o1mnikent

It’s been a long week. I have no idea how I made it.

Wait–

Yes I do.

I recently learned that one of my Greek profs at Calvin won the presidential award for teaching at Calvin College. He deserves it – his were some of the best classes I had at Calvin.

From the Calvin website:

“When I teach New Testament Greek to future pastors,” he says, “I tell them that their primary responsibility will be to interpret the text accurately. The word of God is not a painting, not a film. It’s a living word, and they need to understand the text deeply. Part of that is transplanting themselves into the first century to try to think like Matthew and Mark. But part of that is also to understand the other classical authors. So they should know something about Plato as well as Mark, Augustine as well as Paul. That’s always been the liberal arts vision at Calvin, and I’m very grateful for it.”

earlier: part 1

Dale Cooper: You’ve been a pastor for thirty years, beyond that you’ve written a number of books and also translated the Bible. As you look back… what’s been the most fulfilling part for you? The most difficult?

Eugene Peterson: I think the most fulfilling part has been being part of a worshiping community that was being formed into the likeness of Christ. That’s a fancy way to put it. I was learning on the job. … I basically knew what I didn’t want to be, and so I was trying to work this out in a new congregation, most of whom didn’t know anything either. They were either nominal church people or rejects from other churches, or people who had never been to church before – only peripherally. So I didn’t really have a group of people …. I did know I wanted to preach the gospel and tell them about Jesus and form a community that had a biblical Holy Spirit identity. And that’s what happened. I was with these people for twenty nine years, and it was slow going. I though the easy part would be forming a community and the hard part would be preaching… it was just the opposite. They would let me say anything I wanted to say, but they wouldn’t be formed. They were stereotypical suburban Americans… autonomous, consumerists, no idea of relationship. …I thought they’d love to learn each other’s names, share their children’s lives, and it took probably about ten years before a community started to be formed around the act of worship. And after thirty one years I was – I became a professor at Regent, and the thing I missed most was that community.

A school – and I love school – is very different from a congregation. A classroom is very defined, you know what the goals are, exactly what you have to do. And everybody’s measured, you get grades, you graduated, you have a diploma that says you know something. Congregations are not that way at all – they’re messy, nobody has anything in common, and it takes a long time for they to develop a commonality around Jesus. They have no idea what worship is, they’re used to be entertained or be challenged… congregations don’t do that, they don’t do anything. Marva Dawn calls worship a royal waste of time. I love that phrase. It is. But the key word is the adjective: royal. We’re involved in something that the world has no conception of or care for, and … we live in a culture where there are a lot of people who don’t know what worship is, so we’ll give them something they like and we’ll call it worship. We have this wonderful Calvin Institute of Christian Worship which is a breath of fresh air. I miss that most. I miss that congregation – no specific thing.

I love preaching. I was surprised when I wasn’t preaching that I didn’t miss that very much. What I missed was that intricate relational […] who have nothing in common and hardly know the name of Jesus and gradually getting pulled together in a relationships that make them a Christian community. And I emphasize ‘gradually’ – it doesn’t happen quickly.

I started teaching in the middle of the winter, and I had a class that was meeting in the evenings. We got to Maundy Thursday and I realized that this is the first time in thirty-five years that I have not celebrated the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday. I stopped and I told my class and I told them. And then I went on with my lecture. I didn’t notice it, but two people left and came back with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread. That’s what I miss.

Dale Cooper: …it was reading books like Working the Angles which named for me what it meant to be a pastor, and gave me some warrant for what I really longed to be. But now I think about younger women and men and their longing to be pastors in a culture such as ours. What things would you say to them as they take up their work?

Eugene: I would encourage you to be determined to find out what it means to be a pastor – a pastor who’s shaped by the biblical tradition and Christian revelation and Christian tradition. And to tell you that it’s not easy, that the whole American culture, probably the whole world, is in a conspiracy to seduce you from being a pastor. Nobody – I exaggerate – wants you to be a pastor. They want religion on their terms and they’d like you to serve it up on their terms. Being a pastor is being a leader of a counterrevolution – a life of sacrifice and love and belief and away from a life of consumerism and self-fulfillment. Every generation the details change. My son is a new church developer. He started a new church thirty-five years after I did and in those first years as he was starting this church, he would call me and say, ‘Dad, here’s what’s going on, what do i do?’ and I almost always said, ‘Eric, I have no idea. I never had to do that. You’re dealing with a totally different culture.’ Thirty-five years makes a big difference. I wasn’t much help, because I had to learn on the job just as he had to learn on the job.

In a place like [seminary], you’ll learn a lot that’s useful, but being a pastor means… in some ways, just forgetting about whole dimension which with we’re working with… requires two things, I think, that are non-negotiable. You have to be personal, and you have to be local. You can’t do bureaucratic and programmatic things as a bottom line. You can’t do a personal gospel in an impersonal way. It’s got to be relational.

