Things I learnt from Eugene Peterson

I recently re-read Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places by Eugene Peterson, and was fascinated to see how much this book - and the series of which it is a part - have shaped my thinking about the Christian life.  Here are three ways.

The centrality of participation.  Before there was anything in creation, there was the blessed life of God in the Holy Trinity.  The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit - the eternal life of the one God - comes first.  And that means that in everything - in creation, in redemption - God comes first.  He is active first of all; everything else follows after.  The Christian life is therefore about being attentive to what he is about, and only secondarily thinking about how I get involved.  It will often be the case that if I am attentive I will find that the secondary question doesn't occur, because I am already involved, already right in the middle of it all.  I get to participate in God's prior activity.  But more than that, astonishingly we as Christians are invited to participate in the very life of God himself.  The relationship of love that characterises the Godhead is the relationship which is, if you like, opened up to us in the incarnation and the sending of the Holy Spirit.  Joined to Christ by faith, we are called to participate in his eternal relationship with the Father.

I think this is a rebuke to the activism which characterises evangelical Christianity, and particularly to the visionary leadership we often think we need.  What we do matters, but what God does and who God is matter far, far more.  It is not up to us to work out a vision and a plan; we are called to join in with God's vision and plan, which is laid out in Scripture.  This has had lots of practical outworkings in my thinking.  For example, I've come to think that having a set liturgy better represents this participation than starting from scratch each week.  But mainly, I've realised that the heavy lifting is done.  If we participate in Christ's relationship with the Father, it is a relationship which already exists perfectly.  We just get to join in, we don't have to make it.  Prayer?  He does the heavy lifting.  Worship?  He does the heavy lifting.  Battle with sin?  He does the heavy lifting.  Good works?  He does the heavy lifting.

The importance of congruence.  Something Peterson is really big on is the need for congruence between ends and means.  It is not okay to set about the Lord's work in worldly ways.  This is related to the former point.  When we think that the Christian life, or the church's task and mission, is something a bit like a job - where we've been given the job description and now just have to make it happen - we can easily look around for techniques to achieve the results we want.  Of course, if the life of the individual Christian and the corporate church is actually a participation in God's activity, this simply cannot be!  The means are not up to us to decide any more than the ends are.  Jesus is the Life, and Jesus is the Way.  You can't do it any other way.  It is blasphemous to try.

Practically, that makes me pretty suspicious of bringing worldly wisdom into the church.  In my experience, 'sanctified common sense' is not often all that sanctified.  Away with management consultants, away with analysts, away with targets and techniques and gurus!  There is no way to build the Christian life or the Christian community except the way of Christ: the word, the sacraments, deep and sacrificial relationships, confession and absolution.  Evangelicalism is deeply pragmatic, and that is, I have come to think, a grave sin.  The reality of the Christian life and community is spiritual, and cannot be addressed pragmatically.  That something works is not a reason to do it, and that it doesn't seem to work is not a reason to stop doing it.  Walking with Christ is all that matters.

The value of small and slow.  Connected to this, Peterson has taught me to see the value of the seemingly insignificant.  When God works, it is not always - or even usually - in big, dramatic ways.  It is often the still, small voice.  It is archetypally the baby in the manger, the hidden life in Nazareth, the concealed glory of the cross.  The Lord is not in a hurry.  Nor is he putting on a show.  The slow, seemingly insignificant work of the church, and the frustratingly slow progress of the Christian life - that is how God is working.  To bring it back around, Peterson has taught me to be attentive to those little flashes of God's glory that we do see, and to take assurance from those things that he is at work, deep at work underneath all the busy-ness and fuss of life.

Despite recent protests, evangelicalism still has a bias towards the big and the obviously successful.  We still want to get things done, and we are chronically impatient.  Peterson has a lot to teach us here.

Disappointing Church

"Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join it - committing myself to work and worship with that company of God's people.  I've never been anything other than disappointed: every one turns out to be biblical, through and through: murmurers, complainers, the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizers."

