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HarperOne
March 2011
On Sale: February 21, 2011
336 pages ISBN: 0061988200 EAN: 9780061988202 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In The Pastor, Eugene H. Peterson, the translator of the
multimillion-selling The Message and the author of more than
thirty books, offers his life story as one answer to the
surprisingly neglected question: What does it mean to be a
pastor? When Peterson was asked by his denomination to begin a new
church in Bel Air, Maryland, he surprised himself by saying
yes. And so was born Christ Our King Presbyterian Church.
But Peterson quickly learned that he was not exactly sure
what a pastor should do. He had met many ministers in his
life, from his Pentecostal upbringing in Montana to his
seminary days in New York, and he admired only a few. He
knew that the job's demands would drown him unless he
figured out what the essence of the job really was. Thus
began a thirty-year journey into the heart of this uncommon
vocation—the pastorate. The Pastor steers away from abstractions, offering instead a
beautiful rendering of a life tied to the physical world—the
land, the holy space, the people—shaping Peterson's pastoral
vocation as well as his faith. He takes on church marketing,
mega pastors, and the church's too-cozy relationship to
American glitz and consumerism to present a simple,
faith-filled job description of what being a pastor means
today. In the end, Peterson discovered that being a pastor
boiled down to "paying attention and calling attention to
'what is going on right now' between men and women, with
each other and with God." The Pastor is destined to become a
classic statement on the contemporary trials, joys, and
meaning of this ancient vocation.
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