Eugene H. Peterson is a Presbyterian minister and the author of The Message, probably the most popular modern-language Bible. In February he published The Pastor: A Memoir which includes these paragraphs, which I find surprisingly moving:
North American culture does not offer congenial conditions in which to live vocationally as a pastor. Men and women who are pastors in America today find that they have entered into a way of life that is in ruins. The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ in a country that “knew not Joseph.”
I love being an American. I love this place in which I have been placed—its language, its history its energy. But I don’t love “the American way,” its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed. I don’t love the dehumanizing ways that turn men, women and children into impersonal roles and causes and statistics. I don’t love the competitive spirit that treats others as rivals and even as enemies. The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from those cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus. I wanted my life, both my personal and working life, to be shaped by God and the scriptures and prayer.
If you click on this YouTube interview, you'll hear him say, "Impatience is the besetting sin of pastors." What a challenge to me as an interim pastor! I want to help the church move expeditiously toward the calling of the next pastor. I find myself "pushing the river," and picking up the stress of our culture. I wish I had the patience to be more trusting of the interim process, and God's timing.
--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor
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