Prayer Is

Pastor Eugene H. Peterson

The all-embracing openness that characterizes Peterson’s thinking is evident in the many sources he cites as influences—Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Protestant theologian Karl Barth, sixteenth-century Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Scottish minister Alexander Whyte, Baron Friedrich von Hugel. Peterson is widely and deeply read, a Christian humanist who came into the ministry during a time of great ecumenical and interfaith cross-fertilization and receptivity to learning from all kinds of faith streams and currents.

–David E. Anderson [Senior editor of Religion News Service].

Additional Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.”

–Pastor Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir].

“I love being an American, I love this place in which I have been placed—its language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love ‘the American way,’ its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed….The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.”

–Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir].

“Congregation is a company of people who are defined by their creation in the image of God, living souls, whether they know it or not. They are not problems to be fixed, but mysteries to be honored and revered. Who else in the community other than the pastor has the assigned task of greeting men and women and welcoming them into a congregation in which they are known not by what is wrong with them, but by who they are, just as they are?”

–Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir] p. 137.

“Reading the Bible can get you into a lot of trouble. Few things are more important in the Christian community than reading the Scriptures rightly. The holy Scriptures carry immense authority. Read wrongly, they can ignite war, legitimize abuse, sanction hate, cultivate arrogance. Not only can, but have … So caveat lector – let the reader beware. Read; but read rightly. The adverb rightly in this context does not only mean accurately; it means right-heartedly as well as right-mindedly, what the biblical writers referred to as uprightly.”

–Eugene Peterson [Introduction to The Act of Bible Reading, edited by Elmer Dyck (Downers Grove: IVP, 1996)] p. 8.

“I think there’s a whole part of the Christian church which operates out of fear. It’s a negative kind of gospel, which I think is quite contrary to the Gospel that Jesus brought to us. I’m not happy with that. As with Trump, I think we can survive that too. Overall, I’m optimistic. That’s the short answer.”

–Eugene H. Peterson [Interview with Jonathan Merritt, Religion News Service, July 11, 2017].