These days I’m listening to Winn Collier’s book “A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson.” I am increasingly enamored with the value system promoted via Eugene’s story, and I’m exceedingly convinced that Eugene’s approach to pastoral work, and to simply being human, is richly compatible with the emphatic commendation of God revealed in Scripture.

Below are some examples of how Eugene’s value system heartily aligns with the anomalous approach of Jesus of Nazareth.

“This is one reason Eugene was so (frustratingly) reluctant to dispense advice, why he so detested celebrity: he knew these postures of the ego-driven expert were lies and illusions. And this is why Eugene would rather pray with someone than argue theology, why he’d be eager for a call from his neighbor while letting prominent figures go to his answering machine: friendship (with God and one another) is real.”

“I am not a truly card-carrying evangelical—there is a sense in which I am most comfortable as an “outsider evangelical” within the halls of tradition. Regent is too comfortable for me—and there is no sense of larger context: the reality of church complexity. Evangelicalism is too combative and clear-cut for me.”

“I would want to tell pastors to quit being so busy and learn quiet, to quit talking so much and learn silence, to quit treating the congregation as customers and treat them with dignity as souls-in-formation.”

“Thanks to Sven, I was being prepared to understand a congregation as a gathering of people that requires a context as large as the Bible itself if we are to deal with the ambiguities of life in the actual circumstances in which people live them….For me, my congregation would become a work-in-progress—a novel in which everyone and everything is connected in a salvation story in which Jesus has the last word. No reductions to stereotype.”