I'm convicted!

Eugene Peterson on today’s pastors:

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns—how to keep customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package goods so that customers will lay out more money. . . .

“A walloping great congregation is fun,” says Martin Thornton, “but what most communities really need is a couple saints."

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are instead, communities of sinners, gathered week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called the pastor. . . . The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God.

Three basic pastoral acts, says Peterson, determine the shape of evening else:

Attentiveness to God in prayer, in Scripture reading [preaching, teaching] and spiritual direction [personal discipling relationships].

From Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.


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