Two Competing Visions for The Pastor
As a young pastor, Eugene Peterson’s call to pastoral ministry was clear, but the road from there was anything but. He quickly realized he was in strange territory. Eugene’s supervisor, the NCD leader who’d brought him to Baltimore, handed Eugene an overstuffed red three-ring binder filled with instructions on everything one could possibly think of related to forming a new church. The promise of the binder was seductively simple—whatever problem Eugene might face as a pastor, he need only run his finger down the index and find appropriate instructions: how to organize a committee, how to lay out a church calendar, how to manage a budget, how to implement evangelistic strategies.
Small portions may have been helpful. But Eugene noticed how little God had to do with any of it. He sensed something elemental had shifted—from God, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the living Spirit, to finding out what people wanted. And then giving it to them. “The ink on my ordination papers wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts, so-called, in the field of church that my main task was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery stores, corporations, banks, hospitals, and financial services.” That first year at Christ Our King, Eugene attended a gathering for new church pastors led by a leadership guru who’d written a number of bestselling books on church growth. “The size of your congregation,” the expert explained, “will be determined far more by the size of your parking lot than by any biblical text from which you will speak.” Eugene eventually gathered the stack of books and tossed them in the dump.
“Eugene, though new to the pastorate, felt himself in the center of a great war.”
Eugene felt alarmed. Not only because he sensed in his gut that this approach decentered God, but because so many of these perceived needs were actually destructive, dehumanizing. Even antithetical to the gospel of Jesus.
Eugene, though new to the pastorate, felt himself in the center of a great war. On the one side, the system of the world, invoking ancient sins and deadly temptations disguised in new raiment— advertising—comingled with the intoxication of American security. A soft Christianity using all the right words but missing the profound, revolutionary truth. And on the other, the community of Jesus. Small, slow, honest, stumbling forward. Suffering. Close to the Christ they sought to follow through the desert of modern life.
Nothing could have been more pastorally important than engaging this conflict. As families poured from Baltimore into the suburban comforts of Bel Air, an obsession with safety fueled isolation and a basic, compulsive self-centering. The response to fear or insecurity was not community solidarity or renewed peace-making. It was to hunker—the least Christlike posture possible. The bunkers formed by this mentality were certainly metaphorical, but they sometimes became literal, physical extensions of the quiet fear pandemic. Eugene learned that in response to Sputnik and the panic over a nuclear attack from the USSR, a number of his neighbors had excavated bomb shelters in their backyards.
And yet in response to these real enemies in their midst, the red binder offered only vanity and emptiness. The community did not need a church to craft little programs to assuage their consciences or perceived needs for safety. It needed the church to invite people into a new reality ruled by the kingdom of God. Christ Our King needed to worship. With all this in mind, Eugene saw with a growing sense of both joy and desolation that what was most essential in all his work was the opening invitation he offered each Sunday—Let us worship God.
Those first years with their church literally underground (a bunker of a more hopeful kind) provided time for Eugene and the church to grow into who they were. Christ Our King had little to offer that was attractive or compelling for church shoppers. This unconventional setting allowed them to go deeper than common assumptions of what a church should look like. Instead, they began to focus on who they were. There in the little cinder block catacombs, with just fifty or sixty people gathering weekly, they could learn one another’s stories. They could gradually find themselves caught up together in what God was doing in their corner of the world.
For any of this to be real, Eugene knew he had to get to know the people and their children and their stories. With the same energy he’d given to learning the names of the students he had represented at SPU years before, he dedicated himself to this quiet work. Every week, he wrote three names on a three-by-five-inch card and propped it on his desk. He kept those people in his sights as he prayed and studied that week’s text. It was all very primal.
“I would immerse myself and our church-in-formation in the story of the first church-in-formation. Acts would give us a text for cleansing our perceptions from the blurring and distorting American stereotypes.” Eugene preached forty-six sermons from Acts. Rather than disseminating information, he was trying to enter a larger world—and invite others to enter with him.
“Rather than disseminating information, Eugene was trying to enter a larger world—and invite others to enter with him. ”
But even as God was gathering a congregation, that bloated red notebook whined for his attention. Eugene’s gut told him the system it espoused was a dead end. His gut also told him he’d better get this right, and in quiet hours or moments of frustration, he often questioned if his instincts were correct. After all, what did he know?
Eugene was hung between two competing visions of what it meant to be a pastor. Preaching from Acts, he saw how clearly everything depended on God. But tossing in bed late at night or poring over endless financial forms whose figures made dark prophecies, it felt as though everything depended on him. And he was not sure he was up for the job.
Adapted from A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message © 2021 by Winn Collier. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, on March 23, 2021.
Winn Collier is the author of four books (Restless Faith, Let God: The Transforming Wisdom of François Fénelon, Holy Curiosity, and Love Big, Be Well) and contributed to numerous other volumes. He has written for multiple periodicals including Christianity Today, Christian Century, Relevant, and the Washington Post. A pastor for 25 years, Collier was the founding pastor of All Souls Charlottesville in Virginia. He now directs the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary in Michigan. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, where he focused on the intersection of religion and literary fiction. Collier and his wife, Miska, a spiritual director, live in Holland, Michigan, with their two sons.