Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity
Eugene H Peterson
Language: English
Pages: 137
ISBN: 0802802656
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Eugene Peterson issues a provocative call for pastors to abandon their preoccupation with image and standing, administration, success, and economic viability, and to return to the three basic acts critical to the pastoral ministry: praying, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction.
human nature - are edited out. Our pastoral ancestors self-consciously set themselves in opposition to this Promethean spirit and understood their work as proceeding from a very different source, from prayer: cultivating a grace-filled relationship with God, not defiantly plotting an ambitious rivalry against him. Because of this different source action, death was viewed differently. There were times, in fact, when pastoral work was defined as preparing people for a good death.4 When the
aggravation. The sensible thing is to ask, "Where do I fit? Where do you need an extra hand? What still needs to be done?" The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God's creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a world we didn't make, into a salvation we didn't earn.
aggravation. The sensible thing is to ask, "Where do I fit? Where do you need an extra hand? What still needs to be done?" The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God's creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a world we didn't make, into a salvation we didn't earn.
than inside it. From across those seas, someone was saying something to them that sounded like the difference between life and death, or at least between being helped and being helpless. They wanted to know as much about it as possible. The strange scrawls gathered power over them and came to mean more to them than all the books and memos and bulletins that kept their island communications system working with such flawless efficiency. But it is the nature of these words to tell us not what is
environment of wreckage provides daily and powerful stimuli to us to want to repair and fix what is wrong; the secular mind makes for a steady, unrelenting pressure to readjust our conviction of what pastoral work is so that we respond to the appalling conditions around us in terms that make sense to those who are appalled. The definition that pastors start out with, given to us in our ordination, is that pastoral work is a ministry of word and sacrament. Word. But in the wreckage all words