Thus Eugene Peterson, in Leap Over a Wall, p 101.  He adds in an endnote:

"I was pastor to one of these companies for thirty years, and thought I could organize something more along the lines of Eden, or better yet New Jerusalem.  But sinners kept breaking and entering and insisting on baptism, defeating all my utopian fantasies."

Well, I'm off to keep company with the other losers for a couple of hours.

The Jesus Way

I have finally finished reading Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society.  It was not a very cheerful read.  The thrust of Ellul's diagnosis of western culture is that it has completely fallen prey to technique.  Things that were designed to make our lives easier have in fact taken over our lives.  Ends have disappeared; everything is about means.  We are becoming more and more efficient, more and more technically adept...  But why?  For what purpose?  We no longer know.  Everything truly human is suppressed in the rush to turn ourselves into part of the great machine.

As a sort of antidote, I have begun re-reading Eugene Peterson's book The Jesus Way.  My main practical concern reading Ellul has not been for society as a whole.  I find his picture sadly compelling, and it genuinely grieves.  But what troubles me more is the way the church has fallen prey to the same tendencies.  Peterson sets out the problem:  "More often than not, I find my Christian brothers and sisters uncritically embracing the ways and means practised by the high-profile men and women who lead large corporations, congregations, nations and causes...  But these ways and means more often than not violate the ways of Jesus...  Doesn't anybody notice that the ways and means taken up, often enthusiastically, are blasphemously at odds with the way Jesus leads his followers?  Why doesn't anyone notice?"

Peterson's point is that Christians so often try to do the work of Jesus - Kingdom work - in ways which stand in sharp contradiction to the Kingdom.  Why doesn't anyone notice?  I would suggest it is because these ways and means get things done.  Too often for our liking, Jesus' way looks like a meandering, long-way-round, slow, rough path.  We can apply a few simple techniques to get things done better.  We still have the same goals in mind, of course; we just have a better way of getting there.  And without a doubt, our ways and means work.  They grow churches, they stabilise lives, they increase knowledge.  Still the same goals...

Or are they?  What if Kingdom goals are not the sorts of things you can pursue any which way?  What if it is only Jesus' slow, wandering path that will actually get us there?  What if 'getting there' isn't really the point anyway; what if it's all about the way?

The Jesus Way

So, I've just started reading The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson. So far, it's great! If you've never read Peterson before, you should get stuck in to his Spiritual Theology series - starting with Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, followed by Eat This Book and then continued in The Jesus Way. They are eye-opening and heart-warming, and also challenging - I feel as if my heart is being probed for false motives and sub-Christian beliefs. Incidentally, if you dislike The Message as much as I do, please don't let that keep you from reading these books!

Anyway, the thesis of this current instalment is simple: if we're going to do Jesus' work, we need to do it in Jesus' way. We can't just adopt whatever methods seem to work. Not just the ends, but also the means are important to God.

And so I came across this passage yesterday:

More often than not I find my Christian brothers and sisters uncritcially embracing the ways and means practiced by the high-profile men and women who lead large corporations, congregations, nations and causes, people who show us how to make money, win wars, manage people, sell products, manipulate emotions... But these ways and means more often than not violate the ways of Jesus. Christians today are conspicuous for going along with whatever the culture decides is charismatic, successful, influential - whatever gets things done, whatever can gather a crowd of followers - hardly noticing that these ways and means are at odds with the clearly marked way that Jesus walked and called us to follow. Doesn't anybody notice that the ways and means taken up, often enthusiastically, are blasphemously at odds with the way Jesus leads his followers? Why doesn't anyone notice?

(The emphasis is mine, but that's how it sounds in my head...)

It's Freshers' week in two of the Universities I work with. My prayer and desire for the Christian students at both is that they would do the job Jesus has given us to do in the way that Jesus would have us do it, in the power that only Jesus gives.