Notes on *The Contemplative Pastor*

The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction, Eugene Peterson (Eerdmans, 1993)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• The vocation of a pastor is determined by God in Scripture, not the secular-shaped demands of people- and our vocation, biblically, is deeper and slower than you'd think.

Interaction 

• "Psalm 131!" (25)

• "Imperturbable as = "Poised harpooner", "Well-differentiated self", "Men with chests" (CSL), "Trained emotions and stable sentiments by which our minds govern our appetites." (JR). (25)

• "When dealing with secularists. (not talking about Christians here)." (32)

• "Patience for the pastor, perhaps more than anything else, requires him to believe that Jesus is real, that we need Jesus to do his work, that we don't do Jesus's work for him." (49)

• "Let us talk about God like we believe he's real, and the world like he has entranced it with himself "re-mythologize". (79)

• "What local churches say to pastors, truly." (139)

• "Peterson closes with several wonderful poems that celebrate the gospel and various seasons within the church's life." (155)

Table of Contents

Foreword

I. The Naked Noun

II. The Unbusy Pastor

III. The Subversive Pastor

IV. The Apocalyptic Pastor

V. Ministry amid the Traffic

VI. Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art

VII. Praying with Eyes Open

VIII. First Language

IX. Is Growth a Decision?

X. The Ministry of Small Talk

IX. Unwell in a New Way

X. Lashed to the Mast

XIII. Desert and Harvest: A Sabbatical Story

XIV. Poets and Pastors

XV. Poems

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Foreword

I. The Naked Noun

• "if I, even for a moment, accept my culture's definition of me, I am rendered harmless." (16)

• "The essence of being a pastor begs for a redefinition. To that end, I offer three adjectives to clarify that noun: unbusy, subversive, apocalyptic." (16)

II. The Unbusy Pastor

• "How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works id I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?"(17)

• "The word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront. Hilary of Tours diagnosed our pastoral busyness as irreligiosa sollicitudo pro Deo, a blasphemous anxiety to do God's work for him." (17)

• "I (and most pastors, I believe) become busy for two reasons; both are ignoble. 1. I am busy because I am vain. 2. I am busy because I am lazy." (18)

• "But if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don't have time to do my proper work, the work to which I have been called. How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion?" (19)

• "I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time." (20)

• "I need a drenching in Scripture; I require an immersion in biblical studies. I need reflective hours over the pages of Scripture as well as personal struggles with the meaning of Scripture. That takes far more time than it takes to prepare a sermon." (20)

• "I want the people who come to worship in my congregation each Sunday to hear the Word of God preached in such a way that they hear its distinctive note of authority as God's Word, and to know that their own lives are being addressed on their home territory. A sound outline and snappy illustrations don't make that happen.mThis kind of preaching is a creative act that requires quietness and solitude, concentration and intensity. "All speech that moves men." contends R. E. C. Browne, "was minted when some man's mind was poised and still." I can't do that when I'm busy." (21)

• "Pastoral listening requires unhurried leisure, even if it's only for five minutes. Leisure is a quality of spirit, not a quantity of time." (21)

• "The trick, of course, is to get to the calendar before anyone else does. I mark out the times for prayer, for reading, for leisure, for the silence and solitude out of which creative work prayer, preaching, and listening - can issue." (23)

• "The pastor is not, and should not be, exempt from the hundred menial tasks or the administrative humdrum. These also are pastoral ministry. But the only way I have found to accomplish them without resentment and anxiety is to first take care of the priorities. If there is no time to nurture these essentials, become a busy pastor, harassed and anxious, a whining, compulsive Martha instead of a contemplative Mary."(23)

• "To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil." (24)

• "The metaphors Jesus used for the life of ministry are frequently images of the single, the small, and the quiet, which have effects far in excess of their appearance: salt, leaven, seed. Our culture publicizes the opposite emphasis: the big, the multitudinous, the noisy. It is, then, a strategic necessity that pastors deliberately ally themselves with the quiet, poised harpooners, and not leap, frenzied, to the oars. There is far more need that we develop the skills of the harpooner than the muscles of the oarsman. It is far more biblical to learn quietness and attentiveness before God than to be overtaken by what John Oman named the twin perils of ministry, "flurry and worry." For flurry dissipates energy, and worry constipates it!" (25)