Hopefully in theology you’ve been learning a lot about the trinity. This is the most important symbol for pastors to work with because it’s relational.

And the other part, it’s local. There is no congregation like yours. Pay attention to what’s there. It’s unique. Don’t bring in models of somebody else… it may have been right for them, it’s not right for you. I think this realization of pastoral identity is right at the center of what you’re doing. It’s not a vocational identity, it’s your identity with these people. You’re not a leader in the sense that you exercise power – power is the worst thing that the pastor can want – you’re not coercing people or manipulating them or propagandizing them. You’re a pastor who cares about your lives and their lives. … in some ways you’re on your own. You come out of a great tradition, but the tradition has been eroded in the last – I don’ t know how many years. Forty-five years ago it was in pretty bad shape, and one of the things I felt I could do … and I didn’t start out… I started writing about it. …Two of my early books in terms of re-imagining my life as a pastor in the biblical Christian reformed tradition. I might say that we’ve got – we have an artist here from the Netherlands [Anneka Kaai]… I think I found my strongest allies in …sharpening my pastor identity, from artists. Because the artist is one of the few people who’s paying attention to the local in a personal way. When artists quit being personal they join advertising firms, and when they quit being local they manufacture. Good artists are paying attention to the now, the here, the personal, and that’s what pastors have to be doing. You can’t paint by the numbers and do good work. So I’ve cultivated the company of poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, people who took art seriously and gave themselves to this work that is, in a sense, a waste of time. […]

Most artists don’t live economically by their work… but if they believe in it enough they’ll do it, because you’re not doing it for economic reasons. Pastors are one of the few places in the world where you can get paid for what you do. But it takes a lot of guts and intentionally and patience to do what you’re supposed to do, which is develop this community patiently, patiently, patiently, without manipulation, without lying, and keep this gospel of Jesus Christ on the cross central in terms of understanding who we are.

It looks like another windmill will be built in Lynden.

From the Lynden Tribune:

“The 53-foot-tall structure will be just for show, with nothing planned for inside the body of the windmill.”

Unfortunately, the new windmill won’t surpass in height the 72-foot windmill downtown.

Imagine if you could create the church you wanted, any way you wanted…

After reading Nathan’s column in the Chicago Tribune and Matt’s latest post, I won’t add anything else to the conversation, other than that there’s an interview with VandenBosch himself over on Nathan’s presticogitation site that I just listened to. It includes, among other things, the following phrases:

“charitable pity and sympathy”

“my plan is not just to rule the world, but to get a word in the OED, too.”

and…

“that would please me a lot”

Last night I flew back to Grand Rapids from a trip to New Jersey. The first leg of our flight was from Newark to Detroit. As we were approaching the runway for what seemed like our landing, the pilot quickly pulled the plane up, and I watched the airport pass by underneath.

“Strange,” I thought.

The pilot came over the speakers in the cabin of the plane. “Uhh, our flaps don’t work. This means that we can’t slow the plane down and we can’t land. We’re going to run some checks and get back to you.”

A few explitives found their way into my thoughts.

Flaps are one of my favorite parts of the plane. Flaps and landing gear. I remembered a return flight from Europe last summer when our flight was delayed because the landing gear didn’t work. “I’m all about landing gear,” I thought at the time.

Last night, however, I was all about flaps. “What I would give for a decent flap right now.”

About fifteen minutes later, the pilot spoke again. “Our flaps still don’t work, but we’re going to try to land anyway. We’ll be landing at a much faster speed.”

Not desirable, but whatever. But then the captain continued…

“Also, when we land, you’re going to see a bunch of firetrucks lining the runway. It’s just a routine thing. Also, some ambulances.”

And then the plane started to descend. I saw all the firetrucks and ambulances, and I noticed a lot of parked planes. Apparently they had closed the airport just for our landing.

And then we hit the runway and went all the way to the end, where we stopped. A few firetrucks followed us and looked at some stuff, and then the caravan of emergency vehicles drove away.

“Yes”, I said, in the second-most affirmative statement ever (the first being the “Amen” found at the end of Revelation 21).

This past weekend, Emily, Bert, Becky, and I joined Jorge to lead workshops at three churches in the New York City area. Two of the three churches we encountered intrigued me.

On Saturday afternoon, we led workshops at Filipino CRC in Jersey City, New Jersey. This congregation is comprised of about seventy people who have emigrated to the States in past five years. The church was originally a church plant by a pastor from Asian Theological Seminary in Manilla. This church is located in a particularly poor area of the city in an old building that was originally a white Baptist church back in the mid-nineteenth century. This congregation is struggling to find their identity as Americans while retaining their Filipino heritage. I found them singing contempoary “praise and worship” songs by pop artists here in America. They’re operating under the dillusion that this constitues true worship. I listened to them, and wanted to say, “You don’t have to try to be American. Chris Tomlin is no better or worse than the songs you sang five years ago back in the Philippines.”

