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The Pastoral
Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness
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.
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.
207 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
146 people are currently reading
1169 people want to read
About the author
Eugene H. Peterson
432 books984 followersEugene H. Peterson was a pastor, scholar, author, and poet. For many years he was James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He also served as founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. He had written over thirty books, including Gold Medallion Book Award winner The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language a contemporary translation of the Bible. After retiring from full-time teaching, Eugene and his wife Jan lived in the Big Sky Country of rural Montana. He died in October 2018.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 158 reviews
November 18, 2017
It's taken me far too long to read Eugene Peterson (the only book before this I had read was "Holy Luck," which I picked up at the library because I had a couple of hours to kill). While "Under the Predictable Plant" has pastors as its primary audience, I gleaned a lot from it (and it is part of the required reading for a vocational discernment class).
Peterson laments much of (North) American ministry. He accuses it of being infected by the secular culture's drive for results and productivity, with pastors taking on the role of managers and salespeople rather than spiritual directors. Autobiographically, Peterson recalls his own pastoral experience and insights he has accumulated throughout his years - including his childhood - to help pastors revitalize their vocational callings. He also uses writers and thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Wendel Berry (he would spend two hours, three days a week during his work hours to read through Dostoevsky's novels). He challenges pastors to spend time focusing on the details and to become contemplatives.
One of my favourite points Peterson made was that it is crucial to think locally when it comes to the church and appreciate each church's and individual's unique context (which is also why I chafed a bit at his criticism of Explanation and favouring of Imagination; it's largely indicative of my own preference to read theology rather than a novel, but I think for some people they need more Explanation over Imagination and vice-versa). He also advocates pastors remaining where they are for as long as possible; so often the Church can seem like a corporation, with successful pastors being bumped up to larger, more prominent churches, but Peterson warns that this is a sign of egoism and ambition seducing clergy (and Peterson also aptly notes that spiritual sins are so much harder to identify than external sins).
Although I'm not a pastor, this book was very insightful. I think especially for people in ministry and those walking through a vocational discernment (like me), this book will be very rewarding and help explain how ministry often looks.
Peterson laments much of (North) American ministry. He accuses it of being infected by the secular culture's drive for results and productivity, with pastors taking on the role of managers and salespeople rather than spiritual directors. Autobiographically, Peterson recalls his own pastoral experience and insights he has accumulated throughout his years - including his childhood - to help pastors revitalize their vocational callings. He also uses writers and thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Wendel Berry (he would spend two hours, three days a week during his work hours to read through Dostoevsky's novels). He challenges pastors to spend time focusing on the details and to become contemplatives.
One of my favourite points Peterson made was that it is crucial to think locally when it comes to the church and appreciate each church's and individual's unique context (which is also why I chafed a bit at his criticism of Explanation and favouring of Imagination; it's largely indicative of my own preference to read theology rather than a novel, but I think for some people they need more Explanation over Imagination and vice-versa). He also advocates pastors remaining where they are for as long as possible; so often the Church can seem like a corporation, with successful pastors being bumped up to larger, more prominent churches, but Peterson warns that this is a sign of egoism and ambition seducing clergy (and Peterson also aptly notes that spiritual sins are so much harder to identify than external sins).
Although I'm not a pastor, this book was very insightful. I think especially for people in ministry and those walking through a vocational discernment (like me), this book will be very rewarding and help explain how ministry often looks.
January 31, 2025
I really loved this book. Eugene Peterson reframes the Jonah story in a way that speaks to modern experiences, mostly focused on pastors but I found it applicable to any ministry. There are so many fun and engaging stories sprinkled throughout from his life and ministry experiences, some that even had me laughing out loud.
One criticism is that Peterson reads his experience into the Jonah story, casting Jonah as a pastor and Nineveh as a congregation. It works very well as allegory to the points that he makes regarding how to pastor in an honest, caring, God-fearing, and God-honoring way; the only problem is that Jonah was a prophet, not a pastor. I feel a hesitance to make a one-for-one attribution of Jonah and Nineveh and other elements of the Jonah story in a way that was completely unintended by the author. But I have enough appreciation for God and His mystery and enjoyed Peterson’s masterful and playful perceptivity to allow it.