III. The Subversive Pastor

• "I am undermining the kingdom of self and establishing the kingdom of God. I am being subversive." (27)

• "Yes, I believe that. I believe that the kingdoms of this world, American and Venezuelan and Chinese, will become the kingdom of our God and Christ, and I believe this new kingdom is already among us. That is why I'm a pastor, to introduce people to the real world and train them to live in it." (28)

• "In general, people treat us with respect, but we are not considered important in any social, cultural, or economic way. In parody we are usually treated as harmless innocents, in satire as shiftless parasites." (29)

• "It's hard to maintain a self-concept as a revolutionary when everyone treats us with the same affability they give the grocer. Are these people right? Is their way of life in no danger from us? Is what we say about God and his ways among us not real in the same way that Chevrolets and basketball teams and fresh garden spinach are real? Many pastors, realizing the opinion polls overwhelmingly repudiate their self-concept, submit to the cultural verdict and slip into the role of chaplain to the culture. It is easy to do. But some pastors do not; they become subversives in the culture." (30)

• "The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden Adams and Eves are willing to pay their respects to God, but they don't want him invading their turf. Most sin, far from being a mere lapse of morals or a weak will, is an energetically and expensively erected defense against God. Direct assault in an openly declared war on the god-self is extraordinarily ineffective. Hitting sin head-on is like hitting a nail with a hammer; it only drives it in deeper. There are occasional exceptions, strategically dictated confrontations, but indirection is the biblically preferred method." (31)

• "Prayer and parable are the stock-in-trade tools of the subversive pastor. The quiet (or noisy) closet life of prayer enters into partnership with the Spirit that strives still with every human heart, a wrestling match in holiness. And parables are the consciousness-altering words that slip past falsifying platitude and invade the human spirit with Christ-truth." (36)

• "Words are the real work of the world - prayer words with God, parable words with men and women. The behind-the-scenes work of creativity by word and sacrament, by parable and prayer, subverts the seduced world. The pastor's real work is what Ivan Illich calls "shadow work" - the work nobody gets paid for and few notice but that makes a world of salvation: meaning and value and purpose, a world of love and hope and faith - in short, the kingdom of God." (37)

IV. The Apocalyptic Pastor

• "With the vastness of the heavenly invasion and the urgency of the faith decision rolling into our consciousness like thunder and lightning, we cannot stand around on Sunday morning filling the time with pretentious small talk on how bad the world is and how wonderful this new stewardship campaign is going to be." (39)

• "Pastors are the persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances, and who therefore must be apocalyptic." (41)

• "Apocalypse is arson- it secretly sets a fire in the imagination that boils the fat out of an obese culture-religion and renders a clear gospel love, a pure gospel hope, a purged gospel faith." (41)

• "How can I keep from settling into the salary and benefits of a checkout clerk in a store for religious consumers How can I avoid a metamorphosis from the holy vocation of pastor into a promising career in religious sales? Here is a way: submit my imagination to St. John's apocalypse the crisis of the End combined with the urgencies of God- and let the energies of the apocalyptic define and shape me as pastor." (41)

• "He is an alert and alive pastor. He reads and assimilates the Scriptures; he reads and feels the impact of the daily news. But neither ancient Scripture nor current event is left the way it arrives on his doorstep; it is all turned into prayer." (42)

• "The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us?" (42)

• "People would rather talk to the pastor than to God. And so it happens that without anyone actually intending it, prayer is pushed to the sidelines. And so pastors, instead of practicing prayer, which brings people into the presence of God, enter into the practice of messiah: we will do the work of God for God, fix people up, tell them what to do, conspire in finding the shortcuts by which the long journey to the Cross can be bypassed since we all have such crowded schedules right now. People love us when we do this." (43)

• "Prayer is the most thoroughly present act we have as humans, and the most energetic: it sockets the immediate past into the immediate future and makes a flexible, living joint of them." (44)

