eugene peterson interview excerpts… excellent
These are some excerpts from an excellent interview of Eugene Peterson at religion-online.
you can read it here.
from the article…
We’re not a market-driven church, and the ministry is not a market-driven vocation. We’re not selling anything, and we’re not providing goods and services…
If you look at the numbers and money, American churches in some ways are the most successful churches ever. And yet, I think it could be argued, we’re at probably one of the low points because of the silliness and triviality that characterize so much of church life these days.
The only way as a pastor to be discriminating and aware of the deeply ingrained idolatrous nature of human beings is by learning to love a particular group of people in one place over time. They’ve got to know you are on their side even if you don’t give them what they want you to give. They’re not going to know that just from hearing you from the pulpit. You can only convey that to them by being with them, by listening to them, by feeling their pain and suffering, and even by sharing their wrong ideas, but all the time giving witness, whether verbal or silent, to the work of the spirit.
If the gospel is basically relational, if what we know of God through the Trinity means that knowledge of God is fundamentally incarnational, then shouldn’t pastoral life have an incarnational cast to it? Shouldn’t it be intensely relational?
A central challenge of the pastoral life is to take people seriously just the way they are and to look at them, to enter into conversation with them and to see the glory that takes place right there, in that person’s world, the glory of God present in them.