Eugene H. Peterson The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers and the shops they keep are churches The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. there are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week by week in towns and villages all over the world.

Definition of professional: A professional is someone who is committed to standards of integrity and performance that cannot be altered to suit people's tastes or what they are willing to pay for.

The image aspects of being a pastor, the parts that have to do with meeting people's expectations can be faked easily. We can impersonate a pastor without being a pastor. being the kind of pastor that satisfy a congregation is one of the easiest jobs on the face of the earth.

A job is what we do to complete an assignment but profession is different. In profession we have an obligation beyond pleasing somebody: we are pursuing or shaping the very nature of reality.

First Angle : Prayer

We want life on our conditions, not on God's conditions. Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God's conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn't get us what we want but what God wants.

For pastors, the Greek stories are useful, but Hebrew prayers are essential. Prayer means that we deal first with God and then with the world. The Greek stories are the best stories in the world, interesting and accurate. They account for our condition, but they do not change it or even promise that it can be changed. But the point is not to understand history but to change it as Karl Marx said.

   Praying by the book

Prayer is never the first word. it is always the second word. God has the first word. Prayer is answering speech. It is not primarily "address" but "response".

We need to restore prayer to its context in God's word. Prayer is not something we think up to get God's attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. We must develop within ourselves the means for a full and continuous awareness of its secondary quality, its answering character. the first word is everywhere and always God's word to us, not ours to Him.

The divine utterance (Torah) with the human answer (Psalms). The way that something is said to us is often as important as what is said. Form can communicate as much as content. For every word that God speaks to us there must be an answering word from us. No word of God can go unanswered. The word of God is not complete simply by being uttered. it must be answered. Psalm-answers and Torah-addresses.

The life of faith is not done to us but developed in us by commanding and blessing words that are completed in words of obedient assent and willing praise. All the parts of our lives and all the parts of our history are addressed by God and then answered by us. Pastoral work means staying awake and keeping others awake to this language and giving answer to every word of it.

   Prayer Time

When we sleep God begins his works. Sleep is God's creation for giving us the help he cannot get into us when we are awake.

 An accurate understanding of Sabbath is prerequisite to its practice. it must be understood biblically not culturally.

Sabbath: Uncluttered time and space to detach ourselves from the people around us so that they have a chance to deal with God.

Sabbath keeping: Separating ourselves from the people who are clinging to us, from the routines to which we are clinging for our identity and offering them all up to God in praise. Sabbath keeping is not Primarily something we do but what we don't do and it is a day to watch and be responsive to what God has done. Spareness records fullness and a presence.

Prayer without intending it. We get the rhythms right. and with the rhythms right, we realize that without directly intending it, we have time to pray.

Second Angles : Scripture

Turning Eyes into Ears

Reading scripture is not the same as listening to God. but they are often assumed to be the same thing. Pastors, who spend more of their time reading the scriptures than most Christian do make this unwarranted assumption with alarming frequency.

The common practice is to nurture a listening disposition: the involving ear rather than the distancing eye, hoping to become passionate hearer of the word rather than cool readers of the page.

Listening and reading are not the same thing. They involve different sense. Listening is an interpersonal act; in involves two or three people in fairly close proximity. Reading involves one person with a book written by someone who can be miles away or centuries dead or both. The listener is required to be attentive to speaker and is more or less at the speaker's mercy.

When I listen to a person the person knows very well whether I am paying attention or not. In listening, another initiate the process. In reading I open the book and attend to the words. I can read by myself; I cannot listen by myself. In listening the speaker is in charge; In reading the reader is in charge.

Schooling is very different from learning. In schooling persons count for very little. Facts are memorized, information assimilated, examinations passed. Teachers are subjected to a supervision that attempts to insure uniform performance and the records of schooling is summarized on a transcript in number, grade, which is the most abstract of language. Learning is the most intricately personal process, which will not submit to such summarizing.

We are habituated to looking for information when we read rather than being in relationship with a person who once spoke and then wrote so that we could listen to what was said. Language, of course, does provide information and books are conveniently accessible containers for it. But the primary practice of language is not in giving out information but being in relationship.

The scriptures are almost entirely this kind of book. If we read them impersonally with an information gathering mind, we misread them.

Our task is to get enough distance from our culture so that our theological conviction that God speaks and not just read about it. No longer is God's word merely written. It is voiced. The ear takes over from the eye and involves the heart.

Contemplative Exegesis

Scriptural exegesis is surgical work, cutting through layers of history, culture and grammar

Contemplative exegesis means listening to the word as sound, the word that reveals out of one's interior, it also means receiving the words in the form in which they are given. When we listen to the word of God in Scripture, listening for what God is revealing out of himself, a story is shaped in our hearing. The words have a revealing quality to them, so stories have a shaping quality to them.

Contemplative exegesis means opening our interiors to these revealing sounds and submitting our lives to the story these words tell in order to be shaped by them. This involves a poet's respect for words and a lover's responsiveness to words.

Contemplative exegesis involves these two matters, an openness to words that reveal and a submission to words that shape. Words are double dimensioned; they carry meaning from their source and they carry influence to their destination

Scripture is characteristically unsummarizable. It resists abstractions. It is specific, concrete, geological. What pastor must not do is extract principles from Scripture, distill truths from the gospel. that is a realism in the scriptures

You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed

Third Angle : Spiritual Direction

Christianization is directly concerned with and concerns the individual person and the individual event. it needs to take an interest in the specific detail of everyday incidents.

Spiritual direction is the aspect of ministry that explorers and develops this absorbing and devout attentiveness to the specific detail of everyday incident. Being a spiritual director means noticing the familiar naming the particular. Being knowledgeable in the large truth of sin, grace, salvation, atonement, and judgment is necessary but not sufficient.

The importance of naming : a simple act of naming is part of the recovery. what is unnamed is often unnoticed. Naming focuses attention. when I name something it becomes meaningful to me.

Basic requirement for being a spiritual director is simply to take seriously what we already know are serious matters. Being a spiritual director is bringing the same card and skill and intensity to the ordinary, boring, uneventful parts of our lives that we readily give to the eventful conversions and proclamations.

It is certainly true in my life that the people who have helped me most weren't trying to help me and didn't know they were helping when they were. Conversely, the people who tried hardest to help were often no help at all.

"Though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers(1 Cor. 4:15) It is easier to tell people what to do than to be with them. 

A person in need and in growth is vulnerable and readily accepts counsel that is sincerely given

It would be unwise to forget for a moment that in this business we are sinners dealing with sinners. it is easier to look for sin than for grace.

We need another's help. we need guidance besides God's grace. No one is poorer, no one is more defenseless than a person who has no one to guide him along the road to God. It is not merely nice to for pastors to have a spiritual director, it is indispensable.

The importance of spiritual director : a thing that ha struck me is the difference in being in touch with an oral tradition as compared to a written one. A book that tells me about the dark night and the person who comments on my dark night, even though the words are the same, are different. I can read with detachment but I cannot listen with detachment. The immediacy and intimacy of conversation turn knowledge into wisdom.

We shift our attention from book to person easily enough, but no corresponding shift takes place in us. we read the person as impersonally as we read book. the effect is disastrous. If we reduce a person to sermon material we are agents of alienation.

When a person comes to me for spiritual direction it is not to get into a theological discussion but to find a friend in a theological content.