One criticism is that Peterson reads his experience into the Jonah story, casting Jonah as a pastor and Nineveh as a congregation. It works very well as allegory to the points that he makes regarding how to pastor in an honest, caring, God-fearing, and God-honoring way; the only problem is that Jonah was a prophet, not a pastor. I feel a hesitance to make a one-for-one attribution of Jonah and Nineveh and other elements of the Jonah story in a way that was completely unintended by the author. But I have enough appreciation for God and His mystery and enjoyed Peterson’s masterful and playful perceptivity to allow it.
March 1, 2018
Simply superb. Astounding. Breath taking. Eugene does it again in this beautifully rich articulation if recovering the pastoral vocation in the midst of American careerism. Instantly one of my all time favorites of Peterson’s.
November 7, 2024
The rare book that immediately and noticeably changes how I think and how I live. I wanted the book to continue on indefinitely.
It felt like a mentor telling me life stories and lessons that connected with, and put words and categories to some of my thoughts, experiences, and longings. A fellow Cru staff member said it “saved his life” on Cru staff. It has helped me (increasingly) accept nothing less than whole-hearted, God-aware approach to life and ministry.
It has simultaneously made me more skeptical and frustrated by “soul-less” ministry; ministry that looks and feels manufactured or hypothetical situations / supervisors that would force that on me. Although, as Peterson even notes, it’s not that what we do necessarily changes and from the outside our days may look the same as they did, but we approach and view and experience it differently.
It felt like a mentor telling me life stories and lessons that connected with, and put words and categories to some of my thoughts, experiences, and longings. A fellow Cru staff member said it “saved his life” on Cru staff. It has helped me (increasingly) accept nothing less than whole-hearted, God-aware approach to life and ministry.
It has simultaneously made me more skeptical and frustrated by “soul-less” ministry; ministry that looks and feels manufactured or hypothetical situations / supervisors that would force that on me. Although, as Peterson even notes, it’s not that what we do necessarily changes and from the outside our days may look the same as they did, but we approach and view and experience it differently.
January 8, 2022
If you're in pastoral ministry in any capacity, this book is worth reading...maybe more than once.
Like Peterson's famous 'Message' paraphrase of the Bible, I sometimes struggled with with the creative-writing-overkill, and the connection with pastoring and Jonah was quite tenuous at times...
...but the bulk of it was just. So. Good.
"Under the Unpredictable Plant" rightly skewers Western pastoral careerism and congregational consumerism and reminds us that Jesus calls is to something altogether different. It's brilliant. I'm not sure of the last time I read a book with so many "lightbulb" moments; it's been a while, for sure. There's an almost throw-away reflection on anger in the section entitled "The Stunted Imagination" that blew my mind!
Highly recommended.
Like Peterson's famous 'Message' paraphrase of the Bible, I sometimes struggled with with the creative-writing-overkill, and the connection with pastoring and Jonah was quite tenuous at times...
...but the bulk of it was just. So. Good.
"Under the Unpredictable Plant" rightly skewers Western pastoral careerism and congregational consumerism and reminds us that Jesus calls is to something altogether different. It's brilliant. I'm not sure of the last time I read a book with so many "lightbulb" moments; it's been a while, for sure. There's an almost throw-away reflection on anger in the section entitled "The Stunted Imagination" that blew my mind!
Highly recommended.
March 27, 2021
Eugene Peterson. Pastor to pastors. This was a timely book as I am currently not a vocational pastor after 13 years. Peterson really helped me to refocus and root myself in who I am in Him than what I do FOR Him. In other words, learning to be a Christian first instead of a pastor. He frames the book with the book of Jonah, which was really insightful! Peterson preaches against careerism in the pastorate and instead of being managers with a job description, to be spiritual directors. Lots of good takeaways as I trust the Lord for what's next in ministry.
May 2, 2020
Whenever I need renewal in my vocation as a writer and therapist, I turn to Peterson. I’ll pull up an old recording or open the pages of a book, and what I find is the joy of a soul set on God. He reminds me to be patient, to be amazed, and to offer the world not what is popular but what prompts us to pay attention to the presence of God.
January 10, 2025
Incredibly timely and pertinent. This has been a refreshing read to begin the year, and I intend to make it a reread soon.
January 29, 2021
This book was a gift from a dear friend.
Maybe it was because I wasn't ready for it or didn't quite understand it, but Peterson's words didn't really hit until the last chapter.
