As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God - Hardcover

Peterson, Eugene H.

 
9781601429674: As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1601429673 ISBN 13: 9781601429674
Verlag: WaterBrook, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Living Out the Word Made Flesh
 
“Sixty years ago I found myself distracted,” Eugene Peterson wrote. “A chasm had developed between the way I was preaching from the pulpit and my deepest convictions on what it meant to be a pastor.”
 
And so began Peterson’s journey to live and teach a life of congruence—congruence between preaching and living, between what we do and the way we do it, between what is written in Scripture and how we live out that truth.
 
Nothing captures the biblical foundation for this journey better than Peterson’s teachings over his twenty-nine years as a pastor. As Kingfishers Catch Fire offers a never-before-published collection of these teachings to anyone longing for a richer, truer spirituality.
 
Peterson’s strikingly beautiful prose and deeply grounded insights usher us into a new understanding of how to live out the good news of the Word made flesh. 

This is one man’s compelling quest to discover not only how to be a pastor but how to be a human being.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, authored more than thirty books, including the spiritual classics Run with the Horses and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. He earned a degree in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University, a graduate degree in theology from New York Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in Semitic languages from John Hopkins University. He also received several honorary doctoral degrees. He was founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he and his wife, Jan, served for twenty-nine years. Peterson held the title of professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, British Columbia from 1998 until his death in 2018.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

LETTER TO THE READER

Eugene Peterson. The brilliant pastor-poet behind the wildly successful The Message Bible and spiritual classics like Running with the Horses and A Long Obediencein the Same Direction. A detail you may not know is that he spent twenty-nine years as pastor of the same church in Bel Air, Maryland, faithfully sharing his heart with his congregation Sunday after Sunday and all the days in between.

Wouldn’t it have been amazing to have been a fly on the wall or a person in the pew those twenty-nine years, listening to Peterson unpack “the whole counsel ofGod” (Acts 20:27)? What you have in your hands — As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God — is our attempt to make that happen.

Throughout this definitive collection of teachings, Peterson is intentional in keeping the main idea the main idea: that we, as Christians, live lives of congruence. Put another way, that the inside matches the outside. Or as we used to hear, that we indeed practice what we preach.

With the exception of small editorial polishes here and there, these teachings are presented in their original form, without any anxiety to update. In other words, there will be references to the moon landing, nods now and then to places specific to Peterson’s congregation, and phrases like “My text for today is . . .” We believe they add a charming integrity to this work, more responsible than relevant, each page honoring real time, revealing how we can “find ourselves living, almost in spite of ourselves, the Christ life in the Christ way.” We hope you agree.

Sincerely,
The WaterBrook Multnomah editorial team

PREFACE

Sixty years ago I found myself distracted. I was being tossed about by “every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14), except it was not winds of doctrines that were distracting me but the winds of the times. It was the sixties, and there was a lot going on: charismatic personalities like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights revolution in the South, Timothy Leary and the drug culture, Earth Day and the flower children, Vietnam . . . There was so much going on — in the world, in the culture, in the church — so many important things to do, urgent voices telling me what had to be done. There was no one thing needful. There were many things needful, all clamoring for my attention.

I was living in a small town twenty miles from Baltimore, a sleepy colonial town that was fast becoming a suburb. I had been assigned by my denomination to gather and organize a congregation. I started out with a fair amount of confidence and much energy. I was well supported organizationally and financially. The personal encouragement was strong. The mission I had been called to lead was clearly articulated.

But as time went on, I found myself increasingly at odds with my advisors on matters of means, the methods proposed for ensuring the numerical and financial viability of the congregation but without even a footnote regarding the nurturing of souls. I was given books to read on demographics and sociology. I was sent to seminars on programming strategies for appealing to the secular suburban mind-set. Leadership was interpreted almost entirely from business and consumer models.

It wasn’t long before I was in crisis: a chasm had developed between the way I was preaching from the pulpit and my deepest convictions on what it meant to be a pastor. I sensed my attitude toward the men and women I was gathering into a congregation was silently shaped by how I was planning to use them to succeed as a pastor developing a new congregation with little thought to serving these souls with the bread of life. I found myself thinking competitively about other churches in town, calculating ways in which I could beat them in the numbers game.

Then three things happened about the same time that brought me to the realization I didn’t know what I was doing. It began in my pulpit. I realized I didn’t know how to preach. I was not a preacher. What I was doing from the pulpit each Sundaywas not preaching; in fact, it had nothing to do with preaching. I was whipping up enthusiasm. I was explaining the nature of what we had to do, while arbitrarily fitting Bible texts into key places. I was using the place of worship as a bully pulpit. I had become very American in all matters of ways and means. I never wavered in my theological convictions, but I had a job to do — get a congregation up and running — and I was ready to use any means at hand to do it: appeal to the consumer instincts of people, use abstract principles to unify enthusiasm, shape goals by using catchy slogans, create publicity images that provided ego enhancement.

And then, almost at the same time, two more things happened: I heard a lecture and read a poem. The combination of lecture and poem changed everything. The two events taught me what I needed to know to become a pastor of the gospel. The lecture was given in person by Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician; the poem was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, long dead.

Paul Tournier in midlife had shifted the location of his medical practice froma consulting room, with its examining table and supporting laboratories and surgeries, to his living room, before a fireplace, with him holding a pipe in his hand instead of hanging a stethoscope from his neck. For the rest of his life he used words — listened to and spoken — in a setting of personal relationship as the primary means for carrying out his healing vocation. He left a way of medical practice that was primarily focused on the body and embraced a medical practice that dealt primarily with the whole person, an integrated being of body, soul, and spirit. He wrote many books and I read them all.

Driving the twenty miles home from Johns Hopkins Hospital, the site of the lecture, my wife and I commented appreciatively on Tournier’s words, in the courseof which she said, “Wasn’t that translator great?” And I said, “What translator? There wasn’t any translator.” To which she said, “Eugene, he was lecturing in French. You don’t know twenty words of French. Of course there was a translator.” And then I remembered her: a woman about his age, standing to the side and a little behind him, translating his French into English. She was so unobtrusive, so self-effacing, so modest in what she was doing that I forgot she was there, and ten minutes after the lecture, I didn’t even remember she had been there.

But there was something else: Paul Tournier himself. During the lecture I had the growing feeling that who he was and what he was saying were completely congruent. He had been living for a long time in Switzerland. Precisely the way he lived and what he was now saying in Baltimore came across as an accurate and mature expression of all he had been living and writing. Just as the translator assimilated to the lecturer, her English words carrying not just the meaning but also the spirit of his French words, so his words were one with his life — not just what he knew and what he had done, but who he was.

It was a memorable experience, the transparency of that man. No dissonance between word and spirit, no pretense. And the corresponding transparency of the woman. No ego, no self-consciousness in either one of them. Later I remembered T. S. Eliot’s comments on Charles Williams: “Some men are less than their works, some are more. Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough. . . . [He was] the same man in his life and in his writings.” 1

That’s the sense I...

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Verlag
WaterBrook
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601429673
ISBN 13 
9781601429674
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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