The Pastor Quotes

“The vocation of pastor(s) has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I don't want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“William Faulkner was once asked how he went about writing a book. His answer: “It’s like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast.” Like becoming a pastor.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who “gets things done” but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to “what is going on right now” between men and women, with one another and with God—this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful “without ceasing.” I want to give witness to this way of understanding pastor, a way that can’t be measured or counted, and often isn’t even noticed. I didn’t notice for a long time. I would like to provide dignity to this essentially modest and often obscure way of life in the kingdom of God. Along the way, I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life: the pastor’s emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives—these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. No trying to be successful. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops, and comes to birth is unique to each pastor. The only modifier I can think of that might be useful in honoring the ambiguity and mystery involved in the working life of the pastor is “maybe.” Anne Tyler a few years ago wrote a novel with the title Saint Maybe. How about Pastor Maybe? That would serve both as a disclaimer to expertise (that if we could just copy the right model, we would have it down) and a ready reminder of the unavoidable ambiguity involved in this vocation. Pastor Maybe: given the loss of cultural and ecclesiastical consensus on how to live this life, none of us is sure of what we are doing much of the time, only maybe.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong” is the warning posted by H. L. Mencken.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them. A church can never be reduced to a place where goods and services are exchanged. It must never be a place where a person is labeled. It can never be a place where gossip is perpetuated. Before anything else, it is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus’s name. A place where dignity is conferred.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Place gathers stories, relationships, memories. This two acres of sacred landscape in the mountains of Montana has provided the material conditions for preserving a continuity of story in the course of living in eighteen residences located variously in five states and two countries. It has provided a stable location in space and time to give prayerful, meditative, discerning attention to the ways in which my life is being written into the comprehensive salvation story. It is the holy ground from which choke-cherry blossoms scent the spring air and giant ponderosa pines keep sentinel watch in the forest. It opens out on an immense glacier-cut horizon against which the invisibilities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form a believing imagination where the “inside is larger than the outside.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I love this place in which I have been placed—it’s language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love “the American way,” its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed. I don’t love the dehumanizing ways that turn men, women, and children into impersonal roles and causes and statistics. I don’t love the competitive spirit that treats others as rivals and even as enemies. 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. I wanted my life, both my personal and working life, to be shaped by God and the scriptures and prayer.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I didn’t want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn’t want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn’t want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“The classroom was too tidy. I missed the texture of the weather, the smell of cooking, the jostle of shoulders and elbows on a crowded sidewalk. In the congregation, by contrast, everything was going on at once, random, unscheduled, accompanied too much of the time by undisciplined and trivializing small talk. Babies born squalling, people dying neglected, and in between the parenthesis of birth and death, lifetimes of ambiguity: adolescents making an unholy mess of growing up and their parents muddling through as guilty bystanders. Also, of course, heroic holiness, stunningly beautiful prayers, sacrificial love surfacing from the tangled emotions in a difficult family, a song in the night, glimpses of glory, the sullen betrayal of a bored spouse quietly redeemed from years of self-imprisoned self-worship by forgiveness and grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And all of this mixed together. In 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.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Resurrection does not have to do exclusively with what happens after we are buried or cremated. It does have to do with that, but first of all it has to do with the way we live right now. But as Karl Barth, quoting Nietzsche, pithily reminds us: “Only where graves are is there resurrection.” We practice our death by giving up our will to live on our own terms. Only in that relinquishment or renunciation are we able to practice resurrection.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“But without those years in the badlands, I would never have become a pastor, at least not the pastor I’d earlier had a vision of being, a John of Patmos pastor, the pastor I had hoped I might be. Looking back now, I see myself in those prebadlands years as a Labrador puppy, full-grown but uncoordinated, romping and playful but not yet “under authority,” oblivious to its master’s command: “Sit.” The only verbal signal that the puppy was capable of responding to was “Fetch,” which sent him galloping across a field, catching a Frisbee in full flight, and returning it with wagging tail, ready for more. In the badlands I learned to sit.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don’t know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“(from chapter 24, "Heather-scented Theology")

"...I was more than ever what I had been becoming for a long time - a contemplative pastor. In these early years when I was becoming a pastor, I needed a pastor. Some deep and cultivated pastoral instinct in Ian responded: he became my pastor without making me a project, without giving me advice, without smothering me with his concerns... I learned, without being aware that I was learning of the immense freedom that comes in pastoral relationships that are structured by prayer and ritual and let everything else happen more or less spontaneously. The competitiveness didn't exactly leave me, but it developed a root system that didn't depend on artificial stimulants or chemical additives - like 'start another building campaign.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“(from chapter 19, "Willi Ossa")

"...when I did [become a pastor], I knew that it was a vocation, not a job. I told my friends in the Company [of Pastors] the story of Willi...We were honing our observational skills in discerning the difference between vocation and job. As we were seeing pastors left and right abandoning their vocations and taking jobs, we were determined to keep the distinction clear for ourselves. A job is an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated. It is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not. It is pretty easy to tell whether a job is done well or badly.

