I remember reading the following, from Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, somewhere before, a few years ago. When I saw that John Barach had posted it, I copied and pasted it here because it is characteristic of Peterson's incisiveness and wisdom, and his ability to systematically expose the rampant consumerism at work in American evangelicalism. Here he laments the way the pastorate has become just another tool used to satisfy the wants of the consumers in the pew.

For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) [7-8]

Pastoral ministry is not about giving people what they want. Instead, it is about giving people what they need. While at first we may, with Peterson, laugh a little about this, we too must come to the point where we are not laughing about this anymore. When it is all said and done, this is not just a matter of wants versus needs, or likes versus dislikes. The reality is that this a matter of life and death.

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A couple of years ago, I wrote a number of posts trying to work through how to understand and practice the Sabbath. Too often, I think, we look at the Sabbath through one of two lenses: the first has us thinking about what we are not supposed to do on the Sabbath, and the second has us saying that as long as we go to church, the rest of the day is free for us to do whatever we want.

My point is simply that in thinking about the Sabbath this way, we are making it about us actively doing something, and so we have missed the point of the Sabbath altogether. Yesterday morning I was reading Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, and came to a part where Eugene Peterson talks about the need for a Sabbath:

If there is no Sabbath—no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking—we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God's work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives.We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection. We lose the capacity to sing 'This is my Father's world' and end up chirping little self-centered ditties about what we are doing and feeling.

This is a most difficult command to keep, a most difficult practice to cultivate. It is one of the most abused and distorted practices of the Christian life. Many through the centuries have suffered much under oppressive Sabbath regimens. And more than a few of us have been among the oppressors. It is difficult to assemble a congregation of Christians today that does not number in its company both oppressed and oppressors. John gives us accounts of two of Jesus' Sabbath healings (chapters 5 and 9) that serve as serious warnings against glib or legalistic or oppressive Sabbath practices. Jesus spent a good deal of his time at odds with people who had wrong ideas about keeping Sabbath. (See also Mark 3:1-6; 3:23-30; Luke 14:1-6). And one contributing cause of their wrong ideas was that they had severed the connection between Sabbath and work.

But I don't see any way out of it: if we are going to live appropriately in the creation we must keep the Sabbath. We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing. We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying. All our ancestors agree that without silence and stillness there is no spirituality, no God-attentive, God-responsive life.

For Peterson, then, the Sabbath is not about keeping a set of rules, but resting in order to take the focus off of ourselves and look to God. We rest from our toils in order both to imitate God's rest from his creative work, and as a means of remembering the rest we find in redemption.

More to come on this. Maybe.

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One of Eugene Peterson's concerns in his book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, is to get us to see that creation is sacred—all of creation. It is easy for us to look at the grandeur and beauty of the mountains or to bask in the warmth of the spring sun and recognize the beauty of creation. Yet, when we find ourselves looking at the pinnacle of God's creation, humanity, that is not often the case."There is a great deal of so-called creation  appreciation, or 'love of nature,'" Peterson writes, "that prefers to look the other way when men and women appear on the scene." But, he argues, Genesis 2 won't allow us to do that because of how integral humanity is to creation.

Peterson tells this story to make his point:

Several years ago one of my students who lived a distance away and rode a crowded bus to the college each day said to his wife as he went out the door one morning, 'I'm just going to go out and immerse myself in God's creation today.' The next day his parting words were the same. On the third day, she called him back, 'Don't you think you ought to go to class today? A couple of days walking in the woods or on the beach is okay, but don't you think enough is enough?'

He said, 'Oh, I've been going to class every day.'

'Then what,' she said, 'is all this business about immersing yourself in creation?'

'Well, I spend forty minutes on the bus each morning and afternoon. Can you think of a setting more thick with creation than that—all these people created, created in the image of God, created male and female?'

'I never thought of that,' she said.

'You mean you've never read Genesis?'

As big of a challenge as it is, we need to learn to see the beauty in the broken. "I'm not suggesting it is easy," Peterson concludes, "...I'm only insisting that it is necessary" (82-83).

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As I mentioned in the previous post, Eugene Peterson is coming to speak at RTS this week. A good friend of mine is picking him up from the airport tomorrow morning, and Peterson will be delivering two lectures tomorrow and then another two on Thursday. It promises to be very good. The overarching theme for his lectures is that prayer must be at the very root of the Church's life, and he will be taking us through Ephesians to explore that.

