned out.
Part II: “Intently Haphazard”. Eugene’s path to pastor was always inside of him, but never a simple and straightforward path.
Chapter 3: My Mother’s Songs and Stories. The lesson here was that it is the way we acquire knowledge that matters more than the thing itself that we are learning.
Chapter 4: My Father’s Butcher Shop. Here we are reminded that when good work is done, there is a humility that must cultivate as a submission to the conditions of the work. A congregation is a group of people who leave behind what the world thinks of them and are given a name in light of Jesus. One thing he had to unlearn, particularly with regards to humility, when becoming a pastor was not to work himself into oblivion. He had to learn that God’s work, not his own, was the center and focus for attention. As pastors, one should seek that first and then help others do the same.
Chapter 5: Garrison Johns. This chapter is the story of how easy it can be to slip into the way of the world and depart from the truths of scripture.
Chapter 6: The Treeless Christmas of 1939. He describes the one year that his mother felt convicted about having a Christmas tree at their home. The year without the tree was the year he truly began to understand the importance of “Jesus without tinsel.” This particular balance is especially difficult in the world’s seductive cultural norms.
Chapter 7: Uncle Sven. Uncle Sven was a man who was described with many different personalities. Peterson discusses how he did not want his congregation to be labeled by their greatest strengths or worst sins, as Uncle Sven was, but by the salvation story found in Jesus.
Chapter 8: The Carnegie. Peterson shares that it wasn’t in school but in books where he received his “education” and love for learning. His only formal education that rivaled that came when the professor was willing to humble himself. Within books, knowledge was, “the disciplines practice of thinking, imagining, formulating, and testing for the truth.”
Chapter 9: Cousin Abraham. His cousin rescued him from the confinements he was raised in as a child. Specifically, to trust the Spirit and let go of the confinement of sectarianism. This particular story challenged me to consider what things I was raised to believe that I have to undo within my own theology and doctrine.
Chapter 10: Mennonite Punch. Here, Eugene portrays a funny story of how a prideful pastor who had never drank accidentally found himself drunk as a result of some spiked punch at a Mennonite wedding.
Chapter 11: Holy Land. This chapter, we are lead to understand how scripture would take over and use Peterson to share the message versus him using the scripture. He talks about how there is something unique about being up in the middle of the night. I too can attest to this as the hours I spent nursing my sweet baby overnight are still some of the most precious moments between God and I. He reminds us that life is not found in the generalizations, but the specific places. Holy lands in holy places.
Chapter 12: Augestine Njokuobi & Elijah Odajara. After a failed engagement, Peterson lets his two Nigerian friends know that he can no longer travel to Nigeria with them. Since he has no other options, he believes that he could be a pastor, if necessary. However, it doesn’t feel right. He describes himself wrestling with an angel overnight and waking to realize God had another plan for his life at that time, seminary.
Chapter 13: Seminary. Peterson’s relationship with the Bible is likely similar to many of our own experiences. He would be bored with it and approached it as something to be used for personal gain. However, over the course of seminary, the Bible began to transform into a conversation that invoked inductive imagination. The pastor at the church he worked for during seminary said that the most important thing he did to prepare to teach was make home visits to the middle- and working-class families within walking distance of the church. He desired to know what was going on in their lives so he could effectively preach truth to them. Additionally, Karl Bath as a theologian got him excited. Karl made theology about listening to, living in, and participating with God as opposed to simply talking about God.
Chapter 14: Jan. Eugene describes Jan’s role as, “[placing] her strategically yet unobtrusively at a heavily trafficked intersection between heaven and earth.” He describes Jan as being present, centered, emotionally accessible, and “delighted in the hereness and nowness of life.” One’s spouse is absolutely crucial in the success of one’s ministry.
Part III: Shekinah. Shekinah is a Hebrew word that means, “a collective vision that brings together dispersed fragments of divinity.” In other words, bringing God to a specific time and place. A Rabbi friend reminds Peterson that when Israel first returned to the temple that had been restored and rebuilt after the exile, they wept over what they saw. However, God’s glory began to shine through, and overtime the Shekinah faded out. In our Church world today, people still place immense value on the “place” of God. However, God’s glory is what we as church goers should truly be seeking.
