What grade would you give a parish minister who never attended one church committee meeting in 25 years, and got most of his pastoral inspiration from novels and secular poetry? Careful now, because Eugene Peterson is by common (pastoral) consent the best contemporary writer about parish ministry in the English-speaking world. Peterson is a biblical scholar (most of us have ‘The Message’ on our shelves), a wordsmith, spiritual director, hiker-every-Monday-in-all-weathers, a marathon-runner, and mentor to ten thousand pastors (he was pastor for 29 years of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Maryland, before taking up a five-year appointment as Professor of Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver). Two of his books – Take and Read, and Under the Unpredictable Plant – would be in my ‘top ten’ for pastors…

Subversive Spirituality is a collection of ‘noticings’ – articles, poems and interviews published in various journals over about twenty years. Most important novel for a pastor to read? The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Most important roles for a pastor? Prayer, preaching, spiritual direction.

Now I could nitpick: I would have liked him to distinguish between ‘academy’ and ‘seminary’ (most seminaries are actually acadamies, which is why they fail to produce more effective pastors). Peterson comes close, when he criticises professors who seem ‘more interested in spelling than spirituality, spending far more time on paradigms than in prayer’ (p.54). And it would be nice if he’d had a bit of the writing color of, say, Frederick Buechner…

But let Peterson speak for himself:

# Any attempt to denigrate the intellect… is unacceptable (58) (Peterson says he was brought up in an intellect-denigrating Pentecostal church and by a ditto father)

# Most pastoral work takes place in obscurity, deciphering grace in the shadows, blowing on the embers of a hard-used life (147)

# The pastorate is one of the few places in our society where you can live a truly creative life (195)

# Busyness – which is essentially laziness – is the enemy of spirituality. A busy person is a lazy person because they are not doing what they are supposed to do (237)

# If I were to set up a seminary curriculum, I would spend a whole year on a couple of poets (252)

# The twin pillars of ministry are learning and prayer (255)

Five chapters – Learning to Worship from St John’s Revelation, Mastering Ceremonies, Teach Us to Care, and Not to Care, Novelists Pastors and Poets, and Haphazardly Intent – are worth the price of the book. If your pastor seems to be more guilty when reading than not reading or needs to be omnipresent at committee-meetings give him/her this book!

Rowland Croucher March 1998