• "People are uncomfortable with mystery (God) and mess (themselves). They avoid both mystery and mess by devising programs and hiring pastors to manage them." (48)

• "Apocalypse convinces us that we are in a desperate situation, and in it together. The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state. All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness." (48)

• "Impatience, the refusal to endure, is to pastoral character what strip mining is to the land - a greedy rape of what can be gotten at the least cost, and then abandonment in search of another place to loot. Something like fidelity comes out of apocalyptic: fidelity to God, to be sure, but also to people, to parish - to place." (49)

• "Apocalypse ushers us into the long and the large. We acquire, with St. John and his congregations, fidelity to place and people, the faithful endurance that is respectful of the complexities of living a moral, spiritual, and liturgical life before the mysteries of God in the mess of history." (49)

V. Ministry amid the Traffic

• "Sundays are important - celebrative and essential. The first day defines and energizes our lives by means of our Lords resurrection and gives a resurrection shape to the week. But the six days between Sundays are just as important, if not so celebrative, for they are the days to which the resurrection shape is given." (54)

VI. Curing Souls: The Forgotten Art

• "Until about a century ago, what pastors did between Sundays was a piece with what they did on Sundays. The context changed: instead of an assembled congregation, the pastor was with one other person or with small gatherings of persons, or alone in study and prayer. The manner changed: instead of proclamation, there was conversation. But the work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity." (57)

• "This is the pastoral work that is historically termed the cure of souls. The primary sense of cura in Latin is "care," with undertones of "cure." The soul is the essence of the human personality. The cure of souls, then, is the Scripture-directed, prayer-shaped care that is devoted to persons singly or in groups, in settings sacred and profane. It is a determination to work at the center, to concentrate on the essential?" (57)

• "The cure of souls, is the essential pastoral work It is not a narrowing of pastoral work to its devotional aspects, but it is a way of life that uses weekday tasks, encounters, and situations as the raw material for teaching prayer, developing faith, and preparing for a good death. Curing souls is a term that filters out what is introduced by a secularizing culture." (59)

• "Pastors who devote themselves to the guidance of souls must do it among people who expect them to run a church." (59)

• "The cure of souls is not indifferent to the realities of human lethargy, naive about congregational recalcitrance, or inattentive to neurotic cussedness. But there is a disciplined, determined conviction that everything (and I mean, precisely, everything) we do is a response to God's first work, his initiating act. We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed!" (61)

• "Running-the-church questions are: What do we do? How can we get things going again? Cure-of-souls questions are: What has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on?" (61)

• "The primary language of the cure of souls, therefore, is conversation and prayer." (63)

• "Life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep In repair by our wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the creation, the cross, grace, God." (64)

VII. Praying with Eyes Open

• "Witness is the key word in all this. It is an important biblical word in frequent contemporary use. It is a modest word saying what is there, honestly testifying to exactly what we see, what we hear. But when we enlist in a cause, it is almost impossible to do it right: we embellish, we fill in the blanks, we varnish the dull passages, we gild the lily just a little to hold the attention of our auditors. Sea lion stuff. Important things are at stake - God, salvation -and we want so much to involve outsiders in these awesome realities that we leave the humble ground of witness and use our words to influence and motivate, to advertise and publicize. Then we are no longer witnesses, but lawyers arguing the case, not always with scrupulous attention to detail. After all, life and death issues are before the jury." (79)

• "Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week, Christ washes the disciples' dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, 'It is all right, believe it or not, to be people." (84)

VIII. First Language

• "That the central and shaping language of the church's life has always been its prayer language." (89)

• "This is my essential educational task: to develop and draw out into articulateness this personal word, to teach people to pray. Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God in faith." (93)

• "But I have determined that the language in which I must be most practiced and for which have a primary responsibility for teaching proficiency in others is Language I, the language of relationship, the language of prayer - to get as much language as possible into the speech of love and response and intimacy." (94)

IX. Is Growth a Decision?

• "Real work always includes a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, but when the work is done well there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand, a cultivation of humility." (100)