Chapter 15: Ziklag. It took a while for Eugene to understand that the congregation was his primary workplace, and his workplace was primarily God’s workplace first. The Village of Ziklag was given to David as a “church” when he was on the run from King Saul. He sought to be alone, but quickly was joined by an entire group of runaways and renegades. He came to understand that the congregation is place full of stories of both Jesus and the people within it. “Every once in a while….I see what my sin-dulled eyes had missed: Word of God-shaped, Holy Spirit – created lives of sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience – Shekinah. And sometimes I don’t – Ziklag.” In other words, sometimes ministry is on fire and working, and sometimes it is a grind. However, in both seasons, God is to be glorified.
Chapter 16: Catacombs Presbyterian Church. Peterson understood the church as “a colony of heaven in the country of death, a strategy of the Holy Spirit for giving witness to the already-inaugurated kingdom of God.” The story of Jesus in the Gospels is Him revealing God to us. The story of Acts is Jesus’s story as it is lived through and by the community of His followers. When we study Acts, it is easy to allow Jesus to fall behind the scenes of the story. We may even believe that God does the salvation, and we run the business of church. However, Acts doesn’t read as such. If the first church was told in the form of a story, so is our church today. We are retelling the story of Jesus through our willingness to listen, respond, follow, believe, and obey Christ’s commands or not. However, as pastors, we must be willing to accept that not everyone wants to be a part of this show if they are not given the role that they want for themselves. Through the Catacombs church, Eugene was able to understand that it takes all kinds of kinds to form the church. The body truly needs every single part. When we allow the Holy Spirit to work in and through us to build the church, a community is created that places Christ as the starring role in the story of the church.
Chapter 17: Tuesdays. Though Peterson was trained on mental health counseling, he was not there to “fix people.” Instead, he was there to lead people in worshiping God and living out their faith on a daily basis. Overtime, he began to become more interested in fixing the people as problems rather than understanding his people in light of God’s grace and mercy working in and through them. He came to recognize that his primary role was to live in relationship with Christ and teach them to do the same even when they do not ask. Essentially, that is the role of pastor.
Chapter 19: Company of Pastors. The congregations often get described negatively as men and women who desperately need their pastors. Instead, that view should be transformed into seeing them as people who are experiencing God move in, for, and through them. Peterson formed a company of pastor’s who were set out to determine what the role, expectations, and agenda of a pastor was. First, they evaluated the meaning of the Sabbath or Sunday worship and used that as the day that would shape the rest of the week. Before the company, laypeople, executives, and even mentors had opinions about what it meant to be a pastor. As a result, most of the pastors were lonely and angry. Since joining the company, the diverse group came together to understand the role of pastor. The diversity was so great, that it made the unity even more special. At the time, Eugene found that the “leading expert on pastoral theology” did not have a single reference to prayer in his major books. Eugene believes that personal conversation with God had to be a primary disciple regardless of one’s location or task at hand.
The company struggled to connect the Sunday worship with the work week until Paul, the Rabbi helped out. Paul’s explanation was one of my favorite moments of the entire book. He explained how Jews celebrate 5 mandatory acts of public worship. He connected them as follows: during Passover, the feast of salvation, they read Song of Songs that covers the topic of prayer. Likewise, pastors pray for and with people each day. Pentecost is the feast of the revelation of the law on Sinai. They read Ruth during this time. In a similar way, pastors help people recognize how their stories are connecting with the greater story of Sinai. Ninth of Ab is the fast of grieving the loss of city and temple and is paired with Lamentations. Pastors don’t attempt to explain away suffering but instead face it with their people. Tabernacles was a remembrance of the years in the wilderness wandering. Ecclesiastes is read during that week. Pastors do not simply follow the demands of the church, but trust God in the unknown and meaningless. Purim celebrates the deliverance from Persia and reads through Esther. Similarly, pastors work with a God-formed community and are reminded of that through Esther’s story. Though many pastors fall to the lust of power, money, numbers, worldly success, or sinful affirmation, many more are following and trusting in God’s plan for their vocation both on Sundays and for the rest of the work week.
Chapter 19: Willi Ossa. Willi as an artist was living a vocation. Peterson sees through him that a job is something with quantified work that can be evaluated. A vocation is serving God.
Chapter 20: Bezalel. In thinking about their church identity, they discovered that being the church is experiencing the Holy Spirit conceiving the life of Jesus through the church itself as the Spirit did with Jesus in Mary. Peterson’s church had become a place of worship where it was less about what they did and more about what they allowed God to do in and for them. As he had used Acts to become a people that worshiped, he desired to use Exodus as a path for building the worship place to invite others into. In Exodus, Moses leads the inception and formation of salvation and revelation of God, and Bezalel is the architect that provides continuation and maturation for a place to respond to God’s goodness. His goal was to make the sanctuary less focused on socialization and more focused on theologization, or a representation of God’s completeness and utter joy. They arranged even the pews to represent communal worship with neighbors and families alike. Everything is intentional and purposeful in design. After all, “worship is the supreme art.”
