{"id":8592,"date":"2011-05-13T15:40:30","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T19:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=8592"},"modified":"2013-05-10T15:14:49","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T19:14:49","slug":"what-is-a-pastor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2011\/05\/13\/what-is-a-pastor\/8592\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is a Pastor?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Send<\/a> <\/span><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

by David E. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Pastor: A Memoir<\/em> by Eugene H. Peterson (HarperOne, 2011) Excerpt<\/span><\/a> <\/p>\n

Eugene Peterson is a master storyteller. He is also a narrative theologian attuned to the way stories shape the biblical message and the lives of Christian believers and congregations, and the skills of both are in play throughout The Pastor<\/em>, Peterson\u2019s graceful memoir of his long career in congregational ministry.<\/p>\n

\"post01d-whatispastor\"Best known for The Message<\/em>, his contemporary English translation\/paraphrase of the Bible that has sold millions of copies, Peterson is less well known for the 29 years he spent in the pulpit, starting and then pastoring Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, a community not far from Baltimore.<\/p>\n

The Pastor<\/em> is not the conventional story of a call to ministry or a road-to-Damascus experience. Peterson cites poet Denise Levertov\u2019s phrase \u201cevery step an arrival\u201d as a metaphor for his changing understanding of ministry as new experiences and challenges brought him to new perspectives. \u201cI never knew where I was headed, and at some point I realized it was pastor,\u201d he explained in a recent interview.<\/p>\n

Two constants, however, grounded Peterson\u2019s moral imagination as his understanding of self and vocation developed. One was the Rocky Mountain landscape of western Montana, where he grew up. The other was John of Patmos, author of the New Testament Book of Revelation.<\/p>\n

But it is not John as apocalyptic prophet of the second coming, the end times, or the rapture Peterson identifies with so much as John the exiled pastor to seven congregations \u201cembedded, of all places, in the massive, arrogant, bullying Roman Empire.\u2019\u2019 As he worked part-time in a Presbyterian church in Westchester County, New York, Peterson began to imagine himself in \u201cthat intersecting work and world\u201d of Patmos and White Plains: \u201cIn this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

This understanding of the pastor as exile recalls Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann\u2019s book Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles<\/em>, where Brueggemann writes of the Israelite exile experience as \u201ca loss of the structured, reliable world which gave them meaning and coherence, and they found themselves in a context where their most treasured and trusted symbols of faith were mocked, trivialized and dismissed. Exile is not primarily geographical, but it is social, moral and cultural.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Peterson, too, sets himself against the dominant trends in both church and culture. \u201cThe vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans,\u2019\u2019 he writes early on in a scathing critique of much of what passes for pastoral ministry in contemporary American culture. Indeed, he says, it is that very culture the pastor must navigate and resist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love being an American,\u2019\u2019 Peterson writes. \u201cI love this place in which I have been placed\u2014its language, its history, its energy. But I don\u2019t love \u2018the American way,\u2019 its culture and values. I don\u2019t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed\u2026.The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Peterson takes for the book\u2019s epigraph a sentence from Herman Melville\u2019s Moby Dick<\/em>: \u201cTo insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.\u201d It is, again, Peterson\u2019s response to the business model of pastoral ministry, and he returns to it late in the book in a chapter called \u201cInvisible Six Days a Week,\u201d where he writes about the \u201cunbusy pastor\u201d and necessary idleness. \u201cMelville\u2019s harpooner,\u201d he explains, \u201cfound company in my imagination with Jesus\u2019 metaphors that feature the single, the small, and the quiet\u2014salt, leaven, seed that have effects far in excess of their appearance. Our culture publicizes the opposite: the big, the multitudinous, the noisy. Is it not, then, a strategic necessity that some of us deliberately ally ourselves with the quiet, poised harpooner, and not leap frenzied to the oars?\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Peterson describes his route to becoming a pastor and realizing his vocation as \u201chaphazard.\u2019\u2019 From the first, he says, he believed that being a pastor was what you did when you couldn\u2019t do anything else. But while the journey may have been haphazard, the construction of this memoir is anything but. Loosely chronological and following the contours of his life, from his growing up and schooling to his pastorate and then briefly, near the end of his career, working in academia, the book is essentially anecdotal and episodic. Yet it is carefully structured around a series of marvelously realized short stories that illuminate elements of Peterson\u2019s growth and allow him to reflect on various aspects of congregational ministry and his own deepening understanding of the nature of churches and congregations.<\/p>\n

Peterson has maintained a home or the slopes of the Rocky Mountains since his father bought two acres of land there and began building a cabin overlooking Flathead Lake in 1948 when Peterson was 16. In his descriptions the place becomes \u201csacred space\u2019\u2019 and \u201choly land,\u201d invested with biblical echoes and a theological resonance that make it more than a vacation or retirement home: \u201cBy buying this lakefront property and building a cabin, my father provided me and, as it turned out, many others, with a rooting and grounding, a sense of thisness <\/em>and hereness<\/em>, for the faith that was maturing in me.\u2019\u2019 Peterson argues, in a theme repeated throughout the memoir, that \u201cthe life of faith cannot be lived in general or by abstractions. All the great realities that we can\u2019t touch or see take form on ground that we can <\/em>touch and see.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