I played piano at their worship service yesterday. The service was a unique blend of very contemporary American music with a charismatic feel. We also recited the Heidelberg Catechism and something from the Westminster Confession on the authority of scripture. The leader asked the question, and every person answered at their own pace. They invited us up to serve communion, so we passed out hamburger bun-esque pieces of bread and grape pop. The thank offering, we learned, was for us. We sang a few songs in Tegala, sang the doxology, and then passed the peace – i.e. greet every single person in the church. The service was a unique mix of Filipino and American music and language, a blend of Reformed history and charismatic worship. It was a group of people trying to figure out what it means to be Filipino in America, to figure out how to sing a new song in a strange land.

That morning, just a few hours prior, we were at Goshen CRC. This is a conservative Dutch Reformed congregation located in a rural part of New York. We sang songs from the Blue Psalter Hymnal and from a screen. I also noticed a Maranatha praise songbook in the pews. After church, Emily spoke on changes in Christian worship in the last twenty years, talking mostly about culture, technology, the role of women, and various other aspects of Christian worship. The Q&A time after the presentation revealed much of the struggles of their community.

One woman asked, “Do you think these changes are good or bad?” Emily noted that such changes cannot be evaluated on a denominational level, only a congregational level. Questions surfaced about communion, about music, and everything else.

Afterward, I asked the pastor about the demographics of the congregation. Many were Dutch, just as I suspected. But what I didn’t realize was that many were first generation immigrants, much like the Filipino church in Jersey City. They, too, were struggling with singing a new song in a strange land. They were coping with being the body of Christ while watching their children grow up influenced by the forces of American culture absent in the Netherlands. They were isolated and terrified. They, too, were trying to figure out how to be the body of Christ.

On the flight back to Grand Rapids, I thought about Jesus, comforting his disciples. “I’ll send a Paraclete, a Comforter to be with you when I leave.” He speaks this to immigrant communities, to rural, urban, and suburban congregations, to megachurches, regardless of race or class.

Last Tuesday, Eugene Peterson visited Calvin Seminary to talk about the life and work of a pastor. Dale Cooper, chaplain of Calvin College, interviewed him, and he also took questions from the audience, largely comprised of students and pastors from the local community. I transcribed the entire two hour conversation, but editing it has been slow going (between the Worship Symposium and end of the quarter responsibilities). So, I thought I’d post segments of the conversation as I finish them. Without further ado…

Dale Cooper: How did you end up becoming a pastor?

Eugene Peterson: “I never thought I’d be a pastor. I never knew a pastor that I trusted or respected. We lived in Montana, so our pastors would come in and stay for a couple years and get the trophies and leave and it never seemed to be an honorable profession. Frankly, they were jerks. They never cared.

“I went to seminary in New York City and… met Presbyterians. I didn’t know anything about the Presbyterian Church except that they were shaky on the scriptures and thought the Second Coming was a myth. I later found out they have a name for that. They called it predestination. But it didn’t make a difference because I didn’t want to be a pastor.

“I needed a job… so I talked to him [pastor] and told him I really was just doing this for the money – I’ll work hard, but don’t plan on me becoming a pastor. So he agreed, he hired me, and to my surprise, I found myself with a pastor who was a man of God. And so within three months, I made a complete vocational turn. This was what I always wanted to do… I didn’t know you could be a pastor and take God seriously, take people seriously.

“For three years… I learned all I could… and then I had a chance to go start a new church near Baltimore, which I did. And then I found out I didn’t know how to be a pastor. I knew what I didn’t want to do as a pastor. Growing up, pastors were basically entertainers, cheerleaders… then [when I was] in grad school, [I worked with a pastor of a] big institutional church. That was a matter of power and manipulation, and I didn’t want any part of that. So here I was in this little suburb of Baltimore learning how to be a pastor on my own. I realized I didn’t have any models. I had two negative ones… well, there was a positive one… [there was a] man I respected enormously, he was very different than I was. I couldn’t imitate him. There was no way I could do it like he was. So I was on my own.

“My denomination was making sure that I would succeed, so they sent me to conflict seminars and business management courses. They wanted me to organize, and manipulate basically, and I just knew in my gut that this was the wrong thing to do. So I started searching for my own way. And it was the perfect setting to do it… small, meeting in the basement of our home. So I realized that there was not much going on in my culture that gave me any hint of what it meant to be a Christian pastor. So I looked other places, basically in the cemeteries, finding out what people had been doing for two thousand years.”