"It is the imagination that must shift, the huge interior of our lives that determines the angle and scope of our vocation." (pg. 177)
This seems to be where the whole point of his argument finally takes off.
That said, I loved following his interpretation of the Jonah story, and appreciated the humorous storytelling and references to various authors throughout.
Maybe it was because I wasn't ready for it or didn't quite understand it, but Peterson's words didn't really hit until the last chapter.
"It is the imagination that must shift, the huge interior of our lives that determines the angle and scope of our vocation." (pg. 177)
This seems to be where the whole point of his argument finally takes off.
That said, I loved following his interpretation of the Jonah story, and appreciated the humorous storytelling and references to various authors throughout.
June 12, 2018
This is one of my favorite Petersen books. He describes the life of a pastor as a Jonah-like experience...running away, jumping ship, and being spit out in the very place he was called in the first place. Every pastor and professional church staff ought to read this one.
July 15, 2019
The two words I’d use to describe this book for anyone called to the work of pastoral ministry; timely and timeless.
August 5, 2025
I reread this often and recommend to all my pastor friends. Peterson articulates the "why" of ministry that can feel murky and elusive.
April 3, 2023
I discovered Peterson for the first (significant) time by reading The Jesus Way, a book I was desperately searching for. I can find books on “making disciples” easily - they’re a dime a dozen. I was looking for a book to walk through with a group about *being* a disciple.
That about sums up the difference between Peterson (and/or the school of thought to which Peterson subscribed) and other pastoral/authorial points of view.
As a pastor who is frustrated with “church” - the models, the emphasis on numbers and growth, the LED screens and cool shoes and flashy Instagram accounts - I am drawn to Peterson’s approach. It is like water in the desert to me. Though of course I must be careful that I am not flocking to Peterson to simply affirm all of my frustrations (that is my caution to myself and future readers.)
If you’ve never read Peterson, you should know that he is a poet, and it becomes clear as he writes. It is harder for us to grasp the key points because he does not write them out in a clear 1-2-3 format (something my pastor is keen on, which I am too) but he writes it out poetically, anecdotally, and conceptually. He’s not the most “organized,” so read the book looking for the meat. Make your notes separately if you must.
All told, this is a refreshing take on the life of Jonah and what it means for the pastor. How to embrace the difficult and the ordinary in place of the exotic and easy. How to embrace suffering and the formation of spiritual identity. How to get away from “results based” spirituality. Because this is the ground in which we work - people (including ourselves as pastors) are never “done” - we continue to change, shift, bear fruit, die, and come back to life in new seasons. This is pastoral work. It is long-haul work.
That about sums up the difference between Peterson (and/or the school of thought to which Peterson subscribed) and other pastoral/authorial points of view.
As a pastor who is frustrated with “church” - the models, the emphasis on numbers and growth, the LED screens and cool shoes and flashy Instagram accounts - I am drawn to Peterson’s approach. It is like water in the desert to me. Though of course I must be careful that I am not flocking to Peterson to simply affirm all of my frustrations (that is my caution to myself and future readers.)
If you’ve never read Peterson, you should know that he is a poet, and it becomes clear as he writes. It is harder for us to grasp the key points because he does not write them out in a clear 1-2-3 format (something my pastor is keen on, which I am too) but he writes it out poetically, anecdotally, and conceptually. He’s not the most “organized,” so read the book looking for the meat. Make your notes separately if you must.
All told, this is a refreshing take on the life of Jonah and what it means for the pastor. How to embrace the difficult and the ordinary in place of the exotic and easy. How to embrace suffering and the formation of spiritual identity. How to get away from “results based” spirituality. Because this is the ground in which we work - people (including ourselves as pastors) are never “done” - we continue to change, shift, bear fruit, die, and come back to life in new seasons. This is pastoral work. It is long-haul work.
November 26, 2024
My younger brother recommended this book to me years ago and providentially I haven't gotten around to reading it until now, and I'm so glad I read it NOW. The author writes about how pastors can easily misunderstand what being a pastor is all about. He explains from personal experience how it's so easy to get it wrong but also encouragingly, points to the way forward. This book has helped me find a renewed purpose in simply living life in God's presence and including others in those profound moments where God's holiness shows up. I highly recommend this book.
October 22, 2022
If you work in ministry, this is SO good!!!
