Our family came to the United States in 1976, with every intention of returning to England, and the Church of England specifically, three years later. This was to be our big adventure before our daughters reached school age; we were never quite sure why the Lord brought us here. The breadth of American Christianity was certainly new.
Three years in New England were followed by upstate New York, a difficult parish in an awkward diocese. Around this time Christianity Today launched a journal for pastors called Leadership. Attractively presented and relevant, it came as a breath of fresh air, moderating my uneasiness. It was the contributions by a Maryland Presbyterian pastor that caught my imagination.
A local Presbyterian friend gave me Eugene Peterson’s address, and I wrote to him. I expected little in the way of response, but about ten days later came a substantial reply, and a friendship began. Eugene died in 2018, but until he succumbed to dementia, ours was a pen-pal relationship punctuated by phone calls and occasional times together.
Eugene was my kind of Presbyterian, and he shared many of my qualms about American Christianity. As a mainline Presbyterian raised in a Pentecostal-evangelical home, Eugene helped me understand that brisk spectrum of religion through his writing and our personal correspondence. I always looked forward to his letters.
Several years after Eugene’s death, Winn Collier’s biography, A Burning in My Bones, was published. Having spoken a couple of times with Collier, I bought the book immediately. However, only in recent months did I find myself able to read it. I am not sure why I lingered; maybe it was grief.
Finally, a few months after my wife Rosemary died, I picked it up intending to spread it out over several weeks, but instead I was glued to it from cover to cover in a weekend. There were fascinating things I discovered about Peterson and his family that I did not know, but I realized afresh how influential his approach to ministry and theology was in my evolution as a Christian and as a pastor in America, and my battle of coming to terms with the peculiarities of American Christianity (including the Episcopal Church). This realization in turn led to an immediate second reading.
Eugene’s mother was an extraordinary woman. Married to a butcher in a small Montana town, she was a Pentecostal minister who drove an aging car around the mountains and preached in mining encampments, often taking her young son with her. Raised Pentecostal, educated at an evangelical college in the Pacific Northwest, Eugene was drawn to pastoral ministry as a Presbyterian, while at the same time being perfectly comfortable among Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and others.
Peterson’s approach to theology, life, and ministry had an integrity that was genuinely orthodox and ecumenical. He challenges us to be authentically biblical, immersing ourselves in both Scripture and scholarship. Agendas should be set prayerfully, not by the latest ecclesiastical fad, which I have watched coming and going over more than half a century of ordained ministry.
The pastor/priest is with the congregation, not in the limelight. Our vocation belongs on the fringes, eschewing the bombastic and noisy. Eugene was the pastor’s pastor. Pastoring was about being in Christ alongside, not engaging in any kind of empire-building. Eugene was edgy about large parishes, and while they have their place, size can make them awkward places to exercise the pastoral vocation. Now, as a priest in a large parish, I understand his misgivings.
His example and counsel made me leery of the notion of a clerical career ladder, so much so that hearing priests talking in such terms makes me uncomfortable. This vocation is not about our title, the size of our paycheck, or honors being bestowed. Rather, it is an upward call of service to holiness of life. Peterson set an example, but as his autobiography shows, he had his own unexpected struggles. Hands laid on our heads at ordination set us apart for a call to humble service—and the effort that goes with it.
Eugene’s integrity nourished and shaped me and now, seven years since his death, the same has convinced me that living the pastoral vocation is inescapably at odds with the shallow rat race culture, whose tentacles have reached deep into the church. A pastor’s call is to be an under-shepherd in God’s flock, loving and serving, even guiding congregants through the valley of the shadow, resting with them beside still waters, caring about each of them as we carry them home rejoicing.
Pastors are called to be women and men of prayer, which for me has always been one of the hardest facets of our calling. Yet pastors cannot pray adequately for their people without living within the setting of the congregation; it is from this position that pastors provide leadership and offer teaching enabling Christians to live within God’s revelation. Eugene was the one who made it clear to me that pastoral ministry is inevitably hard work, prayer being one of the keys to empowering it. This makes demands on the pastor and the pastor’s family and cannot but be enabled by God’s grace.
There are no foolproof formulas or easy shortcuts to ordained ministry. Becoming friends with Eugene Peterson was incredibly significant in the way it shaped my faith, gave direction to my journey, and helped me through the dizzying discomfort of failure.
Drawing on his insights, I have found myself standing on firmer ground, eschewing the superficial razzmatazz that shapes American evangelicalism and beyond. Although as a classical evangelical I have been somewhat insulated from that sort of church and its consumer culture, often its noise and clamor have been impossible to ignore. That has, sadly, become increasingly the case in recent years.
I remember exploring the seeming promise of the church growth movement, flirting with facets of the raucous, competitive commercialized clamor that is sometimes passed off as pastoral ministry. Yet I found all this squeezing the life out of my soul. I hope that I drew back from it before I became a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. It is so easy to be waylaid by the wrong models—things we are told work and yet are far from grounded in biblical truth.
The last time Eugene and I were together, we were with our wives. This was a few years before he died, dementia stealing so much of him in those intervening years. Jan, his wife, died a mere four months later. Although we were not very close, I felt extraordinarily diminished by his parting.
After reading again various books my beloved Rosemary had been reading in the months before she was taken from us, and with nothing else to read, Peterson’s biography rose to the top of the list. The essence of Peterson, the epitome of the scholar-pastor, had been enchantingly captured. In the midst of producing books that will likely continue to be pastoral classics for years to come, Eugene crafted his well-known biblical paraphrase, The Message, his lectio divina in “American koine.” His body of writing reflects decades of pastoring, seminary teaching, and nurturing other pastors and reflective believers.
In my mind, Eugene Peterson stands with such luminaries and preachers as Richard Baxter, Lancelot Andrewes, and William Law. I commend A Burning in My Bones as a helpful glimpse into the life of Peterson, the pastor’s pastor.
The Rev. Richard Kew is priest associate at St. George’s Church, Nashville. He was born and raised in England, was educated at the University of London and London College of Divinity, and was ordained to the priesthood at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1970.
