When Martin Luther made the priesthood of believers one of the foundation stones in his work of reforming the church, he didn’t, as many other reformers have tried to do, intend to eliminate priesthood as such. He was democratizing a priesthood that had been debased into a religious bureaucracy. He was designating every one of us to responsibilities of being priests to one another: guiding, praying for, encouraging – but not taking over, not interfering. Stubborn and rampant consumerist individualism – everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost – is alien to the Christian life. We need our brothers and sisters; our brothers and sisters need us, and they need us as men and women of God. That is the context in which Peter told his congregation that they were a “holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5,9). Jesus is our high priest. Jesus makes the sacrifice that establishes our intimate relationship with God but also in community with relationships with one another. No merely human priest is permitted to interfere with that intimacy (the magisterial letter to the Hebrews makes that clear). But neither are we permitted to assume that we can go it alone in the way of Jesus. Eugene Peterson ☀
The American church runs on the euphoria and adrenaline of new birth — getting people into the church, into the kingdom, into causes, into crusades, into programs. We turn matters of growing up over to Sunday school teachers, specialists in Christian education, committees to revise curricula, retreat centers, and deeper life conferences, farming it out to parachurch groups for remedial assistance. I don’t find pastors and professors for the most part, very interested in matters of formation in holiness. They have higher profile things to tend to. Eugene Peterson ☀
What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except in the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this nave criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it. Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism. Eugene Peterson ☀
The great weakness of North American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting in on the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. And the more there is of us, the less there is of God. Eugene Peterson ☀
The operating biblical metaphor regarding worship is sacrifice. We bring ourselves to the altar and let God do to us what God will. We bring ourselves to the eucharistic table, entering into that grand fourfold shape of the liturgy that shapes us: taking, blessing, breaking, giving—the life of Jesus taken and blessed, broken and distributed; and that eucharistic life now shapes our lives as we give ourselves, Christ in us, to be taken, blessed, broken and distributed in lives of witness and service, justice and healing. But this is not the American way. The major American innovation in the congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise. Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting and requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn’t even know we had. We are insatiable. It didn’t take long for some of our colleagues to develop consumer congregations. If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our churches is to identify what they want and offer it to them. Satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel into consumer terms—entertainment, satisfaction, excitement and adventure, problem-solving, whatever. We are the world’s champion consumers, so why shouldn’t we have state-of-the-art consumer churches? Eugene Peterson ☀
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