In 1987 Eugene Peterson published a book entitled Working
the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. Two decades later I was entering ordained ministry, and Eugene Peterson had become a household name in mainline Christian, and especially Presbyterian, circles.
This book is a blast from the past, gifted to me from a retired colleague. On my last study week I dove into it.
Peterson describes
the pastor of the late twentieth century as a "shopkeeper"
of the Church, no longer concerned with the things of God but
consumed by the routine tasks of keeping things running. He issues a
strong call for pastors to reclaim their professional vocation as
ministers of the word and sacrament. To do this, he proposes three
basic areas in which pastors must find again their center.
First, he says
that pastors must again become persons of prayer. He takes great
pains to redefine prayer as communication with God rather than a
simple echo of the desires of society and congregants. He finds roots
for a scriptural understanding of prayer in the Psalms, and asserts
that pastors must take their cue for a prayerful life from the
variety and richness found in those poems. (I see in this section prescient echoes of Peterson's work with the psalms which would lift them up as essential to Christian spirituality.)
Second, Peterson
says that pastors must listen to scripture. Once again, he goes to
great length to clarify how reading and studying scripture have
usurped the pastoral calling of listening. He accuses methods of
learning--test-taking, bubble-filling, written examinations--of
poisoning our understanding of how scripture speaks and how we ought
to listen. Peterson touches briefly on a few ways in which some
students of scripture have understood the bible as a document
speaking to and connecting with all of human life. He also asserts
the primacy of the spoken and heard word (as opposed to the written
and read word) in God's way of redemption.
Third, he asserts
that pastors must take seriously both their calling to be spiritual
directors and their mandate to get spiritual directors for
themselves. He recalls a deep and wide history of the Church which
assumed that all pastors would serve in this capacity and would
receive direction from others. He bemoans the (apparently current as of 1987)
belief that pastors are self-sufficient lone rangers tending a
communal flock.
I resonated with
much of Peterson's book. In the worldview of academic publications,
this book is old, published twenty-four years ago; yet his
admonishments are timely to me. I read little which shocked me with
its novelty; instead, I received helpful reminders of things that
friends, colleagues, and teachers have been telling me for some time.
(Maybe this shows that I am the inheritor of a generation of pastors
for whom Peterson's insights were novel breakthroughs.)
I was surprised by
the urgency of his tone at the opening of the book. I was not in
ministry--or even high school--when this book was published; but I
know from listening to the leadership of the Church for the past ten
years or so that the late 1980s may have been a time of reckoning for
the Presbyterian Church, in which Peterson labored for much of his
ministry. The numerical (and financial) decline of the Presbyterian
Church (and especially the PC(USA)) began in the 1970s and continues
today. The 1980s may well have been the time when congregations had
to shed the idea that decline was a temporary phenomenon and required
no attention. Decline also frequently gives birth to twin devils:
hyperactivity and peacekeeping, against both of which Peterson rails
in the early chapters. The disciplines he encourages all require a
level of peace (abstinence from anxiety) which may have been in short
supply in the mainline congregations of the 1980s.
If my guesses are accurate, I'm not sure how
this context affects the applicability
of the book to the present day. I am convinced that one of the
primary roles of a pastor is to be an anxiety-abstinent presence in
places of fear and foreboding--of which there are far too many in the
Church today. There are few better ways to cultivate the Spirit of
Peace than prayer, listening to scripture, and spiritual direction.
Thus, although circumstances may have changed, the call may be the
same.
I would expect
nothing less from a calling derived from scripture, for no matter the
rich variety of behavior to which we are called, it's all rooted in
the same God and Christ. If I had to co-author the 2011 revision of
Peterson's book, I would add a fourth discipline: to proclaim hope.
Prayer is, in a sense, already conformed to this habit; listening to
scripture will engender the need to do so; spiritual direction of
individuals may or may not include it. But I believe proclaiming
hope--the hope of The Resurrection for us and the Church--is an
essential part of pastoral integrity.
~ emrys
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