As I continue to comb back through the memoir of Eugene Peterson I was reminded of this challenging and important passage in which Peterson helps those of us who have been called to be pastors to consider the distinction between vocation and a job.

A job is an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated. It is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not. It is pretty easy to tell whether a job is done well or badly.

But a vocation is not a job in that sense. I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do it, dismissed if I don’t. But I can’t be hired to be a pastor, for my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve but to the God I serve. As it turns out, the people I serve would often prefer an idol who would do what they want done rather than do what God, revealed in Jesus, wants them to do. In our present culture the sharp distinction between a job and a vocation is considerably blurred. How do I, as a pastor, prevent my self from thinking of my work as a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by my denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation? How do I stay attentive to and listening to the call that got me started in this way of life — not a call to make the church attractive and useful in the American scene, not a call to help people feel good about themselves and have a good life, not a call to use my considerable gifts and fulfill myself, but a call like Abraham’s “to set out for a place… not knowing where he was going,” a call to deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus, a call like Jonah’s to “go at once Nineveh,” a city he detested, a call like Paul’s to “get up and enter the city and you will be told what to do”?

How do I keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description? How do I keep the calling , the vocation, of pastor from being drowned out by job descriptions, gussied up in glossy challenges and visions and strategies, clamoring incessantly for my attention?

The pastorate is a calling… and not a job.

But many of us struggle to see it as such, especially when things are hard.

But even when they’re going well… we struggle to know how to live this out because we have rarely (if ever) seen what Peterson has described above modeled for us.

We don’t know what it looks like?

No one has ever shown us with living and serving as a pastor can look like in this kind of “system” or “structure.”

Whether we care to admit it or not, there is a part of us that feels more comfortable in the kind of structure that Peterson is talking against — because we see it lived out all around us.

It’s more familiar.

But clearly Peterson wants us to understand that this is not how we are to operate or understand ourselves.

It’s not what we’ve been called to.

We are supposed to live, lead, serve and work from a different place — with a different understanding — given the nature of our call to be pastors.

For me, these questions from Peterson hit the nail on the head:

How do I, as a pastor, prevent my self from thinking of my work as a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by my denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation? How do I stay attentive to and listening to the call that got me started in this way of life —

How do you answer these questions?

Please take a moment to share a story, insight or question in the comment section below.

And to read other posts inspired by Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor you can click on:

• Every Step An Arrival
• Helping Students Identify a Call to Pastor
• Pastoring in North America
• Local and Personally Present
• A Story Among Stories
• The Americanization of Congregation
• Are Your Expectations Too High? Probably.
• When You’re Not the Star
• The Messianic Virus
• The Invisible Pastor