This year I have been reading some books by Eugene H. Peterson (yes, the guy who wrote 'The Message' version of the bible). "Shaping the Angles" was first which was great, and now I am working through "Under the Unpredictable Plant," which as title suggests uses the story of Jonah to explore the pastoral vocation. What follows are some quotes which I pulled out of Section III "In the Belly of the Fish" which resonated with me as I seek to journey with a congregation in a local church setting.

“...We assume that because people want more religion, they want more of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. WE assume that when they gather in our congregations and ask us to lead them in prayer, they want us to lead them before the throne of a Holy God. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The people in our congregations are, in fact, out shopping for idols. They enter our churches with the same mind-set in which they go to the shopping mall, to get something that will please them or satisfy an appetite or need....Congregations commonly see the pastor as the quality control engineer in the factory....They want God, in a way, but certainly not a ‘jealous God,’ not the ‘God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Mostly they want to be their own god and stay in control but have ancillary idol assistance for the hard parts, which the pastor can show them how to get.”p 80-81

“...it is characteristic of post-Eden human beings to try to be or get their own gods and that this characteristic is persistent, subtle and relentless.” p81

[After a congregation had developed and grown during the construction of the church building, and then had begun to decline, he writes)”I learned to my dismay that nothing at all was wrong, it was just that there was nothing now to do....I had suddenly awakened to the fact that what we can get our hands on is idols. I thought that we were there to worship God and love our neighbours, living into a holy mystery.”p83

“It turned out that far more people that I would have guessed had helped to develop and build the new church because it was a religious project, an idol that gave meaning and focus in the context of something worthwhile and suggestive of transcendence. They were not interested in God. Worshiping God was not emotionally exciting. Loving neighbours was not ego-satisfying. They drifted away and went on to get involved in other community projects.” P 83-84

“While everyone has a hunger for God, deep and insatiable, none of us has any great desire for him. What we really want is to be our own gods and to have whatever other gods that are around to help us in our work. We are trained from an early age to be discriminating consumers on our way to higher standards of living. It should be no great surprise to pastors when congregations expect us to collaborate in this enterprise.” P 84-85

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