One of my fav quotes from it “Words for communion are used to tell stories, make love, nurture intimacies, develop trust. Words for communication are used to buy stocks, sell cauliflower, direct traffic, and teach algebra, Both piles of words are necessary, but words for communion are our speciality.…… At the center of communion there is sacrifice. Working at the center, we dont use words to give something but to give up a piece of ourselves.”
One of my fav quotes from it “Words for communion are used to tell stories, make love, nurture intimacies, develop trust. Words for communication are used to buy stocks, sell cauliflower, direct traffic, and teach algebra, Both piles of words are necessary, but words for communion are our speciality.…… At the center of communion there is sacrifice. Working at the center, we dont use words to give something but to give up a piece of ourselves.”
November 5, 2023
Excellent read. Some outdated language, for sure, but the core message of the book is rich. The need to recapture vocational holiness amongst pastors is the central message.
He's pushes back against the institutional pastor for a long time, and my hope is that pastors actually take up his challenge and call. To refuse pastor as Messiah and Manager, and to take up the slow, mundane, job of nurturing christlikeness, and becoming spiritual directors.
He's pushes back against the institutional pastor for a long time, and my hope is that pastors actually take up his challenge and call. To refuse pastor as Messiah and Manager, and to take up the slow, mundane, job of nurturing christlikeness, and becoming spiritual directors.
April 20, 2020
Excellent. One of the more convicting reads on pastoral ministry I’ve come across. As relevant today as ever.
November 16, 2021
Peterson is so thought provoking and helpful
July 22, 2022
A rare book on ministry, in which every word was worth reading.
October 31, 2022
This one took me a while to read. I think for multiple reasons. But I’m glad it did. So many thoughts forced me to put it down and think. About my life, ministry, desires and dreams. Did not expect this book to be this way. Not sure what I expected. Just not what it was. In the best way possible. So good.
July 11, 2025
Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness [The Pastoral series], by Eugene H. Peterson
Eugene Peterson’s ‘Under the Unpredictable Plant’ is a stunning and brutally honest meditation on the pastoral vocation, offering not just critique but a sincere call to recover a deeply authentic vision of ministry. With the story of Jonah as his anchor, Peterson strips away the romanticized illusions of pastoral work, urging ministers to forsake fantasy-bloated ambitions and embrace the hard, holy ground of real congregational life. As he writes, “The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness,” and anything less than this embodied, humble ministry is a form of spiritual defection. His insights are often unsettling—but only because they are so truthful. Peterson reminds pastors that “the world of religion generates a huge market for meeting all the needs that didn’t get met in the shopping mall,” and exposes how easily we morph into “prostitute pastors” chasing applause rather than presence.
What makes this book exceptional is its depth of theological reflection matched by poetic sensitivity. Peterson names the internal storm every pastor faces—the chaos, the call, the anger, the longing—and offers a pathway through, not around, those waters. “The sea storms that call into question our vocations,” he writes, “turn out to be the means of vocational recovery.” He doesn’t just diagnose; he shepherds us into a way of being that is prayerful, place-rooted, and soaked in mystery. His language is both prophetic and pastoral, as when he says, “Our work is not to make a religious establishment succeed but to nurture the gospel of Jesus Christ into maturity.” This book is not just for pastors—it is for anyone hungry for a life lived in response to the presence of God, with all the dust, darkness, and delight that vocation entails. I give it a 5/5 rating.
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Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness [The Pastoral series], by Eugene H. Peterson
1- Buying Passage to Tarshish
The Jonah story pulls us into dry dock and scrapes off the ponderous false dignity, the fantasy-bloated ambitions. p11
'Presence' in Hebrew is literally 'face' (paneh). p12
'The pastor must learn to live with his or her own darkness, with the interior horror or temptation and fantasy.' p20
The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness - the conditions for growing up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Eph 4:12-15). p21,22
2- Escaping the Storm
God and passion. This is why I was a pastor, that is why I had come to this place: to live in the presence of God, to live with passion - and to gather others into the presence of God, introducing them into the possibilities of a passionate life. p45
Religious consumers are like all other consumers, easily attracted by packing and bargains. But I also knew that to follow this route I would have to abandon the very thing that gave the life of a pastor its worth: a passion for God. p57
A successful pastor will discover a workable program and repeat it in congregation after congregation to the immense satisfaction of her parishioners. The church members can be religious without praying or dealing with God. Prostitute pastor. p60
Apostle Paul gathered everyone on the doomed ship to worship God in the breaking of bread and prayers, a service which if not the eucharist itself had the shape of the eucharist (Acts 27:35).
