“This hunger for something radical—something so true that it burned in his bones—was a constant in Eugene’s life. His longing for God ignited a ferocity in his soul.”

Encounter the multifaceted life of one of the most influential and creative pastors of the past half century with unforgettable stories of Eugene’s lifelong devotion to his craft and love of language, the influences and experiences that shaped his unquenchable faith, the inspiration for his decision to translate The Message, and his success and struggles as a pastor, husband, and father.

Author Winn Collier was given exclusive access to Eugene and his materials for the production of this landmark work. Drawing from his friendship and expansive view of Peterson’s life, Collier offers an intimate, beautiful, and earthy look into a remarkable life.

For Eugene, the gifts of life were inexhaustible: the glint of fading light over the lake, a kiss from Jan, a good joke, a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. As you enter into his story, you’ll find yourself doing the same—noticing how the most ordinary things shimmer with a new and unexpected beauty.

Get it here.

“Holy Presence: Eugene Peterson and the Pastoral Imagination”

Led by Dr. Winn Collier (October 25-29, 2021)

application deadline April 15, 2021 (cohort is FULL)

This Doctor of Ministry cohort will invite both established and emerging writers in multiple genres and contexts (those in traditional ministry and those whose work and writing moves them into broader arenas of service) to think deeply, theologically, and artfully about their work. As people whose very life arrives from the Word, Christians ought to be those with the deepest reverence for language. Yet, too often, our writing is stilted, banal, cliched, moralistic and bereft of the beauty and care the craft requires. If we are dealing with holy work simultaneously immersed in gritty humanity and divine transcendence, then our writing ought to carry a haunting lilt while piercing the heart and the mind. “The Sacred Art of Writing” aims to walk with students in this joyful, sacred calling.

This cohort welcomes candidates with a master’s degree who are able to articulate a theological undergirding to their calling to the writing craft and demonstrate appropriate experience and competency. Writing samples will be required in the admissions packet.

Detailed description of “The Sacred Art of Writing” Learning Sequence

Written by Dr. Winn Collier, Peterson Center Director

Pilfering through the cabinets at Christ Our King Presbyterian’s library, I found boxes of cassette tapes affixed with old, wrinkled labels chronicling decades of  Sundays when Eugene was their pastor. I carried several home; and weeks later,  I pulled a bulky Radio Shack player out of storage, slid a yellowing cassette into  the slot and hit play. The spools whined and lurched. The voices were scratchy  and muffled. The recorder moaned as if in pain.  

There was an opening choral piece, distorted notes laboring from the black box.  After the song, Eugene stepped to the pulpit. He cleared his throat and fumbled  with his Bible. I turned up the volume. Eugene took his precious time. Then slowly,  deliberately, in his distinctive calm, gravelly voice, he said three words: Let us worship.  

Then silence. Awkward silence at first. But I found myself leaning forward, pulled  toward that voice, that space. Pulled toward God. How could these three  simple words—via this atrocious, low-tech apparatus and such a plain  invitation—how could they usher me into an encounter with The Holy? 

Eugene was a masterful writer, but he was not an extraordinary preacher. His  journals reveal seasons when he felt his preaching pulsed with vigor and Spirit-life  and other seasons when his sermons were anemic and brittle. Once after  months of preaching without his notes (he always wrote out his sermons, but his  reliance on his pages varied), his wife Jan—unenthused with the results— suggested he return to the manuscripts. While many of Christ Our King’s members shared heartfelt stories of the immense impact of Eugene’s teaching,  they never mentioned pulpit charisma. Rather, over and again, people, in a  variety of ways, described their slow but palatable awakening to God’s  presence. They describe their soul stirring as they began to recognize God alive  in Scripture, in their prayers, in the baptismal waters, in the bread and wine, in  their friendships, in their marriages, in their sorrows, in their work. 

They described this joyful weight of Divine presence, and they inevitably also  described Eugene’s presence. Unhurried. Curious. Immensely human. Long,  meandering conversations. Laughter. No hint whatsoever that Eugene was  prodding them to achieve something or that his own ego or reputation as a  pastor was on the line. For some, it was unsettling to be part of a church with so  little programming or to have a pastor who didn’t prescribe to the normal  mechanisms for church growth or ensconced strategies for discipleship. But if  those folks stayed, they’d eventually notice how all of life (Sundays and  weekdays) integrated into a God-radiating story. Life became prayer. And they  recognized how much they appreciated the way Eugene honored God’s  unique pursuit of each individual person, nothing cookie cutter. People felt safe,  seen for who they were rather than for who they might be. People realized,  maybe for the first time, that they actually had a pastor.  

