This is the first of several guest contributions I requested from people whose ministry and Christian experience have been enriched by the writing of Eugene Peterson who died last month. There have been many tributes paid to the rich and enriching ministry of Peterson, especially through his writing, and in the last third of his life in his teaching to generations of theological students.
His translation of the Bible, The Message is a world best seller and has been very effective in revitalising bible reading across the churches. It has done for the 21st Century what the Good News Bible did for the second half of the 20th Century.
My own appreciation of Peterson, the responses to which suggested these further posts, can be seen in my earlier blog post over here.
The unpredictable worm planted in my soul
I can’t recall most of the argument of Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant, but I do remember its effect. My sense God’s call on my life emerged from reading it in fresh, vibrant colours; what had felt shapeless was given crisp new outline.
His world was not mine. The way they do things in the USA was so different to how we did things in Peckham, Presbyterians are not Baptists. And yet so often in this book I felt like I was meeting myself. It is full of stories, tales from everyday ministry and pastoral encounters told with a vivid attention to detail. and it is full of scripture and lustrous unexpected readings of once familiar texts.
The book left me with an abiding love of Jonah whose unpredictable plant gave Peterson his title. I’d read Jonah before but Peterson’s reading removed the scales from my eyes. Here was a pastor who could read, who understood how great storytelling works, who gets under the skin of a narrative and the art that creates it. It was not just Jonah I fell in love with, it was the bible as the great story of God’s pursuit of us out of his irrepressible, terrifying, persistent love. It’s narratives were no longer to be mined for doctrinal information but entered into as adventures in the greatest love story ever lived.
And the reason Peterson can do this is because he is steeped in reading, shaped by the world’s great writing - wendell Berry to Dostoevsky, Barth to Buechner: deep reading of these writers and others is woven into engagement with the greatest writing of all, scripture, giving rise to writing full of wonder and insight. And he is, therefore, wonderfully quotable and memorable. ‘Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.’ This is one of his most tweeted sayings - I wonder if he hated that as much as I think he would have!
Simon Jones, Director of Ministry Training and Formation, Spurgeon's College.
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