Eugene Peterson is known to most church leaders through The Message, a contemporary Bible translation which he developed. But as he will tell you, that work grew out of his nearly 30 years as founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Md. From that pastorate he went to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, then to Regent College as Professor of Spiritual Theology. He now writes and speaks full time from his home in Montana. He has written or contributed to more than thirty books. Preaching Editor Michael Duduit recently sat down with Peterson to talk about how his work with the biblical text related to his years as a pastor and preacher.

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Preaching: When your name is mentioned, people immediately think of you as a writer, although you have also been a preacher and served as a pastor for many years. Over the years how have your writing and preaching informed each other?

Peterson: They are actually the same thing. A lot of pastors I know fight in order to get time to write. I never had to do that – it has always been part of the same thing. Though I didn’t always know I was a pastor, I always knew I was a writer – that was part of my livelihood since high school. It took me awhile to realize I was a pastor.

When I became a pastor I found that nobody else had the same idea of being a pastor that I did. I wasn’t fortunate with my pastors as I grew up. I really didn’t really feel that this was my vocation; I wanted to find out how to do it right. I wanted to be a novelist when I was growing up, and realized I wasn’t smart enough, so as I realized that I didn’t know how to be a pastor. As I was reading other people, they didn’t know how to do it either. So my writing was a self-education, discovering what was going on.

Writing itself is a hermeneutical process – you are learning, discovering, shadowing parts that you hadn’t noticed before. I think writing saved my vocational life, saved my pastoral life. I think if I had not written, I would have been swept along into the generic and consumer kind of world, marketing.

This also provided me a way to take the Bible seriously in a vocational way, not just personal. There are no pastors in the Bible. A pastor, the way we understand it, has really developed in a different kind of a culture setting. I was also committed to the fact that the Bible was our text, so I went to Scripture to find out what was going on. I was looking at the life of a pastor that was formed and shaped by the biblical revelation. It doesn’t give you a job description. So there has to be something different. There has to be a way of living in this boundary between culture and Christ.

So I began to read. My first major pastoral book was Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. The key came when I was starting a new church. I was a new pastor, I was trying to build some defense against consumerism, therapeutic models, entrepreneurial models. I discovered a passing reference in a book on the Hebrew prophets by Abraham Heschel; I can’t remember for sure which. There are five major festivals of the Jews, the required festivals, the three plus the two. At some point during the festival somebody got up and read: at Passover, the Song of Songs, at Pentecost, Ruth, and on and on. I thought it strange that they pick five little books to make a loaf. At these big festivals – preaching festivals, proclamation festivals – somebody stands up and reads Song of Songs, Ruth and Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther.