The last time I picked a fight with someone was Oct 23rd 2018, the day after Eugene Petersen died. I don’t normally ‘pick fights’ and this one wasn’t a physical one. I opened my Facebook feed to see the words ‘RIP Eugene Petersen – should have called it ‘the mess”. I saw red. Partly because of the incredible value The Message has been to so many in making sense of a book they might otherwise never read, partly because of the timing and partly because I had observed this person slam others on social media now for some time and I had kept my mouth shut. It began with a ‘shove in the chest’, graduated to a few short sharp blows and ended with the post being deleted and me being ‘unfriended’, which was probably a good thing as we certainly weren’t ‘friends’ in any sense.
I am not a pastor in the mould of Petersen – he is genuinely ‘pastorally’ gifted – but over the years I have found his pastoral/prophetic voice to be so incredibly valuable to the church, calling us back to the core business of ministry rather than the distractions that so easily bring us immediate gratification. Petersen was big on Christlikeness as our one pursuit – and he was very low on success as a measure of a life. I needed to hear his voice in my ear often as I walked my own path in Christian leadership. He said things like this:
“The ink on my ordination papers wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts, so-called, in the field of church that my main task was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery stores, corporations, banks, hospitals, and financial services.”
Eugene Petersen in ‘A Burning in My Bones’ by Winn Collier
It was so blatantly true that it was laughable – but also tragic – because we kept on running our corporations regardless. We still do.
Danelle and I have just finished Winn Collier’s biography of Petersen’s life, 9 3/4 hrs of audio book! I have never been a big fan of the audio-book form, always feeling like I was gonna miss something. And I did – for sure – we listened over the last 3 weeks as we drove around Tassie and the concentration it takes to drive a car and caravan around the winding hills of this state meant I couldn’t give it my full attention. That said it was a genuinely inspirational story of a man who sought to be a ‘saint’, but who also struggled with the same stuff all of us encounter – pride, ego, lust and booze.
Early in the book we hear the story of Petersen’s first ‘convert’ – the school bully who picked on him relentlessly until one day Petersen cracked, turned around and jumped on him, pinning his arms to the ground with his knees. He tells of pounding him with his fists and insisting he say ‘Jesus Christ is my Lord and Saviour’ before he let him go. As the bully refused the bloodletting went on until Eugene got his way. He beat his first convert into submission… new missional methods?… Although we tried that with the crusades and it wasn’t such a great success was it?…
The story traced Petersen’s life from his Montana childhood, with an absent father right thru to the dementia years, the bitter end to a beautiful life.
It was intriguing to hear the inner workings of Petersen’s mind – the ongoing struggle to be what he called ‘a saint’, his dedication to the spiritual disciplines and his oh so vast love for people and his ability to sit them with and welcome them into his presence. While his writing is outstanding and we get to hear plenty of his struggle to become a writer, it seems it is his pastoral heart that came thru most powerfully in the story. He sought to love people and listen to people and to point them to Christ as the answer to their questions. When I say I am not a pastor in the mould of Petersen, I mean I simply don’t have the depth of heart that he cultivated, or the patience, or even the willingness to persist with people the way he did. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating – it’s just a reality – my gifts are in other areas. But it did depict someone with a genuine pastoral inclination living out a genuinely pastoral life. Danelle resonated with much of what he had to say as pastoring is her native language.
I appreciated Collier’s willingness to let us into some of Petersen’s vices – his ongoing battle with bourbon – a ‘distraction’ that he never seemed to fully master. There was a complicated relationship with another woman who came to him for counselling but whose energy and presence he began to enjoy a little too much. While it was ‘all above board’ sexually, it was clear that he had lost his way for a time and needed to re-connect with Jan, his wife. His deep ‘interior world’ that allowed him to produce such excellent writing also meant that at times he was hard to reach emotionally, or just absent from his marriage and his children. This was an ongoing tussle for him, Jan and his sons – a reminder that everything comes at a cost.
His vocational challenges were of particular interest to me. The call to pastor – to write – to teach – and in all of that to be husband, father and a decent human being. He wrestled with the machine that so much of institutional Christianity has become and tried to dance within it, sometimes winning and other times feeling like a square peg being bashed into a round hole. He voiced loudly his disaffection with the term ‘evangelical’, which he believed had become too combative to be of ongoing use. (No kidding…) He operated at the fringes in so many ways – which is to be expected of a prophet – and yet he also appeared to be so at home in his own church of so many years where he was able to express his pastoral vocation so strongly.
Prophet and pastor – a curious combination.
The final chapters of the book recount Petersen’s ongoing tussle with the issue of same sex marriage and his rather short, blunt ‘yes’ when asked in an interview if he would conduct such a marriage for people in his church. Collier lets us in to the fact that during this time Petersen was in the early stages of dementia and his ‘yes’ and then subsequent retraction brought him untold pain and grief. In the bio it is recounted as a very sad end to his public engagements. While it seems Petersen may have said ‘yes’ anyway he wasn’t able to nuance his answer the way he did in later reflections.
There is much to love and enjoy in this story of one of our 20/21st C Christian greats. He was a gifted writer, one whose works were written without a thought to their potential dollar value or ‘marketability’, and he was also a genuine pastor who loved people and made time for them. He and Jan appear to have had a great gift of hospitality often having people in their home and spending vast amounts of time encouraging and helping guide.
In his writing of the Message he reflected that one of his ongoing motivations was to create the words of scripture in a way that the average blue collar worker could both read and make sense of them. He loved scripture and he spoke of it as inspired and reliable, but there was a short segment where he addressed the (what seems now strange) issue of inerrancy. This issue caused much grief both here and around the world in the 80’s and 90’s and I am guessing it continues to be ‘fight worth having’ for a certain section of the church, but Petersen ruminates thoughtfully on how we can ever speak of ‘inerrant literature’. Perhaps mathematics could be spoken of an inerrant, but when you are dealing with language (which changes over time), interpretation, and especially metaphor, which the Bible has in spades then it’s a word best left alone.
I could go on… but suffice to say it was much loved part of our trip around Tassie – listening to the life of Eugene Petersen. I don’t normally pick fights either online or in real life, but for this bloke I’d happily do it again if I had my time over.
