The 3 Angles

I’ve been reading through Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity this summer. What drew me to this book was that it wasn’t about ministering to others but that it was more about soul care for individuals/ministers. For Peterson, the shape that Pastoral Integrity takes is that of a triangle. A triangle is made up of 3 lines and 3 angles. As you can see by the title, the angles are what Peterson is most concerned with.

Peterson is challenging/calling those of us privileged enough to lead others into God’s presence to do so out of a life that is constantly connected to the Source. His premise is that we spend so much focus and effort on the lines of ministry- preaching, teaching, administration. To be honest these are the acts of ministry that we get grades for. They are the visible (most visible) aspects of our jobs. What Peterson says is that we should be more concerned with the angles of ministry because these angles feed, inform, develop, and connect our inner life with our “professional” life.

Here are a few choice excerpts:

Three pastoral acts are so basic, so critical, that they determine the shape of everything else. The acts are praying, reading Scripture, and giving spiritual direction. Besides being basic, these three acts are quiet. They do not call attention to themselves and so are often not attended to. In the clamorous world of pastoral work nobody yells at us to engage in these acts. It is possible to do pastoral work to the satisfaction of the people who judge our competence and pay our salaries without being either diligent or skilled in them. Since almost never does anyone notice whether we do these things or not, and only occasionally does someone ask that we do them, these three acts of ministry suffer widespread neglect.

The three areas constitute acts of attention: prayer is an act in which I bring myself to attention before God; reading Scripture is an act of attending to God in his speech and action across two millennia in Israel and Christ; spiritual direction is an act of giving attention to what God is doing in the person who happens to be before me at any given moment.

None of these acts is public, which means that no one knows for sure whether or not we are doing any of them. People hear us pray in worship, they listen to us preach and teach from the Scriptures, they notice when we are listening to them in a conversation, but they can never know if we are attending to God in any of this. It doesn’t take many years in this business to realize that we can conduct a fairly respectable pastoral ministry without giving much more than ceremonial attention to God. Since we can omit these acts of attention without anybody noticing, and because each of the acts involves a great deal of rigor, it is easy and common to slight them.

Wow. What a convicting premise! I couldn’t agree more with what Peterson has said. This summer it is my goal to make sure that I’m working the angles in a greater and more deliberate way. As the pressures of my life grow- new baby, summer expectations, fall planning, leading up-out-and-about- so must my reliance on my Father.

To paraphrase the words of that rock band from the Great White North, RUSH-

I’ll be working them ANGLES overtime! (That was for you Kratzer)