Church communities… Friends, hope these thought’s from Eugene Peterson benefit you as much as they have challenged, encouraged and blessed me. I highly recommend the book – “Under the Unpredictable Plant – An Exploration in Vocational Holiness”, Eugene Peterson, WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

“Pastoral work consists of modest, daily, assigned work. It is like farm work. Most pastoral work involves routines similar to cleaning out the barn, mucking out the stalls, spreading manure, pulling weeds. This is not, any of it, bad work in itself, but if we expected to ride a glistening black stallion in daily parades and then return to the barn where a lackey grooms our steed for us, we will be severely disappointed and end up being horribly resentful.

There is much that is glorious in pastoral work, but the congregation, as such, is not glorious. The congregation is a Nineveh-like place; a site for hard work without a great deal of hope for success, at least as success is measured on the charts. But somebody has to do it, has to faithfully give personal visibility to the continuities of the word of God in the place of worship and prayer, in the places of daily work and play, in the traffic jams of virtue and sin.

Anyone who glamorizes congregations does a grave disservice to pastors. We hear tales of glitzy, enthusiastic churches and wonder what in the world we are doing wrong that our people don’t turn out that way under our preaching. On close examination, though, it turns out that there are no wonderful congregations. Hang around long enough and sure enough there are gossips who won’t shut up, furnaces that malfunction, sermons that misfire, disciples who quit, choirs that go flat – and worse. Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.

I don’t deny that there are moments of splendor in congregations. There are. Many and frequent. But there are also conditions of squalor. Why deny it? And how could it be otherwise? There is not an honest pastor in the land who is not deeply aware of the slum conditions that exist in the congregation and, therefore, the unending task of clearing out the garbage, finding space for breathing, getting adequate nourishment, and venturing into the streets day after day, night after night, risking life and limb in acts of faith and love. We experience this week after week, year after year. Some weeks it is a little better, some weeks a little worse. But always it is there. These are the identical conditions that Moses faced at the foot of Sinai and Jeremiah in the streets of Jerusalem, St. Paul in the lecherous pews at Corinth and St. John among the bruised reeds in Thyatira. Denial of this incapacitates us for our real work. Avoidance of this separates us from Isaiah’s insights and David’s pain, the hungers and thirst’s that pull us into Christ-crucified righteousness.”