Pastoral Work

Engagements with the Vision of Eugene Peterson

Byassee, Owens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871208
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Eugene Peterson may be the most influential theological writer in the church today. Yet because most of his career has not been in academia there is not much critical engagement with his work. Here some of the finest scholar-pastors we have describe the way Peterson has inspired and infuriated on the way to (hopefully) more faithful pastorates.

part one

Words

The Pastor and the Art of Arts

Stephanie Paulsell

In his great sixth-century treatise on the work of pastoral ministry, Gregory the Great described that work as “the art of arts,” a phrase he borrowed from the fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nazianzus. Because human beings are “diverse and manifold [in] character,” as Gregory of Nazianzus put it, and full of hidden wounds, as Gregory the Great put it, the pastor must be able to marshal all possible resources to minister to them.1 The kind of pastoral care offered to one person will not reach another; one size does not fit all. In order to respond to the complex diversity of human experience, pastors need, not a blueprint to follow in each pastoral situation, but a stance towards life that is prayerful, improvisational, steeped in Scripture, and psychologically astute.

In his many books on pastoral ministry, Eugene Peterson has reiterated the wisdom of the two Gregories, although it is the theologian Baron Friedrich von Hügel whom he credits with teaching him, during his early days as a pastor, that “every soul is unique and cannot be understood or encouraged or directed by general advice or through a superficial diagnosis using psychological categories.”2 Von Hügel confirmed what Peterson was learning as the pastor of a congregation: that clichés cannot draw us into life with God and others; that language possesses “sacred qualities”3 that reflect its source in the Word; that pastoral ministry requires prayerful attention to the local, the particular, the invisible. In his recent memoir, The Pastor, Peterson tells a story about what ministry can look like when these lessons have not been learned. He describes enduring a few minutes of condolence from a pastor in the form of “preacher clichés” after the death of his mother. “Oh Karen,” he says to his daughter after the man leaves, “I hope I have never done that to anyone.”4

“The art of arts” seems an apt description of Eugene Peterson’s approach to pastoral ministry, not only because he shares the vision of the complexity of pastoral work offered by the two Gregories, but also because Peterson’s vision of ministry has been profoundly and thoroughgoingly shaped both by his long love affair with words and stories and by the theory and practice of art. In the brief, six-page introduction to The Pastor, Peterson grounds his understanding of pastoral ministry in the words of one poet and two novelists. In Denise Levertov’s account of her poetic vocation in the phrase “every step an arrival,” Peterson recognizes the incremental unfolding of his own vocation. In the title of Anne Tyler’s novel, Saint Maybe, he finds a truthful gesture towards the “unavoidable ambiguity” of pastoral work. He sums up the introduction with William Faulkner’s description of how to write a book: “It’s like building a chicken coop in a high wind. You grab any board or shingle flying by or loose on the ground and nail it down fast.” Peterson adds: “Like becoming a pastor.”5

As these references suggest, literary artists provide a crucial source for Peterson’s vocational understanding. His own vocation is “pastor and writer, a single coherent identity,”6 and it is writers to whom he most often turns when he needs words to describe the pastoral vocation: Keats, Shakespeare, Kant, Dickens, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Muir, Dickinson, Melville, Hawthorne, Nietzsche. The way Peterson writes—“to explore and discover what I didn’t know”7—is also a way of praying, preaching, worshiping, pastoring. It is a stance towards life and ministry that refuses to foreclose on the possibility of transformation, no matter how unexpected or unlooked for.

Writers are not the only artists from whom Peterson draws insight into the pastoral vocation. Cultivating friendships with artists of all kinds during his seminary years in New York City, he learns how to live creatively within a culture that does not recognize or value one’s work by watching these artists, unheralded by the world around them, persist in theirs. From jazz musicians, he comes to think of his weekday ministry as “salvation melodies and creation riffs” on “the larger rhythms set down in Lord’s Day worship.”8 He looks to the vocational reflections of “writers and musicians and painters, weavers and potters and sculptors”9 to support his own spiritual formation. It is no surprise, then, that some of the most beautiful writing and profound theological reflection in The Pastor appears in his account of his collaboration with an artist, the architect who helped Peterson’s congregation decide on a plan for a new church building. Peterson calls the architect “Bezalel” after the craftsman who designed and created the tent of meeting and the ark of the covenant in Exodus, the artist who found a shape for the freedom into which Moses led God’s people. Peterson is plainly fascinated by the way the architect is able to create a space for the congregation to be present to the invisible presence of God. “Artists do that,” he marvels, “use material and sound, color and form to see the invisible, listen to the silence, touch the interior.”10 Artists use their art to help a congregation practice their art: the art of worship.

The intellectual and spiritual excitement that Peterson experiences through his deep engagement with the artist who would design a sanctuary for the church Peterson had planted and grown from nothing is contagious, both for us as readers and for the members of the congregation of Christ Our King Prebysterian Church. At the end of the chapter on Bezalel, Peterson describes coming upon three college students on the first Easter Sunday in the new sanctuary. They are deep into a conversation about the possible meanings held in the new space. “Pastor,” a young woman named Wanda says, “we think we might be on to something. That empty tomb—could that be an echo of the empty mercy seat of the ark?”11 Having had their biblical imaginations nurtured through their pastor’s preaching, teaching, and pastoral care, these students could move among Exodus, the Gospels, the architecture of their church, and the story of their lives together to generate more and more meaning, more and more ways to see their own story among the layers of biblical stories. Working with Bezalel was clearly a high point in Peterson’s ministry, for him and for those in his care. It is a high point in his book as well, full of the evocative and theologically rich language and insight that Peterson’s readers cherish in his work.

Art is such a fruitful source for Peterson because, at its core, his pastoral work is language-work: “my artistic medium,” he writes, “was words, written and prayed and preached.” The Pastor is, in large part, about his search for language that can honor the irreducible complexity and ambiguity of human beings and the holiness of being alive. It is not enough for him, though, that language describe these things accurately. There is very specific work that he wants his language to do: to draw those with whom he ministers into God’s narrative, to help them see their story within God’s story. “True language has to do with communion,” he insists, “establishing a relationship that makes for life.”12 True language for Peterson is participatory, the means by which we knit ourselves into relationship with others, the means by which we become a community.

How does language fulfill the high hopes Peterson has for it? Through story. As a teenager, Peterson hoped to become a novelist, and it was his early experiments with plot, he believes, that nurtured in him “a pastoral imagination adequate for entering into the complexities of good and evil, sin and salvation.”13 Peterson knows that the best stories unfold in unpredictable ways and leave room for many possible developments. Congregational life that is rooted in the language of story, then, opens space for change and growth and for a deepening of our relationship with God and one another that cannot be known in advance.

Story is a way of language in which everything and everyone is organically related. Story is a way of language that insists that persons cannot be known by reducing them to what they do, how they perform, the way they look. Story uses a language in which listening has joint billing with speaking. Story is language put to the use of discovering patterns and meanings—beauty and truth and goodness: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.14

This vision of story as a way of shaping our life together as Christians will be familiar to anyone who has read any of Peterson’s books. Looking back on beloved volumes like Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Under the Unpredictable Plant, and The Contemplative Pastor, however, it is interesting to note how few stories from his pastoral ministry appear in them. He does tell some stories from his years as pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, but they are always briefly told, wholly embedded in the stories of scripture, and often held up to the light ...

Table of contents

• Pastoral Work
• Introduction
• Part 1: Words
• Part 2: Institutions
• Part 3: People
• Part 4: Life
• Bibliography
• Contributors