• "Real work, whether it involves making babies or poems hamburger or holiness, is not self-expression, but its very opposite. Real workers, skilled workers, practice negative capability the suppression of self so that the work can take place on its own. St. John the Baptist's "I must decrease, but he must increase" is embedded in all good work." (101)

• "I will to not will what I am already good at in order that what is more than me and beyond me, the will of God, can come into existence in my willing work." (102)

• "We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice." (104)

• "At our human and Christian best we are not fascists barking our orders to God and his creatures. At our human and Christian best we are not quietists dumbly submissive before fat At our human and Christian best we pray in the middle voice at the center between active and passive, drawing from them as we have need and occasion but always uniquely and artistically ourselves, creatures adoring God and being graced by him, "participating in the results of the action." (105)

• "Gospel reverence, Christ reverence, spouse reverence is a vigorous (but by no means presumptuous) bold freedom, full of spontaneous energy. This is the contextual atmosphere in which we find ourselves loved and loving before God. We are more than ready to bow down before Christ unafraid that we will be tyrannized, for Christ has already laid down his life for us on the cross, pouring himself out and holding nothing back. Willed passivity." (107)

• "Humble boldness (or, bold humility) enters into a sane, robust willing - free willing - and finds its most expressive and satisfying experience in prayer to Jesus Christ, who wills our salvation." (109)

X. The Ministry of Small Talk

• "Pastoral work, I learned later, is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary. It is the nature of pastoral life to be attentive to, immersed in, and appreciative of the everyday texture of people's lives - the buying and selling, the visiting and meeting, the going and coming." (112)

• "Most of us, most of the time, are engaged in simple. routine tasks, and small talk is the natural language. If pastors belittle it, we belittle what most people are doing most of the time, and the gospel is misrepresented." (115)

• "Pastors especially, since we are frequently involved with large truths and are stewards of great mysteries, need to cultivate conversational humility. Humility means staying close to the ground (humus), to people, to everyday life, to what is happening with all its down-to-earthness." (115)

IX. Unwell in a New Way

• "These two views- the pastor's theological understanding of people and the people's self-understanding - are almost always in tension." (118)

• "So sinner becomes not a weapon in an arsenal of condemnation, but the expectation of grace. Simply to be against sin is a poor basis for pastoral ministry. But to see people as sinners - as rebels against God, missers of the mark, wanderers from the way that establishes a basis for pastoral ministry that can proceed with great joy because it is announcing God's great action in Jesus Christ "for sinners." (120)

• "Pastoral ministry increases in effectiveness as it discerns and discriminates among the forms of sin, and then loves, prays, witnesses, converses, and preaches the details of grace appropriate to each human face that takes shape in the pew." (121)

• "Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God." (124)

X. Lashed to the Mast

• "But professions and crafts are different. In these we have an obligation beyond pleasing somebody; we are pursuing or shaping the very nature of reality, convinced that when we carry out our commitments, we benefit people at a far deeper level than if we simply did what they asked of us." (132)

• "Am I keeping the line clear between what I am committed to and what people are asking of me? Is my primary orientation Gods grace, his mercy, his action in Creation and covenant? And am I committed to it enough that when people ask me to do something that will not lead them into a more mature participation in these realities, I refuse?" (134)

• "There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing - God, kingdom, gospel - we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the the biblical words of command and promise and invitation." (139)

Notable Content

• "I have no interest in "delivering sermons"." (20)

• "The pastor as the 'Poised Harpooner'." (24)

• The Assumptions of Subversives: (34)

  1. One, the status quo is wrong and must be overthrown if the world is going to be livable.

  2. Two, there is another world aborning that is livable. Its reality is no chimera. It is in existence, though not visible. Its character is known. The subversive does not operate out of a utopian dream but out of a conviction of the nature of the real world.

  3. Three, the usual means by which one kingdom is thrown out and another put in its place- military force or democratic elections- are not available. If we have neither a preponderance of power nor a majority of votes, we begin searching for other ways to effect change. We discover the methods of subversion. We find and welcome allies.

• Three Types of Language: (90)

  1. Language I is the language of intimacy and relationship.

  2. Language II is the language of information.

  3. Language III is the language of motivation.