Chapter 21: Eucharistic Hospitality. Jan, Eugene’s wife, specialized in hospitality that placed Christ as the host and received Christ together in thanksgiving. He reminds us that a meal provides a daily space to take and receive the life of Jesus with loved ones.
Chapter 22: Appreciation and Foolery. As Peterson’s church was becoming more and more independent, he would send letters to the sponsor organization. He quickly realized that they were not reading them and made up dramatic stories of him falling into sin as a test. Needless to say, he was the only one laughing. However, after the building was complete and the church became independent, people quit showing up as regularly. He realized people needed a goal to get them to services, otherwise they quit showing up. This was the beginning of six years that he would dub “the badlands.”
Chapter 23: Pilgrimage. Every year, the family took a month-long vacation in August and drove through the Dakota Badlands where the color of the landscape dried up. This would become a haunting metaphor for their Maryland church in a season of struggle.
Chapter 24: Heather-Scented Theology. Peterson found a mentor pastor who was real with him. He reminded Eugene that the church can find twenty different ways to kill you if you let it.
Chapter 25: Presbycostal. Eugene had found that both his Pentecostal upbringing and his Presbyterian church shaped his theology and ministry. Presbyterians offered him the gift of a living tradition. The Pentecostal background gifted him energy and livability in real life, but Presbyterians reminded him the importance of relationship and open arms to all.
Chapter 26: Emmaus Walks. Eugene and Jan went to a retreat that led them to truly practice the Sabbath. They would embrace silence and prayer together so that the day could be full of remembering the gifts, becoming who God created them to be, and being grateful for the future.
Chapter 27: Sister Genevieve. Being a pastor required integrating the knowledge of seminary into the daily practices with additional prayer and worship. As he considered the “boring” congregation, he was convicted. He realized that he needed to view the congregants as souls rather than people who are there to entertain, serve, or perform on his behalf. God uses the fusion of scripture and talking to us with us to form and model the life of Christ within us. Initially, he thought that emotions were a way to judge the vibrancy of Christ within a person, but emotions would fail him every time. Instead, a friend by the name of Sister Genevieve taught him prayer as a way of life rather than a practiced or forced discipline when necessary and convenient. The health of one’s soul and one’s prayer life are just as important as their understanding of doctrine and scripture. In other words, you don’t work to get it right, but to live it right.
Chapter 28: Eric Liddell. Eric Liddell was a running hero of Peterson’s who was gifted and as a result of his beliefs would not run a race on a Sunday. Peterson wanted to qualify for the Boston marathon, but had to run the qualifying race on a Sunday. He tells the funny story of requesting approval from the ruling elders to run. He qualified and completed the Boston marathon. His love for running reenergized his body, his mind, and his soul.
Chapter 29: “Write in a Book What You See…” In the season of the “badlands,” Eugene began to realize that he wanted to write. He desired to use language in a way that would give God the glory. However, to use language meant first he needed to listen to language both in scriptures and as spoken by his congregants. He shares a story that highlights the world we live in such that we reduce the discussions of God into cliché godtalk rather that allowing Him to be active and alive in our daily speech and action. Eugene, following Pastor John of Patmos’s lead, decided to write what he saw. In summary, he noticed that this godtalk would kill. During this time period, he began to emerge from the season of the badlands. He recognized that it had been a time of growth, maturation, and sanctification. He had to remove what was of Him and allow the Spirit and wise counsel to speak in and through his life. It was during this time that he had learned to sit. Both he and his wife would be encouraged by the Nietzsche quote, “a long obedience in the same direction.” They had decided to focus their energy on emphasizing the lived qualities of the gospel during the time where many thought God might be dead. He would stay with the people in patience, embrace the conditions of the local community, and get to know them personally.
Chapter 30: Ten Secretaries. Eugene wisely reminds that when you don’t know what to do, seek inspiration through prayer of other imaginative outlets. It was by doing this that Eugene solved his administrative difficulty.
Chapter 31: Wayne and Claudia. The struggle for the church is often that “worship had been degraded into entertainment. And community had been depersonalized into programs.” Unfortunately, these issues are both apparent in congregations today. It made me truly reevaluate what my definition of worship and community truly were. Peterson desired people be known for their souls, stories, and names over their functions. The hospitality modeled by the pastors eventually spread to the entire congregation to develop an overall culture of hospitality.
