Photo by Scott Webb on Pexels.com This past Sunday, my message on the life of David ("Cracks in the Legacy") explored the need to shed unhelpful idealization of others or the church for a more grounded approach I described as faith-filled realism. There is no portion of Scripture that tends to undo David's legacy as …
It Needs to Get Inside of You: Eugene Peterson on the Spiritual Disciplines
One of my favorite authors is Eugene Peterson. Peterson is best known as the author behind the paraphrase of the Bible, The Message. As a pastor, his works on pastoral ministry for our contemporary era, such as Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work and Under the Unpredictable Plant, are unparalleled. …
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Ten Ways Eugene Peterson Shaped My Pastoral Ministry
My first introduction to the work of Eugene Peterson was through one of my college roommates, who often read from Peterson’s paraphrase of Scripture, The Message. In his own idiosyncratic style, Peterson’s work with the words of Scripture helped me remember God’s word was a relational word to us here and now. Roughly five years …
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Listening in order to Speak
Eugene Peterson is the pastor-preacher-professor who translated the Bible into the highly popular paraphrase, The Message. One of the most striking aspects of The Message is how Peterson used everyday language in it. The 'everyday'-ness of the wording is sometimes strange because we are used to using one set of words for our religious life …
Bono and Eugene Peterson
It's no secret to anyone that I love U2 and that I love reading the works of Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message. Some folks may know that on recent U2 tours when Bono quotes from Scripture he has generally quoted from The Message paraphrase. In fact, at a celebration of the completion of …
Matthew Erickson 