Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone wants shortcuts. They want help to fill out the form that will get them instant credit (in eternity). They are impatient for results. They have adopted the lifestyle of a tourist and only want the high points. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Growth, or discipleship, is more like cooking with a crock pot, instead of a microwave. It can be slow, long, and difficult, but is always the best way. Eugene Peterson ☀
A friend told me that Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plantshould be required reading for every pastor who has served for at least five years. That was how long it had been since my ordination. I picked up a copy.
Peterson claims that there are two common types of unhealthy clergy. The first is the messiah. Messiahs seek out wounded, broken people, to make them healthy again. It is a noble task, except for its motivation: messiahs need to feel needed. They consider healed people to be numbers, accumulated to suggest pastoral effectiveness.
Then there are managers, who seek not the unhealthy but the healthy: talented, faithful, and prepared people. Managers plug them in, finding the right places for them to serve in an ever-expanding congregational machine. The bigger the church gets, the better managers feel effective and useful. Once again, people become numbers.
I have both messianic and managerial tendencies. It is too easy for congregants to become statistics, which I can use to inflate my sense of clergy effectiveness.
That realization prompted me to search for a new pastoral identity, one that treated people more personally. I found one at the Louvre.
Rather than being my church’s messiah or your manager, I see myself as its docent- a tour guide in a museum or art gallery. Clergy showcase to the world the architecture and artistry of the Christian faith. We are tour guides, leading people from one gallery to another, shifting their attention from one work of God to the next. At times, we offer language to describe the unutterable: magnificence, awe, anguish. We are wordsmiths for life’s most muted moments.
Priests are at their best when we don’t notice them. The moment we begin to notice, we become wary. When he or she, whether laity of clergy, pretends to do God’s work for us, an alarm sounds. There have been thousands upon thousands of good priests whose names we will never know; their anonymity suggests their authenticity. Eugene Peterson ☀
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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