Trouble, at least extreme trouble, 'storm'-trouble, strips us to the essentials and reveals the basic reality of our lives. In Jonah it was prayerlessness, in Paul prayerfulness. The storm revealed Jonah to be a prophet who did not pray. The storm revealed Paul to be an apostle who prayed.
Two other storm stories: In the first, Jesus, like Jonah, is asleep when the storm rises and has to be awakened. Unlike Jonah, Jesus rays and stills the storm (Mark 4:35-41). In the second, Jesus, coming from a place of prayer, calms his frightened friends with his 'Fear not' (Mark 6:45-52), the message that Paul, thirty years later, delivered to his congregation. p71
The sea storms that call into question our vocations turn out to be the means of vocational recovery. They expose us to what we cannot manage. We are returned to primordial chaos, to the 'tohu' and 'bohu' of Genesis 1, where we submit our lives to the world-making word of God. p72
3- In the Belly of the Fish
The drowning of religious careerism is followed by resurrection into a pastoral vocation. p74
The creative artist and the praying pastor work common ground here. Without confinement, without the intensification resulting from compression, there is no energy worth speaking of. p 75
We work out the actual dynamics of our vocations with institutional influences on one side, congregational influences on the other, and our egos ricocheting back and forth between them. p76
The Golden Calf: The people in our congregations are, in fact, out shopping for idols. They enter our churches with the same mind-set in which they go to the shopping mall, to get something that will please them or satisfy an appetite or need. The human heart is a relentlessly efficient factory for producing idols. Congregations commonly see the pastor as the quality-control engineer in the factory. The moment we pastors accept the position, though, we defect from our vocation... With the development of assembly-line mass production, we are putting these idols out in great quantities and in a variety of colors and shapes to suit every taste. Living in golden calf country as we do, it is both easy and attractive to become a successful pastor like Aaron. p81
The spiritual geography of 'congregation' is mapped east of Eden. In our eagerness to please, and forgetful of the penchant for idolatry in the human heart, we too readily leave the center of worship and, with the freely offered emotional and religious jewelry the people bring, fashion a golden calf-god and proclaim a 'feast to the Lord' (Exodus 32:5). Hardly knowing what we do, we meld the religious aspirations of the people and the religious dynamics of the occasion to try to satisfy one and all. There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ’s lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. p84
We must do only what we are there to do: pronounce the Name, name the hunger. p87
Jonah had been to school to learn to pray, and he prayed as he had been taught. His school was the Psalms:
my distress (18:6; 120:1)
Sheol (18:4-5)
all they waves and they pillows passed over me (42:7)
from thy presence (139:7)
upon they holy temple (5:7)
the waters closed on overt me (69:2)
my life from the Pit (30:3)
my soul fainted within me (142:3)
into thy holy temple (18:6)
deliverance belongs to the Lord (3:8)
This is amazing. Prayer, which we often suppose is truest when most spontaneous - the raw expression of our human condition without contrivance or artifice - shows up in Jonah when he is on the rawest condition imaginable as 'learned'. p100-101
Jonah in the belly of the fish was in the worst trouble imaginable. We naturally expect him to pray a lament. What we get, though, is its opposite, a psalm of praise, in the standard thanksgiving form.
He was capable of prayer that was adequate to the largeness of the God with whom he was dealing.