For Eugene, being a pastor was unflinchingly about God (and he lamented how  this most basic truth needed to be reclaimed). The pastor’s essential job—above  every other responsibility—was to stand amid this beleaguered, beautiful world  and point one direction, say this one word: God. This is why the Christian act of  worship was essential. More than our profuse words, we need to hear God speak. More than our presumptions or agendas or spiritual visions, we need God’s way and wisdom. This is why with Eugene there was so much silence, why he was slow to give opinions, why he envisioned a church out of sync with prevailing ideals. Eugene, in the sacred chamber of his soul, was continually moving deeper and further into God’s wide, expansive reality. He was attuned to a different frequency. 

This base conviction—that a pastor’s work has to do with God—explains his dogged challenge to dominant North American pastoral models. Eugene was not a bookish curmudgeon or fixed-in the-past contrarian who reflexively snubbed technology and modernity (Eugene’s reading transgressed into every field and  direction, always soaking up fresh ideas—and he possessed a raucous spirit of  adventure and playfulness). Rather, Eugene believed that burgeoning pastoral  paradigms (pastor as leadership expert, celebrity, management guru, fundraiser, CEO, therapist, etc.) inevitably moved God to the sidelines. Lots of  God-language but very little God. Very little encounter with the Holy.  

However, Eugene’s unrelenting attentiveness to God and to the pastoral  practice of holy presence didn’t mean he lived in a stifled, cerebral world. Just the opposite. Eugene used the word imagination a lot—and imagination did not  mean fancifully envisioning a world one hoped could exist but really didn’t.  Rather, imagination embodies the Spirit-infused capacity to see the world as it  truly Is: God’s world, a world bursting with redemption and goodness and  ultimate wholeness, even if for the moment we’ve committed ourselves to the  shadows, delusions and trivial narratives. To have a spiritual imagination is to  have eyes to see God’s world for what it truly is: the ground where God fills the  whole earth with his glory. When God fills the world, we discover every  conversation and vocation and human endeavor to be a burning bush. Holiness  everywhere. God everywhere.  

For Eugene, seeing God as the burning center of life meant that Christian faith  was not abstract or disembodied but integrated, personal, relational. “Spiritual  theology means that everything in the Scripture can be lived,” he said. This is  why for Eugene gardening and carpentry and birdwatching and Shostakovich’s  compositions and Levertov’s poetry and Stegner’s novels were intertwined with  prayer. Whenever someone asked Eugene how to pray (one of the most  important questions a pastor could receive, he believed), he’d ask: “What do  you love? Where do you feel most truly yourself?”  

This is why Eugene wrote The Message not for the broad, general “Christian  market” but for particular people (truck drivers, teachers, defense contractors,  farmers) sitting in the pews of Christ Our King. This is why Eugene felt out of place  in halls of power (at the White House and around the tables where people wear  titles and accomplishments on their sleeves) but was at ease with plainspoken  folk and was most comfortable in his denim shirt and boots. This is why Eugene  didn’t enjoy large conferences where he was on stage under bright lights talking  to a sea of faces but to no one he knew by name. This is why Eugene felt uneasy  when churches grew too big. After a certain size, he thought it impossible to  know people’s names and stories, that the church would lose the relational  binding essential to a truly shared life in God. He feared pastors would become  managers or institutional spokespersons rather than a pastor. 

Every stitch of these pastoral threads—the holiness, the humanness, the  redeemed imagination—grew, Eugene insisted, in the soil of ordinary life. In the  immediate place that we find ourselves. With the people God has given us.  While pastors may be vexed with the seductive temptation to build a successful 

religious organization or to absorb and then emulate the corporate-speak of  leadership maxims (and Eugene was convinced ambition was the bedeviling sin  for many American pastors), Eugene believed that to be a pastor was to be  present with the people, to give oneself to the long, tedious and unremarkable  work of sustained, physical presence. Sharing wedding vows and grieving at a  graveside. The joy (and agony) of children. Careers going south. Bad news from  the doctor. Years perhaps when nothing seemed to be happening at all. This  work could not be rushed. It could not be charted and measured. It must be  lived over a lifetime, trusting that the God of small, dying seeds would once  again, by the end of the story, resurrect lush and dazzling life. 

Eugene spent his life living his conviction that to be a pastor is to be present with  the people—and then with these dear people, to find our common life and  future subsumed by the Triune God who fills all in all.