Preaching: Based on what you have learned with The Message and your other writing, if you were starting over as a pastor are there some things you would do differently now?
Peterson: I wouldn’t work as hard as I did. I was a new church pastor. New church pastors are full of insecurities, we don’t want to fail.
I remember reading about Roger Bannister, the guy who ran the first four-minute mile. He said he spent a few years as a carpenter. He said he was never really good at it, but he made up for his lack of expertise by using a lot of nails. When I read that I thought: boy Roger, that is me as a young pastor; I made up for it by using lots of nails! It took me awhile to get over that to live a more contemplative life.
I feel very fortunate. I was able to live with a lot of continuity between the time I was twelve years old and the time I am now. I was lucky – I had good parents. I had bad pastors, which may have been good, in terms of “I don’t want to do it that way. I don’t know what I am doing, but I know what I am not going to do.”
Along the way, pastors live under enormous pressure to fit into the American culture and I was seduced a number of times to do this: therapeutic models, the civil rights models, activism. Those are strong, strong pulls. I got right to the edge two, three, four times, and then realized that this is my vocation, this is what I am supposed to do. I didn’t waste a lot of time in detours, and I could have. It is easy. I hope that if I did I would recover, but I didn’t waste a lot of time.
Preaching: As you think about your work as a preacher then as a writer, who are some of the people who have particularly influenced you?
Peterson: The primary influence for me as a pastor was my home. I grew up in a small town. My dad was a butcher; my mom was a kind of a preacher/evangelist. This is a Pentecostal church, the early days of the Pentecostal movement – at least the early 30s. That’s not the real early days but there was a lot of the original stuff there. So I felt on the inside of Christianity and the church.
I have been asked that question a number of times and I try to think of other people, but I really think that was the major influence. That is where all the images that now kind of carry me come out of – my dad’s butcher shop and my mom’s storytelling. It was a storytelling culture. There was a lot of morality. People didn’t read books by and large, but there was a lot of storytelling by pastors and evangelists. Most of them were really good storytellers. That story, narrative way of thinking through life was embedded in me pretty deeply.