But a vocation is not a job in that sense. I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do it, dismissed if I don't. But I can't be hired to be a pastor, for my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve tu to the God I serve. As it turns out, the people I serve would often prefer an idol who would do what they want done rather than do what God, revealed in Jesus, wants them to do. In our present culture, the sharp distinction between a job and a vocation is considerably blurred. How do I, as a pastor, prevent myself from thinking of my work as a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by my denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation? How do I stay attentive to and listening to the call that got me started in this way of life - not a call to make the church attractive and useful in the American scene, not a call to help people feel good about themselves and have a good life, not a call to use my considerable gifts and fulfill myself, but a call like Abraham's 'to set out for a place...not knowing where he was going', a call to deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus, a call like Jonah's to go at once to Nineveh, 'a city he detested', a call like Paul's to 'get up and enter the city and you will be told what to do'?

How do I keep the immediacy and authority of God's call in my ears when in entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description? How do I keep the calling, the vocation, of pastor from being drowned out by job descriptions, gussied up in glossy challenges and visions and strategies, clamoring incessantly for my attention?”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Most of us read the story of Jesus as the story of God doing for us what he wills for us: the story of Jesus, the story of God among us, revealing himself to us, calling us, saving us. But the moment Jesus ascends into heaven as told in Acts, the story shifts to church. It is common at this point to let Jesus slip into the background and proceed to understand the story of church as what we are doing for God. Doing for Jesus to be sure, doing in the name of Jesus certainly. But we are in charge. We are now making the decisions. We have Jesus’s commands; we have Jesus’s example. But now it is up to us: we take responsibility for the church. Or we don’t. The American stereotype of church. Salvation is God’s business. It is what God does. And then he turns it over to us. Church is our business. It is what we do. God, having given himself to us in Jesus, now retires to the sidelines and we take over. Occasionally we call a time-out to consult with God. But basically, we are the action. But that is not the way Acts tells the story. I thought that my pastoral task at this point was to do my best to get my congregation to understand scripture, and for right now Acts, as a story.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“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—beauty 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.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ in a country that “knew not Joseph.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“To 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. —Herman Melville”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“The Holy Eucharist is a meal—the body and blood of Jesus, prepared and served to God’s people as they assemble at the Lord’s table. The ultimate act of hospitality, the matrix of all hospitality. Everything and everyone is interconnected in an organic way: birds and fish, soil and air, black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor, male and female; and all the meals we eat at home—breakfast, lunch, supper—are derivative in some deep and powerful sense from the Lord’s Supper.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Only where graves are is there resurrection.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Theologian Karl Rahner was once asked if he believed in miracles. His reply? ‘I live on miracles—I couldn’t make it through a day without them.’ Still another name for it is mystery.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Most of what Jesus said and did took place in a secular workplace in a farmer’s field, in a fishing boat, at a wedding feast, in a cemetery, at a public well asking a woman he didn’t know for a drink of water, on a country hillside that he turned into a huge picnic, in a court room, having supper in homes with acquaintances or friends. In our Gospels, Jesus occasionally shows up in synagogue or temple, but for the most part he spends his time in the workplace. Twenty-seven times in John’s Gospel Jesus is identified as a worker: “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn. 5:17). Work doesn’t take us away from God; it continues the work of God. God comes into view on the first page of our scriptures as a worker. 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.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“In salvation God makes himself personally present to us; in prayer we respond by making ourselves personally present to God.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“To live no tight, neat role is truly sacrificial, it is also truly creative because it leaves us open and free (dare we say) like God himself.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I didn’t know it at the time, but what I absorbed in my subconscious, which eventually surfaced years later, was a developing conviction that the most effective strategy for change, for revolution—at least on the large scale that the kingdom of God involves—comes from a minority working from the margins.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“I don’t want to end up a bureaucrat in the time-management business for God or a librarian cataloguing timeless truths. Salvation is kicking in the womb of creation right now, any time now. Pay attention.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir