My Sunday reading in February and March has been coming from the book, The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, by Eugene H. Peterson. The Logos version that I am reading from comes from the Word Leadership library. Actually I have read this book more than a couple times (sometimes I only read selections from it) because it helps me get back to what is important when I get overly caught up in the administrative or peripheral responsibilities. We have already had a bit of discussion on this on my Facebook page and I look forward to a bit more. As always if you would like to discuss this, the best place to make comment is on my Facebook page. All the quotes from Peterson are in blue below.
In the first section of the book Peterson decries the culture’s definition of what a pastor is. He proposes three adjectives to strengthen the noun idea of pastor. They are “unbusy,” “subversive,” and “apocalyptic.” He asks the question, “How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?” He urges pastors to return to the significant things they should be doing: study, prayer and listening to people.
It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone. 28.
But what I want to do can’t be done that way. I need a drenching in Scripture; I require an immersion in biblical studies. I need reflective hours over the pages of Scripture as well as personal struggles with the meaning of Scripture. That takes far more time than it takes to prepare a sermon. 30.
The question I put to myself is not “How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?” but “How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?” 31.
Secondly, the pastor needs to be subversive. Most people don’t, at heart, come to church for the right reasons and they resist the changes that Christ wants to make in their lives. The pastor must keep the balance between meeting people’s felt needs and moving them toward meeting their real needs.
The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden Adams and Eves are willing to pay their respects to God, but they don’t want him invading their turf. Most sin, far from being a mere lapse of morals or a weak will, is an energetically and expensively erected defense against God. Direct assault in an openly declared war on the god-self is extraordinarily ineffective. Hitting sin head-on is like hitting a nail with a hammer; it only drives it in deeper. There are occasional exceptions, strategically dictated confrontations, but indirection is the biblically preferred method. 41.
Thirdly, pastors must be apocalyptic. They must be “the persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances.” They must prayerfully and patiently move the perspective of people caught up in the daily world up toward a kingdom perspective.
Apocalypse convinces us that we are in a desperate situation, and in it together. The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state. All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness. Apocalypse ignites a sense of urgency, but it quenches shortcuts and hurry, for the times are in God’s hands. Providence, not the newspaper, accounts for the times in which we live. 57.
Part 2 of the book deals with what the pastor does “between Sundays.” Often we focus so much on the Sunday work we forget that the real ministry is done in the other six days in between. The focus of ministry should be the “care of souls” rather than “running the church.” It means a life of being with people and bringing them into the healing presence of God.
If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the “splendor in the ordinary,” and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage. 73.
The pastor also needs to be out in the world “praying with eyes open.” We need to be with people experiencing daily life with them and connecting these things to God. We need to be a bodily presence in the community – a regular guy connected to Christ and connecting people to Christ.
Matter is real. Flesh is good. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism or sophisticated intellectualism. The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be cumbered with this too solid flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling, or a moral aspiration; the Word became flesh. It also becomes flesh. Our Lord left us a command to remember and receive him in bread and wine, in acts of eating and drinking. Things matter. The physical is holy. 77–78.
We need to be out there to teach people to pray. We need to be praying with people and praying for people.
This is my essential educational task: to develop and draw out into articulateness this personal word, to teach people to pray. Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God in faith. 100.
We need to be working with people to help them find God’s will and be conformed to it. This is not something we force or compel, but it requires us to get to know people so that we see what God is doing in their lives and join him in that. This is how we grow together as people in community.
Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) or are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice. 110.
This happens within a “ministry of small talk.” It happens as we enter into the lives of people and talk with them about the ordinary things of their lives. We don’t get opportunity to talk about the big, important spiritual things until we show we care about the things that concern them. The ordinary and everyday is important.
If we bully people into talking on our terms, if we manipulate them into responding to our agenda, we do not take them seriously where they are in the ordinary and the everyday. Nor are we likely to become aware of the tiny shoots of green grace that the Lord is allowing to grow in the back yards of their lives. If we avoid small talk, we abandon the very field in which we have been assigned to work. 121–122.
How we view people is also important. We need to see people as sinners, but as sinners who have God’s gracious forgiveness and spiritual potential within them through the Holy Spirit. If we focus on their inadequacies we will beat them down. We need to help people to see God’s grace working within them. Do we really believe that Jesus can change people or do they need our methods to make that happen?
If the pastor sees inadequacy as an unfortunate feeling, he or she will use psychological and moral means to remove it. If he sees it as a sign of sin—an avoidance of personal responsibility in the awesome task of facing God in Christ—he will respond by kindly and gently presenting the living God, pointing out the ways in which God is alive in the community. The instances of courage and grace that occur every week in any congregation are staggering. Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God. 131.
We have to beware of pastoring to satisfy the congregation. We need to make sure that we stay connected to God so that we are able to continue calling the people around us out of where they are to where God wants them to be.
Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.” 145.
This means that the pastor should not be doing this by himself. Peterson advocates pastoral sabbaticals so that both the pastor and congregation will know that he is not indispensable.
We are both, the congregation and I, experiencing a great freedom in this: neither of us neurotically needs each other. I am not dependent on them; they aren’t dependent on me. That leaves us free to appreciate each other and receive gifts of ministry from each other. 158
The book ends with a chapter of poems. This one was my favorite:
The Pain
The bawling of babies, always in a way
Inappropriate—why should the loved and innocent
Greet existence with wails?—is proof that not all
Is well. Dreams and deliveries never quite mesh.
Deep hungers go unsatisfied, deep hurts
Unhealed. The natural and gay are torn
By ugly grimace and curse. A wound appears
In the place of ecstasy. Birth is bloody.
All pain’s a prelude: to symphony, to sweetness.
“The pearl began as a pain in the oyster’s stomach.”
Dogwood, recycled from cradle to cross, enters
The market again as a yoke for easing burdens.
Each sword-opened side is the matrix for God
To come to me again through travail for joy. 170.
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