Eugene Peterson on pastoral ministry

Many people think there’s a crisis in ministry today -- a crisis of morality or of morale. How do you see it?

My sense is that many people take on the role of pastor without ever learning it from the inside out. As I said, I do think for those who are called to it the pastoral life is really a good life. Not an easy life, but one full of resonances with everything else that’s going on in creation and in history.

I get the sense these days that many of my colleagues have external rewards in view. How do I become a good leader? How do I get published? How do I do this? How do I do that? Those are questions that are beside the point.

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 a pastor is not discerning and discriminating about the claims of his or her vocation and about the claims of a congregation, then the demands or the desires of the congregation can dominate what he or she is doing -- and that creates the conditions for nonpastoral work.

And then you can lose your morals and your morale, because you’re not working at anything that has any biblical order to it. One’s experience lacks, if I could use a fancy word, any trinitarian inclusiveness or integration.

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. This is one of the reasons I think pastoral work is best handled in a fairly small setting.

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