This contrasts with the prevailing climate of prayer. Our culture presents us with forms of prayer that are mostly self-expression - pouring ourselves out before God or lifting our gratitude to God as we feel the need and have the occasion. Such prayer is dominated by a sense of self. But prayer, mature prayer, is dominated by a sense of God. Prayer rescues us from a preoccupation with ourselves and pulls us into adoration of and pilgrimage to God. .. the distinction between culture-prayer and psalm-prayer. p102,103
The Psalms are the school for people learning to pray. Fundamentally, prayer is our response to the God who speaks to us. God's word is always first. He gets the first word in, always. p104
For there is no lack in us of the impulse to pray. And there is no scarcity of requests to pray. Desire and demand keep the matter of prayer before us constantly. So why are so many lives prayerless? Simply because 'the well is deep and you have nothing to draw with.' We need a bucket. We need a container that holds water. Desires and demands are a sieve. We need a vessel suited to lowering desires and demands into the deep Jacob's Well of God's presence and word and bringing them to the surface again. The Psalms are such a bucket. p105
When we begin life, we have no need of eating utensils; we are given the breast, and that supplies all our needs. But as we grow, the breast is withdrawn and we become competent with the tools of eating. The new life in Christ involves a similar progression. p109
-> Lord's Day Worship with Your Community ->
<- Daily Praying the Psalms ->
<- Recollected Prayer though the hours of the Day.->
Jonah shows us to recover an awareness of the comprehensive and integrating reality of prayer. For pastors, whose primary task is to teach people to pray and to pray for them, are treating prayer as a ceremonial gesture. p111
The alternative to acting like gods who have no need of God is to become contemplative pastors. p114
4- Finding the Road to Nineveh
“In my late adolescence and approaching adulthood … All the while I was looking for work to do, hoping I could find something that would have to do with God and the scriptures and the church.” p120
Geography: It is in the nature of pastoral work to walk into an alien world, put our feet on the pavement, and embrace the ‘locale’. Pastoral work is geographical as much as it is theological. p122,123
When Jonah enters Nineveh, he becomes a pastor. Nineveh is a place on the map in a way that Tarshish is not. Tarshish is a dream, a vision, a goal; Nineveh is mappable, has dust and dirt in the streets, is full of the kind of people you don’t particularly want to spend the rest of your life with, and locates a defined task.
I remind you that Jonah in Nineveh is not an ideal pastor - Jonah is not an ideal anything - be he ‘is’ a pastor.
Every church is located someplace. p123
“He has risen .. he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7). In every visit, every meeting I attend, every appointment I keep, I have been anticipated. The risen Christ got there ahead of me. The risen Christ is in that room already. What is he doing? What is he saying? What is going on? p127
A Day’s Journey into Nineveh.
The gospel is emphatically geographical. Place names - Sinai, Hebron, Machpelah, Shiloh, Nazareth, Jezreel, Samaria, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Bethsaida - these are embedded in the gospel. All theology is rooted in geography. p129-130
Our work is not to make a religious establishment succeed but to nurture the gospel of Jesus Christ into maturity.
When I work in the particulars, I develop a reverence for what's actually there instead of a contempt for what is not, inadequacies that seduce me into a covetousness for someplace else. p132,133
“You have but a corner of the vineyard, and cannot appeal to all men; humility is a better equipment than ambition, even the ambition of doing much good.” (- Peter Forsyth, The Cure of Souls, 133) p139
Eschatology: I am saying two things here that are often separated and may appear contradictory. One, the pastor must stand in respectful awe before the congregation, the holy ground. Two, the pastor must be in discerning opposition to the congregation’s religion, for awed appreciation does not exclude critical discernment. Without diligent, clear-sighted watchfulness, congregations relapse into golden-calf idolatries, much as cultivated fields without care relapse into weeds and brambles. Religion is the enemy of the gospel. This is why pastoral work is hard work and never finished: ‘religion’ is always present. It is the atmosphere in which we work. There is no use trying to get rid of it, striving after the ‘religionless Christianity’ that Bonhoeffer fantasized. p140
‘Yet forty days, and nineveh shall be overthrown.’ Pastoral work devoid of eschatology declines into a court chaplaincy - sprinkling holy water on consumerist complacency and religious gratification. Without eschatology the line goes slack and there is nothing pulling us to the heights, to holiness, to the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus. p144
5- Quarreling with God under the Unpredictable Plant
The Stunted Imagination
Jonah is angry. The word ‘anger’ occurs six times in this final chapter. Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighbourhood. .. What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us. p157
The Recovered Vocation
The world of religion generates a huge market for meeting all the needs that didn’t get met in the shopping mall. Pastors are conspicuous in this religious marketplace and are expected to come up with the products that give customer satisfaction. Since the needs seem legitimate enough, we easily slip into the routines of merchandising moral advice and religious comfort. p173
Messiahs, Managers, and Spiritual Directors p178
Spiritual direction is the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation. A prerequisite is standing back, doing nothing. It opens a quiet eye of adoration. It releases the energetic wonder of faith. It notices the Invisibilities in and beneath and around the Visibilities. It listens for the Silences between the spoken Sounds. p181
Communication is not as much interested in using words to define meaning as to deepen mystery, to enter into the ambiguities, push past the safely known into the risky unknown. The Christian Eucharist uses the simplest of words - this is my body, this is my blood - to plunge us into the depths of love, to venture into what is not tied down, into love, into faith. These words do not describe; they reveal, they point, they reach. p193
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Eugene Peterson’s ‘Under the Unpredictable Plant’ is a stunning and brutally honest meditation on the pastoral vocation, offering not just critique but a sincere call to recover a deeply authentic vision of ministry. With the story of Jonah as his anchor, Peterson strips away the romanticized illusions of pastoral work, urging ministers to forsake fantasy-bloated ambitions and embrace the hard, holy ground of real congregational life. As he writes, “The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness,” and anything less than this embodied, humble ministry is a form of spiritual defection. His insights are often unsettling—but only because they are so truthful. Peterson reminds pastors that “the world of religion generates a huge market for meeting all the needs that didn’t get met in the shopping mall,” and exposes how easily we morph into “prostitute pastors” chasing applause rather than presence.