Peterson has a five-book series on what he calls spiritual theology, and when I came across the term the other day I was not quite sure what he meant by it. But it did not take long to find a definition—within the first few pages of the introduction to the first book in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Peterson writes this:

Spiritual theology is the attention we give to lived theology—prayed and lived, for if it is not prayed sooner or later it will not be lived from the inside out and in continuity with the Lord of life. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to living what we know and believe about God. It is the thoughtful and obedient cultivation of life as worship on our knees before God the Father, of life as sacrifice on our feet following God the Son, and of life as love embracing and being embraced by the community of God the Spirit.

Spiritual theology is not one more area of theology that takes its place on the shelf alongside the academic disciplines of systematic, biblical, practical, and historical theology; rather, it represents the conviction that all theology, no exceptions, has to do with the living God who creates us as living creatures to live to his glory. It is the development of awareness and discernments that are as alert and responsive in the workplace as in the sanctuary, as active while changing diapers in a nursery as while meditating in a grove of aspens, as necessary when reading a newspaper editorial as when exegeting a sentence written in Hebrew.

Some may want to simplify things by keeping the spiritual and throwing out the theology. Others will be content to continue with the theology as usual and forget the spiritual. But the fact is that we live only because God lives and that we live well only in continuity with the way God makes, saves, and blesses us. Spirituality begins in theology (the revelation and understanding of God) and is guided by it. And theology is never truly itself apart from being expressed in the bodies of men and women to whom God gives life and whom God then intends to live a full salvation life (spirituality).

The former president of RTS Orlando, Frank James, once said to our church history class, "Doctrine means nothing if it is not followed by doxology." The point, of course, is that there cannot be a disconnect between what we believe and how we live, something Peterson would wholeheartedly affirm. In the end, then, we are talking about nothing less than recognizing the Lordship of Christ over all of life. Our beliefs and convictions, insofar as they are faithful to God's revelation, are to bring about holistic transformation of our hearts and minds such that we begin to live in a manner that reflects a complete devotion and allegiance to our sovereign God.

If that is what spiritual theology is all about, count me in.

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Eugene Peterson will be here at RTS next week for the annual Kistemaker Lectures. I don't know too much about Peterson, aside from having read an article or two by him in the past, but I'm looking forward to hearing him. He has a reputation for possessing a great deal of wisdom in regards to pastoral concerns and various issues that arise in ministry.

Part of the reason I'm looking forward to the lectures is because of Peterson's commitment to Christian formation and discipleship (his title while at Regent was Professor of Spiritual Theology), and his recognition that the church is to be intimately involved in the lives of believers. The American church, both historically and presently, has demonstrated a great interest in saving souls and seeing people converted, but has not often invested in their lives as they subsequently learn what it looks like to have a life transformed by the gospel. Peterson addresses this in the introduction (and presumably the rest of the chapters) of his latest book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing up in Christ:

We cannot overemphasize bringing men and women to new birth in Christ. Evangelism is essential, critically essential. But is it not obvious that growth in Christ is equally essential? Yet the American church has not treated it with an equivalent urgency. 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 and holiness. The have higher profile things to tend to.

Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place, quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The American church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically, in the name of 'relevance,' it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture; talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.

Meanwhile, what has in previous centuries and other cultures been a major preoccupation of the Christian community, becoming men and women who live to 'the praise of God's glory,' has become a mere footnote within a church that has taken on the agenda of the secular society—its educational goals, its activity goals, its psychological goals. By delegating character formation, the life of prayer, the beauty of holiness—growing up in Christ—to specialized ministries or groups, we remove it from the center of the church's life. We disconnect growth from birth, and, in effect, place it on a bench at the margins of the church's life. Wendell Berry, one of our most perceptive prophets of contemporary culture and spirituality, wrote, 'We think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education"—and not one dime or a thought on character.'

It takes a serious amount of effort to invest that much in someone's life, but Peterson obviously stands as an advocate for the essentiality of this fully-involved discipleship. And the Bible, of course, is replete with examples of this—one only need look to the three years Jesus spent in forming his disciples.

If we truly believe that all of life is to be lived under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, we as the Church need to ensure that we become fully invested in each other's lives as we learn together what that looks like.

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