Under the Unpredictable Plant
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Like Eugene Peterson's other books on pastoring, Under the Unpredictable Plant is full of stimulating insights, candid observations, and biblically grounded prescriptions. Yet this book emanates with a special poignancy out of Peterson's own crisis experience as a pastor.
Peterson tells about the "abyss," the "gaping crevasse," the "chasm" that he experienced, early in his ministry, between his Christian faith and his pastoral vocation. He was astonished and dismayed to find that his personal spirituality, his piety, was inadequate for his vocation -- and he argues that the same is true of pastors in general.
In the book of Jonah -- a parable with a prayer at its center -- Peterson finds a subversive, captivating story that can help pastors recover their "vocational holiness." Using the Jonah story as a narrative structure, Peterson probes the spiritual dimensions of the pastoral calling and seeks to reclaim the ground taken over by those who are trying to enlist pastors in religious careers.
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- Encourages pastors to recover their "vocational holiness" sharing Peterson's own crisis experience as a pastor
- Uses the narrative of Jonah as a structure for recovering the spiritual dimensions of the pastoral vocation in an age that relentlessly secularizes it into career development
- Talks about holiness, the cultivated habit of responding to God's word instead of fitting into the world's program, as the vocational distinctive
Buying Passage to Tarshish
- Jonah Disobedient
- Jonah Obedient
Escaping the Storm
- Repudiating Tarshish Religion
- Recovering a Gospel Vocation
In the Belly of the Fish
- Conditions
- Askesis
- Prayer
Finding the Road to Nineveh
- Geography
- Eschatology
Quarreling with God under the Unpredictable Plant
- The Stunted Imagination
- The Recovered Vocation