Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness Quotes

“Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ’s lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. Religious feeling runs high but in ways far removed from what was said in Sinai and done on Calvary. While everyone has a hunger for God, deep and insatiable, none us has any great desire for him. What we really want is to be our own gods and to have whatever other gods that are around to help in this work.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Every true gospel vocation is a resurrection vocation that arrives after a passage through the belly of the fish. All “word of God” vocations are thus formed. There can be no authentic vocation that is not shaped by passage through some such interior.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Thomas Merton wrote, “it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not ‘what he ought to be.’ If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether.”50”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Somehow we American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in the terms of American careerism. We quit thinking of the parish as a location for pastoral spirituality and started thinking of it as an opportunity for advancement. Tarshish, not Nineveh, was the destination. The moment we did that, we started thinking wrongly, for the vocation of pastor has to do with living out the implications of the word of God in community, not sailing off into the exotic seas of religion in search of fame and fortune.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“The congregation is the pastor’s place for developing vocational holiness. It goes without saying that it is the place of ministry: we preach the word and administer the sacraments, we give pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue, learn to love, advance in hope — become what we preach.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“The so-called spirituality that was handed to me by those who put me to the task of pastoral work was not adequate. I do not find the emaciated, exhausted spirituality of institutional careerism adequate. I do not find the veneered, cosmetic spirituality of personal charisma adequate.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“There is a long and well-documented tradition of wisdom in the Christian faith that any venture into leadership, whether by laity or clergy, is hazardous. it is necessary that there be leaders, but woe to those who become leaders.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“The pastoral itch to be where “the action is” should be resisted.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“All theology is rooted in geography.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“If vocational holiness is to be anything more than a pious wish, pastors must dive to the ocean depths of prayer.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“The Psalms are the cemetery in which our Lord the Spirit leads us to get us out of ourselves, to rescue our prayers from self-absorption and set us on the way to God-responsiveness.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Living in golden calf country as we do, it is both easy and attractive to become a successful pastor like Aaron.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Every time a pastor abandons one congregation for another out of boredom or anger or restlessness, the pastoral vocation of all of us is vitiated.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Pastoral work consists of modest, daily, assigned work. It is like farm work. Most pastoral work involves routines similar to cleaning out the barn, mucking out the stalls, spreading manure, pulling weeds. This is not, any of it, bad work in itself, but if we expected to ride a glistening black stallion in daily parades and then return to the barn where a lackey grooms our steed for us, we will be severely disappointed and end up being horribly resentful.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Writing is not a literary act but spiritual. And pastoring is not managing a religious business but a spiritual quest.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Pastors enter congregations vocationally in order to embrace the totality of human life in Jesus' name. We are convinced there is no detail, however unpromising, in people's lives in which Christ may not work his will. Pastors agree to stay with the people in their communities week in and week out, year in and year out, to proclaim and guide, encourage and instruct as God work his purposes (gloriously, it will eventually turn out) in the meandering and disturbingly inconstant lives of our congregations.

This necessarily means taking seriously, and in faith, the dull routines, the empty boredom, and the unattractive responsibilities that make up much of most people's lives. It means witnessing to the transcendent in the fog and rain. It means living hopefully among people who from time to time get flickering glimpses of the Glory but then live through stretches, sometimes long ones, of unaccountable grayness. Most pastor work takes place in obscurity: deciphering grace in the shadows, searching out meaning in a difficult text, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life. This is hard work and not conspicuously glamorous.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness