The Pastor by Eugene Peterson

A while ago I started Eugene Peterson's, The Pastor.  I got bored of reading it halfway through, but parts of it were good.  I've entered my favourie parts below.  They're mostly for me personally, but perhaps they'll be of use to you.

In the process of realizing my vocational identity as pastor, I couldn't help observing that there was a great deal of confusion and dissatisfaction all around me with pastoral identity.  Many pastors, disappointed or disillusioned with their congregations, defect after a few years and find more congenial work.  And many congregations, disappointed or disillusioned with their pastors, dismiss them and look for pastors more to their liking.  ... I wondered if at the root of the defection is a cultural assumption that all leaders are people who "get things done," and "make things happen."  ... while being a pastor certainly has some of these components, the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who "gets things done" but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to "what is going on now" between men and women, with one another and with God -- this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful "without ceasing." (p.5)


The way we learn something is more influential than the something that we learn.   No content comes into our lives free-floating: it is always embedded in a form of some kind.  For the basic and integrative realities of God and faith, the forms must also be basic and integrative.  If they are not, the truths themselves will be peripheral and unassimilated.  (p.33)


I am quite sure now that the way I as a pastor came to understand congregation had its beginnings in the "congregational" atmosphere of our butcher shop.  Congregation is composed of people, who, upon entering a church, leave behind what people on the street name or call them.  A church can never be reduced to a place where goods and services are exchanged.  It must never be a place where a person is labeled.  It can never be a place where gossip is perpetuated.  Before anything else, it is a place where a person is named and greeted, whether implicitly or explicitly, in Jesus' name.  A place where dignity is conferred.  (p. 40)


It was a view of life shaped by "the Gospel According to America."  The rewards were obvious, and I enjoyed them.  Hard work pays off.  I learned much in those years in my father's butcher shop, yet there was one large omission that set all other truth dangerously at risk: the omission of holy rest.  The refusal to be silent.  The obsessive avoidance of emptiness. (p. 44) ... Inappropriate, anxiety-driven, fear-driven work [will] only interfere with and distract from what God [is] doing.  My "work" assignment [is] to pay more attention to what God [is doing] than what I [am to] do, and then to find, and guide others to find, the daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get this awareness into our bones.  (p. 45)