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Eugene Peterson on Prayer and the Pastoral Vocation

Eugene Peterson’s vision of pastoral ministry is grounded in the conviction that the pastoral vocation requires cultivating personal, communal, and liturgical God-attentiveness. The pastor is placed among the community to “pay attention and call attention” to the divine activity of the triune God. Within this vision, prayer is requisite. Prayer sets the individual before God’s presence, grounding the contemplative life that affords the congruence required to minister to others. The centrality of prayer is readily recognized across Peterson’s writings, but its theological underpinnings not easily so. This paper contends that Peterson’s theology of prayer arises from his God-saturated vision of all reality, in which God is both prevenient—already at work before human initiative—and personal–intimately involved in particularities of human life. The argument unfolds in three stages. The first section sketches Peterson’s God-saturated vision of pastoral theology, wherein the pastor’s primary responsibility is the formation of God-attentiveness. The second section examines how Peterson’s unique vision of pastoring centralizes the practice of prayer. As a means of attending to and speaking the name of God, prayer cultivates God-attentiveness in three primary domains: personal devotion, spiritual direction, and corporate worship. The third section demonstrates that the centrality of prayer is an outworking of Peterson’s doctrine of God’s prevenient presence. Because God is both prevenient and personal, prayer is befitting of the pastoral vocation. In sum, Peterson reframes pastoral ministry as a responsive and ostensive vocation of bearing witness to God’s presence and activity.

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