[rating:4.5]
(New York: HarperOne Books, 2012.)
336 pgs
Certain few books and authors have become important anchors for my life and ministry. Down through the years, the truths of Experiencing God have anchored my soul like none other aside from the Bible itself.
Eugene Peterson’s latest book The Pastor, has become another one of those anchor books, not so much for the direct teaching that it contains. Rather, the book is powerful because it evokes memories and personal insights as to ways God has used places, people and experiences to shape my own calling.
Peterson just tells his own story about the formative elements that conspired to form his identity as a pastor, and how God used each of those—people, places, and experiences–as a canvas on which to paint his calling. I love also how he describes His own pastoral calling:
I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do, dismissed if I don’t. But I can’t be hired to be a pastor, because my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve, but to the God I serve.
As it turns out, the people that I serve would often prefer an idol who would do what they want done rather than do what God, revealed in Jesus, wants them to do. . . How do I, as a pastor, prevent myself from thinking of my work as a job that I get paid for. . .
How do I stay attentive to listening to the call that got me started in this way of life—not a call to make the church attractive and useful in the American scene, not a call to help people feel good about themselves and have a good life, not a call . . . to fulfill myself.
How do I keep the immediacy and the authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture . . . is giving me a job description? (P. 165)
To understand pastoral calling in this way. A pastor realizes that his primary assignment from God transcends the lesser drudgeries and pleasures that accompany the ‘job’ of a pastor.
An earlier book by Peterson caught my attention years ago–Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. In it the author assailed pastors who, in his words, have gone whoring after other gods, the gods of success and marketing. Instead, Peterson calls pastors to return to their primary calling which is the three-fold ministry of Scripture, Prayer, and Spiritual Direction.
Peterson pulls no punches—in either book. In The Pastor, though, he pulls back the curtains of his own life to reveal how and why those bedrock convictions formed.
For anyone trying to ‘find themselves’ in ministry, or for the seasoned minister who needs to rediscover or refine their sense of calling, The Pastor: A Memoir will be a helpful companion in your journey. The only negative, quite slight, is that he uses occasional flashbacks which may leave some people wondering which period of his life Peterson is referencing in his various stories.
Review by Bob Royall, D.Min., Leadership Coach and Coach Trainer, BMI and pastor of Horizon Baptist Church, Suwanee, GA.