July 18, 2025

Summer Reads: Working the Angles

I confess I seldom take time to read for pleasure. Almost all my reading is to resource my ministry among you. (Thankfully, that no longer includes multiple drafts of dissertations and returning them covered in red ink.) However, vacations in general, and summer in particular, I take a book or two out of my “intended for pleasure” stack which never seems to grow smaller. This week and next, I am offering suggestions for two books about ministry and church that I have found very helpful, and maybe some one or two reading this piece might find interesting—even entertaining.

Eugene Peterson is nearly a household name thanks to The Message. But Peterson wrote many other things that are well worth a look. If you are open to a fairly quick read on what it means to be ‘pastor’ as well as what it means to be ‘church,’ I highly recommend Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. It is short, provocative, and insightful. Reading it as a seminarian, it changed the way I understood ministry, even as it changed the way I trained pastors my entire career.

Peterson was the solo pastor of a Presbyterian church in Maryland. His people liked him very much as their pastor. That’s why they we so stunned to find out he wanted to leave. He said he was expected to do so many things as a pastor, but few of them were what a pastor was supposed to do. He wanted the church to do the administration, the budget, in fact everything they considered the ministry of the church. This would free him up to do what pastors are called to do, what Peterson considers the three angles of ministry: praying, studying scripture, and forming the spiritual lives of the congregation and each individual in it.

This is an excerpt, a taste of how Peterson began that book, written in 1987.

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate.They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery, and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does its work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

In your case, you have hired two sinners to be your pastors. In an outcome centered, competition-based, success driven culture, some churches have become indistinguishable from the culture; and intentionally so. Both Pastor Lauren and I, flawed and imperfect as we may be, have drunk from the well of Peterson’s Angles. It has shaped and continues to shape our vision of pastoral ministry at First Covenant. Curious? Then pack this short little book in your beach bag. Aside from giving you insight into how we as pastors approach our ministry, it just might give you a new vision of your place in church and become a well of inspiration you return to often.

Next week I will suggest another short book that predicted the coming age of market driven churches that Peterson was so troubled by, and in many ways is still with us. But if Pastor Lauren and I work the angles right, it won’t be at First Covenant Church, Seattle.

Don’t forget to wear sunscreen,

~ Pastor Todd

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