155 of 161 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Non-Review, February 22, 2011
This review is from: The Pastor: A Memoir (Hardcover)
"...I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life:the pastor's emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives - these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. No trying to be successful. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops and comes to birth is unique to each pastor." - Peterson
Hand-cuffed. I don't even know how to write a review of this book. A review is what you write when it isn't personal. A review is what you do for books. The Pastor is far more than a book. You need to understand that Eugene Peterson saved my vocational soul just over a year ago. And since that time I have been pointing people - especially pastors - to his books. Especially young pastors. So how about a non-review?
Maybe the evangelical world has been a circus for a long time. But I didn't notice. I didn't notice all the center rings, high-trapeze acts and dancing bears. And the unspeakable horror of then realizing you not only paid for a ticket but got paid to take part. You walk out of the arena with sticky soles under you, past the sideshows and into clean air but you have no idea if you should go back in. Who will help you now? Is the insanity the only choice? Is there a voice of sanity in this wilderness?
I remember lying in my bed. The weight of being a pastor was on me and I wanted it off. I knew I needed some help. Maybe circus is the wrong way to describe what is happening in America. For I was surrounded...hemmed in by managers and CEOs, shopkeepers and PR men and women. Marketing analysts and door-to-door salesman of religious goods were everywhere. But I needed a pastor. Lying there, I would've said, "I need a wise old sage." The need was for sanity...Spirit-given sobriety in a religious subculture drunk on the cause célèbre. I needed gray hairs, wrinkles and the experience of someone outside the world I had found myself in. The need was not for all the right answers but good questions. I needed the wisdom of 'a long obedience in the same direction.'
And then, like gifts, memories. Memories of a professor assigning one of Peterson's books for pastors - which I never really `read.' A friend - a fellow pastor - recommending another. And a frozen scene of someone else reading one, the title of which burned in my memory.
So I began reading his books, swallowing them whole sometimes and sipping from them at others. For all of last year. Each was a well-written refuge from the chaos. Every thesis leaving its mark.
Again, sanity.
So when I found out he was releasing his memoirs, I was elated. Do you remember when you were a kid and you kept going back to the same page in the toy section of the Sears Wish Book over and over, reading the description, looking at that toy, the one you wanted more than any other. That is how it was with the description page for The Pastor. And then I got my copy from the publisher. It was late in the afternoon. Too late to start, I waited till the morning. A few days later I was finished. My wife asked me if I was sad. "No, I will begin again tomorrow morning."
Reading a memoir of Eugene Peterson is as reading in another world. A world bereft of 'how' but full to bursting of 'what.' A world without pretension, devoid of formulas. A tome of sober reflection. No romantic vistas of pastoral success. No cheerleading.
Peterson's vision of the pastorate, as dictated by the scriptures, stands athwart the ideal American pastor. Patience over results. The ordinary over the celebrated. People over programs. Dignity over function. Leisurely spiritual direction over ministerial busyness. Prayer over a PR campaign. The even-keeled over the events. It really would be impossible to document how differently he thinks than the current zeitgeist on the definition of pastoral integrity.
Almost everyone knows him as the author of The Message. For this he is loved and hated. But Peterson was a church-planter before it was cool to be so. He was thinking and living through methodology and theology and those inevitable emotionally lean years long before most of today's church planters were born. He was thinking about the dangers of a consumer driven religious atmosphere raising the banner of relevance before we had a category for such.
Don't get me wrong. This is a cheerful book. It's just not full of the saccharine sentimentality or the gritty (edgy?) cynicism we have come to expect from so many famous ministry leaders. Smiles stretch across the pages. Contented belief pervades every chapter. Bound together by the common thread of the work of Christ for sinners - the message once delivered for all the saints sits fixed like an anchor between the covers.
Chronology holds no sway over Peterson's account of his life as a pastor. Poetry does. He moves like a poet through his experiences and insights. His love of words and their sanctity - not just utility - is witnessed in how every word counts. He has no interest in just relating stories for us to learn from. He, as the Pastor, is glorying in them as memories enlivened through words.
But there is a lot to learn.
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40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Unusual Work of Wisdom from a Pastor to Pastors!, February 27, 2011
This review is from: The Pastor: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Over the years I have benefited immeasurably by the writings of Eugene Peterson. I think just about any dedicated Christian can pick up just about any work by Eugene Peterson and spiritually benefit from it. But this is especially true of pastors, of whom I am one.
Eugene Peterson understands pastors like no one else! The truth is that God has exalted the role of pastor, and yet men continue to demean it, undermine it, or ignore it. Peterson's "The Pastor: A Memoir" is therefore a very welcome work to a man who has become a pastor to pastors. In this work, Peterson hopes to restore the dignity of the role of the pastor. I highly recommend it to all who are called to serve in God's Church, and especially to those who may have lost their way or feel inadequate to the great vocation to which God has called you. It will bring rest to all who are weary and heavy laden.
