Pastor

Eugene H. Peterson, the translator of The Message, a Bible version that has sold millions of copies, and the author of more than thirty other books, tells his own life story to address a question he found strangely overlooked: what is a pastor actually supposed to do? The book is his memoir of that search.

When his denomination asked him to start a new congregation in Bel Air, Maryland, Peterson accepted, somewhat to his own surprise, and Christ Our King Presbyterian Church was founded. He soon realized he was not sure of the role himself. He had encountered many ministers, from his Pentecostal childhood in Montana to his years at seminary in New York, and had respected only a handful of them. Fearing the job's demands would overwhelm him unless he grasped its core, he began a thirty-year effort to understand this particular calling.

Rather than theorizing in the abstract, the book anchors his vocation in concrete surroundings: the land, the sacred space, and the people he served, and shows how these shaped both his ministry and his faith. It also takes on church marketing, celebrity preachers, and the church's comfortable entanglement with American glitz and consumer culture. The result is a plain, faith-centered portrait of the pastor's work today, which Peterson sums up as attending closely to what is happening now among people and before God, and drawing others' attention to it.