Chapter 32: Jackson. Eugene tells the story of a recovering addict who came to meet with him about what it means to be a Christian. It didn’t take long before Jackson was evangelizing to everyone he knew. He filled the church with people who were recovering from their various addictions.
Chapter 33: The Atheist and the Nun. Eugene warns pastors that it is easy to fall into the consumerism world of religion and laziness of religious clichés. Thankfully, his time teaching at the seminary defended him from getting any of those bad habits. It was during that time he was able to witness an Atheist humbly provide a confession of the faith and a nun take ownership for her own ministry.
Chapter 34: Judith. Judith was also a recovering addict who had never been to a church before. She wrote a letter to Eugene that explained church as being a negative thing among her friends and her fear to defend the church. She said it is ordinary in the world, but when she pulled back the curtain of ordinariness, extraordinary is all she has experienced since. Both this chapter and the chapter about Jackson made me consider the gospel, Christianity, and church through the lens of the nonbelievers. It is important to pause and make these considerations often to stay relevant and focused in ministry.
Chapter 35: “Invisible Six Days a Week, Incomprehensible the Seventh.” Pastors are often invisible 6 days a week as the congregation is wildly unaware of their responsibilities during the week. In response, Eugene began to write a weekly congregational letter to keep the individuals connected to the pastor’s weekly duties. In a rage of discontentment, Peterson recognized that his greatest desire was to be an unbusy pastor that allowed time for God and God’s people. An elder asked what was stopping him. He responded by saying that he was too busy running the church. When the elder questioned why they couldn’t run the church, Eugene reluctantly agreed. He struggled to trust their leadership at first, but it ended up being a great idea. Eugene reflected on how Jesus spent a majority of his time in secular workplaces. “Once we identify God in his workplace working, it isn’t long before we find ourselves in our workplaces working in the name of God.” In becoming an unbusy pastor, the people of the congregation were becoming workers for God in their own ways as well. When asked about his job, Peterson said that the mess, the miracle, and the mysteries of life were his favorite part. He also cautioned the young pastors to avoid being impatient with the congregation and fall into the trap of making them who you want them to be.
Part IV: Good Deaths. Peterson reminds us that resurrection is important even when we are alive. “We practice our death by giving up our will or live on our own terms”
Chapter 36: The Next One. Pastors are at their best when they are able to work in the background, and the energy and attention are focused on what truly matters. Eugene’s mother and father both died good deaths, but it brought up vulnerability within himself as he realized that his death would be “the next one.”
Chapter 37: Wind Words. When discerning about whether or not Jan and Eugene should leave their church home, they spent time listening to the Spirit’s “wind words.” When they thought they knew, they still waited 9 months. The decision was right, and they left.
Chapter 38: Fyodor. Peterson had been translating the Bible for his American congregation so that they could connect and understand it for many years. When they left the church, it was, as he noted, a good death. From that leave, he “resurrected” and made space in which he compiled The Message Bible translation.
Chapter 39: The Photograph. In Pittsburgh, Peterson was comforted by his grandfather’s photograph that was taken in Pittsburgh. There, he shifted from being a pastor with a congregation full of stories to a professor to students he barely knew to an author with unknown readers. When asked what he missed most about being a pastor, he replied that it was the intimacy between himself and the church’s story that was the hardest to leave. He truly believes that the stories are the language of the Church.
Chapter 40: Death in the Desert. Jan and Eugene kept Sabbath with the “pray and play” strategy for years. There, they realized that their new home, Canada, was full of godless souls. In fact, when visiting the Negev in Israel, a barren desert, Peterson learned an important lesson. There he learned that, “You acquire the Biblical story mostly through your feet, only peripherally through your eyes and ears.” Quickly, you realize it is the least likely place to build a great nation, yet God did it anyway. The godless Canada and dying church of America is far less concerning when compared to Abraham’s Negev and Jesus’s Galilee.
Letter to a Young Pastor: Eugene ends the book with an important letter to a young pastor. It felt like he could be writing to anyone. He writes that being a pastor is unique, because you make far more mistakes than in any other profession and are gifted grace anyways. He emphasizes that you also often don’t know what you are doing. However, not knowing often is paired with trusting God and simply following Jesus. Finally, he reminds the pastor that worship keeps you centered, and your family will keep you grounded.
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