Showing posts with label Eugene Peterson. Show all posts

Being a pastor is an incredibly good, wonderful work. It is one of the few places in our society where you can live a creative life. You live at the intersection of grace and mercy and sin and salvation. We have front line seats and sometimes we even get to be part of the action. How could anyone abandon the glory of that kind of life to become a management expert? We are artists not CEOs. The true pastorate is a work of art – the art of life and spirit.

"We live in a culture that has replaced soul with self. This reduction turns people either into problems or consumers...[E]veryone we meet is either a potential recruit to join our enterprise or a potential consumer for what we are selling; or we ourselves are the potential recruits and consumers." 

--Eugene Peterson

(HT/My friend, Tim)

Image by humancarbine via Flickr

“Spiritual theology, using Scripture as a text, does not present us with a moral code and tell us, ‘live up to this’; nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, ‘Think like this and you will live well.’ The biblical way is to tell a story and in the telling invite: 'Live INTO this — this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being.'

“When we submit ourselves to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories, but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” (43-44)

Image via WikipediaIn the secularizing times in which I am living, God is not taken seriously. God is peripheral. God is nice (or maybe not so nice) but not at the center. When people want help with their parents or children or emotions, they do not ordinarily see themselves as wanting help with God. But if I am going to stay true to my vocation as a pastor, I can’t let the “market” determine what I do. I will find ways to pray with and for people and teach them to pray, usually quietly and often subversively when they don’t know I am doing it. But I am not going to wait to be asked. I am a pastor. (The Pastor: A Memoir -- p.142)

(HT -- The Internet Monk)