But Peterson goes about his task in an unusual and refreshing way. What is perhaps most striking about Peterson's work is something suggested by the titles of his chapters. What you don't find is a list of theological themes or pastorals roles but what looks like experiences from Peterson's life. This is because "The Pastor" is the story of the formation of Eugene Peterson as a pastor. Telling his stories is his way of teaching us how to be pastors, for, as he says, there is no one blueprint for how to become and be a pastor. "The Pastor" is a wonderful look at the formation of one pastor, Peterson, told through the stories and experiences by which God formed him as a pastor. Peterson's story, while unique, is also therefore the story of every pastor. There is such a depth of personal wisdom made meaningful to all that "The Pastor" teaches in a way that few other books do.
Another gift that Peterson gives us, in addition to his stories, is an incarnational point of view. The reason why he names his first section "Topos and Kairos" is that the work of the pastor is not an abstract work but is always a call to a specific place (topos) and time (kairos). This is also why Peterson must imbed his advice on how to be a pastor in the real-life stories of his experience as a pastor. In this, we might say that he's following the lead of his Master, Jesus Christ, who presented his theology in terms of the real places, times, and things of the people whose lives He shepherded. Montana will always have a special place in Peterson's life, just as the places of the Bible where God met man became sacred places. We all have such places in our lives, and I regret that in my own life I have too often dedicated myself to the "spiritual" tasks at hand and haven't always appreciated the importance of the precise place and time where God has placed me.
As Peterson recounts the way his mother used to sing and tell Bible stories with a musical incantation, we realize that it's no wonder that Peterson writes with the ear of a poet and has the sense of a master storyteller. I think Peterson is trying to tell us that among everything else a pastor must be he should have a poetic spirit and be a storyteller. Interestingly enough, Peterson also relates that "I had learned much in my father's butcher shop that gave bone and muscle to my pastoral identity." One thing he learned for sure was some of the deeper meanings of the Levitical sacrifices of the Old Testament! From his father's hard work, Peterson also learned the liturgical rhythm of life that served him so well as a pastor.
From these humble beginnings, Peterson shares with us, step by step and story by story, how God led him to be a pastor, including the astounding revelation that to be a pastor meant that you have a congregation. This, in turn, led to the further revelation that not everyone who comes to a church comes for the best or most zealous of reasons! In Chapter 16, Peterson makes explicit what he's already been telling us all along: that a large part of Christianity is getting caught up in the story of Jesus Christ. Stories, Peterson tells us, are unpredictable, and so we get caught up in them. When the gospel is told as a story, we are, Peterson discovered, encouraged to see our own life and church in terms of God's story as well.
I find it interesting as well that Peterson found both his pastoral and authorial identity in John of Patmos, the disciple whom Jesus loved. In this way, Peterson also imaginatively envisions both his life as a pastor and the life of any pastor who is looking for a new and better vision of his sacred ministry.
Peterson closes his meditation on being a pastor with a letter to a young pastor. Like the entirety of the book, it's not at all what you might expect it to be. There's no encouragement that the young pastor is someone special or unique, only that his calling is unique. Instead, Peterson directly states that to be a pastor is to be someone who makes more professional mistakes than other professionals and to be someone who doesn't always have it all together. But that's OK because in the end the life of the pastor (as the life of any Christian) is to be one that is based on a complete trust on God and not oneself.
If you're looking for a different kind of book on pastors and pastoring that just might help you to see what God has been asking you to see for a long time - this just may be the book for you!
Here's an outline of "The Pastor":
I. Topos and Kairos
1. Montana: Sacred Ground and Stories
2. New York: Pastor John of Patmos
II. Intently Haphazard
3. My Mother's Songs and Stories
4. My Father's Butcher Shop
5. Garrison Johns
6. The Treeless Christmas of 1939
7. Uncle Sven
8. The Carnegie
9. Cousin Abraham
10. Mennonite Punch
11. Holy Land
12. Augustine Njokuobi and Elijah Odajara
13. Seminary
14. Jan
III. Shekinah
15. Ziklag
16. Catacombs Presbyterian Church
17. Tuesdays
18. Companies of Pastors
19. Willi Ossa
20. Bezalel
21. Eucharistic Hospitality
22. Appreciation and Tomfoolery
23. Pilgrimage
24. Heather-Scented Theology
25. Presbycostal
26. Emmaus Walks
27. Sister Genivieve
28. Eric Liddell
29. "Write in a Book What You See . . . "
30. My Ten Secretaries
31. Wayne and Claudia
32. Jackson
33. The Atheist and the Nun
34. Judith
35. Invisible Six Days a Week, Incomprehensible Seventh
IV. Good Deaths
36. The Next One
37. Wind Words
38. Fyodor
39. The Photograph
40. Death in the Desert
Afterword: Letter to a Young Pastor
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