It is this very concreteness that brings to life the stories that follow. Peterson\u2019s Pentecostal mother, who preached and sang and told stories \u201cout of scripture and out of life,\u201d and his father, a butcher, provided him with traits and characteristics that formed him as a pastor. Both are wonderfully rendered. \u201cThat butcher shop,\u2019\u2019 Peterson realizes in retrospect, \u201cwas my introduction to the world of the congregation. The people who came into our shop were not just customers. Something else defined them. It always seemed more like a congregation than a store.\u201d Here again, Peterson\u2019s criticism of the church growth movement that turns congregants into consumers and churches into stores, something he considers a \u201cblasphemous desecration\u2019\u2019 of ministry, works its way into his recollections.<\/p>\n

Other mentors\u2014living and dead, literary and not\u2014as well as friends and parishioners are sketched in brief chapters that follow the trajectory of Peterson\u2019s career and the growth of his Maryland congregation, providing him with insights and challenges that enrich his sense of vocation and the nature of the church: \u201cIt had taken me a long time, with considerable help from wise Christians both dead and alive, to come to this understanding of church: 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.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, one of the book\u2019s most important characters is his wife, Jan, who felt \u201ccalled to be a pastor\u2019s wife,\u201d we are told. It seems an unusual calling in this day and age, and Peterson\u2019s generous descriptions of her life\u2014he says she came to regard what she had entered into as \u201choly orders\u201d and \u201ca vowed life of eucharistic hospitality\u201d\u2014make one long to hear her own voice commenting on her sense of vocation and their life together. \u201cFor Jan,\u2019\u2019 Peterson writes, \u201c\u2018pastor\u2019s wife\u2019 was not just being married to a pastor; it was far more vocational than that, a way of life. It meant participation in an intricate web of hospitality, living at the intersection of human need and God\u2019s grace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peterson also writes wisely and poignantly about low times in pastoral ministry, in particular a period of spiritual malaise he calls \u201cthe badlands.\u2019\u2019 He later came to understand it as a time of dormancy that followed, for him as well as his congregation, the emotional rush of first gathering together a worshiping community in the basement of his home and then building its permanent home.<\/p>\n

The all-embracing openness that characterizes Peterson\u2019s thinking is evident in the many sources he cites as influences\u2014Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sixteenth-century Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Scottish minister Alexander Whyte, Baron Friedrich von Hugel. Peterson is widely and deeply read, a Christian humanist who came into the ministry during a time of great ecumenical and interfaith cross-fertilization and receptivity to learning from all kinds of faith streams and currents.<\/p>\n

One odd note in the book is the virtual invisibility of the social turmoil\u2014the struggle for racial justice, the campaign against the war in Vietnam, the movement for women\u2019s equality, the political assassinations and urban riots\u2014that was so much a part of the 1960s and 1970s, when Peterson and his congregation were being formed as pastor and church. It is hard to believe those conflicts, in which American religious life was so significantly implicated, were not more resonant in their lives.<\/p>\n

And Peterson\u2019s admission in the book\u2019s closing \u201cLetter to a Young Pastor,\u201d that after 50 years as a pastor he has \u201calmost no sense of achievement,\u201d sounds a bit disingenuous. It is one thing to be self-effacing and humble, but this claim just doesn\u2019t ring true. Perhaps more convincing is Peterson\u2019s conclusion that being a pastor \u201cmakes for lonely work\u201d in a culture that \u201cdoesn\u2019t quite know what to make of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, The Pastor<\/em> is a profound and important meditation on the pastoral vocation. It is filled with insight and serves as a necessary reaffirmation of the true nature of a calling that in current American religious life seems largely lost.<\/p>\n

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion New Service. He has written previously for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on writers John Updike<\/a>,<\/strong> Marilynne Robinson<\/a>, <\/strong>Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/a>, <\/strong>Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/a>, <\/strong>and Walt Whitman<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

EXCERPT: THE PASTOR<\/h1>\n

\u201cA Community of Storymaking\u201d<\/h2>\n

\"post02d-whatispastor\"<\/p>\n

“What will you miss most about not being a pastor?” <\/p>\n

“The intimacy, being a part of everyone’s story and having them be part of ours. That daily blending of ordinary and salvation life, the conversations that so often develop into prayers. This incredible company of friends following Jesus. Creating forms of worship and hospitality that unobtrusively subvert the secularity and individualism of the culture.”<\/p>\n

I had never thought of it quite that way until I said it. But there it was. Not entirely, of course. But I had grown up in a family of storytellers. I had been a pastor in a community of storymaking. The text I lived by, the Bible, was a long, deep immersion in a way of life that was rendered in story.<\/p>\n

Story is a way of language in which everything and everyone is organically related. Story is a way of language that insists that persons cannot be known by reducing them to what they do, how they perform, the way they look. Story uses a language in which listening has joint billing with speaking. Story is language put to the use of discovering patterns and meanings\u2014beauty and truth and goodness: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the seemingly random and disconnected pieces of experience and dreams, tasks and songs, promises and betrayals that make up daily life, words and sentences detect and reveal and fashion stories in places of hospitality.<\/p>\n

From The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene H. Peterson (HarperOne, 2011) <\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new memoir reaffirms the vocation of pastor in contemporary American culture. 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