Do you ever find yourself wondering: “how, exactly, did I end up here?”

I know that I do.

Sometimes the question arises in the context of a to-do list that seems to grow at a rate much faster than its items can be completed and crossed off, or a relationship that has become strained, or maybe a ministry initiative — which at one time seemed so promising — that is now floundering.

And sometimes the question is attached to an issue or situation that looms  much larger in our life: a marriage in trouble, an ailing parent, a sibling struggling to find their way, a wayward child, or even issues surrounding our work and sense of calling.

In a lot of ways I feel like I’m going through a process of reclaiming of my identity as pastor this summer. I think this process has been gradually making itself known to me — finding me — but it has also been prompted by some timely conversations with colleagues and mentors to whom I am very thankful.

One of these mentors comes in the form of the written words of Eugene Peterson who — at least for me — seems to have captured the heart of what it means to be a pastor and the challenges we face in the world that we have been called to serve. Here’s a passage from his memoir, The Pastor, that has prompted today’s post:

As I was preparing myself to begin the work of developing a new congregation, I observed that pastors no longer preached fantasy sermons on what the church should be. They could actually do something about the shabby image the church had of itself. They could use advertising techniques to create an image of church as a place Christians and their friends could mix with successful and glamorous people. Simple: remove pictures of the God of Gomorrah and Moriah and Golgotha from the walls of the churches and shift things around a bit to make the meeting places more consumer friendly. With God depersonalized and then repackaged as a principle or formula, people could shop at their convenience for whatever sounded or looked as if it would make their lives more interesting and satisfying on their terms. Marketing research quickly developed to show just what people wanted in terms of God and religion. As soon as pastors knew what it was, they could give it to them.

At the time that I took up my responsibilities for developing a new congregation, this understanding of church and pastor was widespread and vigorously promoted by virtually everyone who was supposed to know what they were talking about. I was watching both the church and my vocation as a pastor in it being relentlessly diminished and corrupted by being redefined in terms of running an ecclesiastical business. 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. Many of them wrote books and gave lectures on how to do it. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.

This is the Americanization of congregation. It means turning each congregation into a market for religious consumers, an ecclesiastical business run along the lines of advertising techniques, organizational flow charts, and energized by impressive motivational rhetoric. But this was worse. This pragmatic vocational embrace of American technology and consumerism that promised to rescue congregations from ineffective obscurity violated everything — scriptural, theological, experiential — that had formed my identity as a follower of Jesus and as a pastor. It struck me as far worse than the earlier erotic and crusader illusions of church. It was a blasphemous desecration of the way of life to which the church had ordained me — something on the order of a vocational abomination of desolation.

It would seem, in an attempt to get the attention of more and more students on campus, I have lost sight of what God has called me to be in this place — a pastor.

In too many ways I have bought into the idea of mega-ministry, students as consumers, and playing the big-and-shiny game of ministry.

I don’t think it was a conscious decision — at least not most of the time — especially had I known then where I would find myself now.

So, I’m on the “road to recovery” in terms of my vocational identity as a pastor. And this will necessitate a shift in how I approach ministry with students.

But I think it will take some time. There’s a lot of undoing — unlearning — that needs to take place.

How about you?

• Where do you find yourself in this passage from The Pastor?
• How have you bought into an unbiblical approach to your work with college students?
• Are there ways that you think Peterson might be misguided, or misinformed, about a “different” approach to pastoral work and ministry?

I’d love to know what you think! Please take a moment to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

And for more posts inspired by Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor, see:

• Every Step An Arrival
• Helping Students Identify a Call to Pastor
• Pastoring in North America
• Local and Personally Present
• A Story Among Stories