{"id":796,"date":"2015-12-07T15:43:31","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T21:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedisciplemaker.org\/?p=796"},"modified":"2015-12-07T15:43:31","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T21:43:31","slug":"conversations-5-minutes-with-eugene-peterson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.navpress.com\/sites\/thedisciplemaker\/2015\/12\/conversations-5-minutes-with-eugene-peterson\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversations: 5 Minutes with Eugene Peterson"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"bsf_rt_marker\"><\/div><p>&#8230;he is best known for translating <em>The Message<\/em> &#8230;.\u00a0 <!--more-->EUGENE PETERSON served for 29 years as pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. He has written numerous books about Christian life and pastoral\u00a0ministry, but he is best known for translating the Bible into the contemporary language of The Message.<br \/>\n<strong>DJ:<\/strong> What keeps your relationship with God alive?<br \/>\n<strong>Eugene:<\/strong> The short answer is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It took me a long time to start living this. I was immersed in a Christian culture that dumped advice on me nonstop about how\u00a0to maintain a \u201cvital\u201d relationship with God. And I did everything anybody told me to do. I got prett<img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-798 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.navpress.com\/sites\/thedisciplemaker\/wp-content\/uploads\/20.CONVERSATIONS_page1_image1-232x300.jpg\" alt=\"20.CONVERSATIONS_page1_image1\" width=\"232\" height=\"300\" \/>y good at it. But the better I got at it the more my relationship with God suffered.<br \/>\nGradually I began to understand what the church had been teaching for centuries, namely, that it is God\u2019s nature to seek us out and draw us into participation with what He is doing. I realized that He was a lot more interested in my relationship with Him than I was. I relaxed. I began to cultivate quiet, listening, and ordinary obedience. The less interested I became in \u201ckeeping my relationship with God alive,\u201d the more I was able to notice and participate in what God was doing to keep me in relationship with Him.<br \/>\n<strong>DJ:<\/strong> What spiritual practice has most shaped your walk with God?<br \/>\n<strong>Eugene:<\/strong> Keeping a weekly Sabbath\u2014a day my wife and I define as \u201cpraying and laying.\u201d A day we don\u2019t do anything that has to be done.\u00a0 When we realized that the command to keep a Sabbath is one of the most repeated in Scripture and yet the most ignored in our culture, we had to readjust radically the way we were living. No other decision has made as much difference to our lives across the board. It has impacted our marriage, children, church life, friendships, writing . . . the works.\u00a0\u00a0 Sabbath-keeping shifted our attention from what we were doing for God to what God was doing for us. Our work became subsumed in His.<br \/>\n<strong>DJ:<\/strong> Who was influential in your spiritual growth?<br \/>\n<strong>Eugene:<\/strong> My father and mother were the primary influences in my life for 17 years. They provided security and stability, and they lived the Christian life in ways that gave me something to look up to. But they didn\u2019t expect me to copy them. They trusted me to develop in \u201cspirit and in truth\u201d in my own ways. I\u2019ve never departed far from the habits I had learned in their keeping. I never had to rebel or get rid of \u201cbaggage.\u201d That was a great gift.<br \/>\n<strong>DJ:<\/strong> In your experience, what has been key to effective ministry?<br \/>\n<strong>Eugene:<\/strong> When I became a pastor, I didn\u2019t know how to pastor. I deliberately schooled myself in pastoral traditions of the last 2,000 years, and I sought to develop a scriptural perspective on the ministry. It didn\u2019t take me long to realize that virtually everything in Scripture is rooted in particular places and deals with named people\u2014no lofty abstractions, no sweeping generalities.\u00a0\u00a0 I decided that I had to stay as long as possible in my congregation in order to work out\u2014over the long haul\u2014what it meant to be a community of sinners saved by grace. And my work had to be personal\u2014hand-to-hand, face-to-face. The size of my congregation had to be such that I could know everyone\u2019s name and visit everyone in his home.<br \/>\n<strong>DJ:<\/strong> What aspect of pastoring did you enjoy most?<br \/>\n<strong>Eugene:<\/strong> As a pastor, you\u2019re caught up in a kind of rhythm that works off the pulse of the gospel itself. Men and women keep getting saved, keep sinning, keep disappointing you, keep surprising you. To be able to call a congregation to worship God every week, lead them in prayers and in listening to God\u2019s Word, and then live with them through the next six days with those prayers and words permeating the world in which we are living together is a magnificent way to live. I\u2019m glad I got to do it.<br \/>\nUsed by permission of Discipleship Journal. Copyright \u00a9 July\/August 2006, Issue 154, The Navigators. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.navpress.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.navpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;he is best known for translating The Message &#8230;.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":""},"categories":[4,17],"tags":[522],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Conversations: 5 Minutes with Eugene Peterson - The Disciplemaker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.navpress.com\/sites\/thedisciplemaker\/2015\/12\/conversations-5-minutes-with-eugene-peterson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Conversations: 5 Minutes with Eugene Peterson - 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