What makes this book exceptional is its depth of theological reflection matched by poetic sensitivity. Peterson names the internal storm every pastor faces—the chaos, the call, the anger, the longing—and offers a pathway through, not around, those waters. “The sea storms that call into question our vocations,” he writes, “turn out to be the means of vocational recovery.” He doesn’t just diagnose; he shepherds us into a way of being that is prayerful, place-rooted, and soaked in mystery. His language is both prophetic and pastoral, as when he says, “Our work is not to make a religious establishment succeed but to nurture the gospel of Jesus Christ into maturity.” This book is not just for pastors—it is for anyone hungry for a life lived in response to the presence of God, with all the dust, darkness, and delight that vocation entails. I give it a 5/5 rating.
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Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness [The Pastoral series], by Eugene H. Peterson
1- Buying Passage to Tarshish
The Jonah story pulls us into dry dock and scrapes off the ponderous false dignity, the fantasy-bloated ambitions. p11
'Presence' in Hebrew is literally 'face' (paneh). p12
'The pastor must learn to live with his or her own darkness, with the interior horror or temptation and fantasy.' p20
The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness - the conditions for growing up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Eph 4:12-15). p21,22
2- Escaping the Storm
God and passion. This is why I was a pastor, that is why I had come to this place: to live in the presence of God, to live with passion - and to gather others into the presence of God, introducing them into the possibilities of a passionate life. p45
Religious consumers are like all other consumers, easily attracted by packing and bargains. But I also knew that to follow this route I would have to abandon the very thing that gave the life of a pastor its worth: a passion for God. p57
A successful pastor will discover a workable program and repeat it in congregation after congregation to the immense satisfaction of her parishioners. The church members can be religious without praying or dealing with God. Prostitute pastor. p60
Apostle Paul gathered everyone on the doomed ship to worship God in the breaking of bread and prayers, a service which if not the eucharist itself had the shape of the eucharist (Acts 27:35).
Trouble, at least extreme trouble, 'storm'-trouble, strips us to the essentials and reveals the basic reality of our lives. In Jonah it was prayerlessness, in Paul prayerfulness. The storm revealed Jonah to be a prophet who did not pray. The storm revealed Paul to be an apostle who prayed.
Two other storm stories: In the first, Jesus, like Jonah, is asleep when the storm rises and has to be awakened. Unlike Jonah, Jesus rays and stills the storm (Mark 4:35-41). In the second, Jesus, coming from a place of prayer, calms his frightened friends with his 'Fear not' (Mark 6:45-52), the message that Paul, thirty years later, delivered to his congregation. p71
The sea storms that call into question our vocations turn out to be the means of vocational recovery. They expose us to what we cannot manage. We are returned to primordial chaos, to the 'tohu' and 'bohu' of Genesis 1, where we submit our lives to the world-making word of God. p72
3- In the Belly of the Fish
The drowning of religious careerism is followed by resurrection into a pastoral vocation. p74
The creative artist and the praying pastor work common ground here. Without confinement, without the intensification resulting from compression, there is no energy worth speaking of. p 75
We work out the actual dynamics of our vocations with institutional influences on one side, congregational influences on the other, and our egos ricocheting back and forth between them. p76
The Golden Calf: The people in our congregations are, in fact, out shopping for idols. They enter our churches with the same mind-set in which they go to the shopping mall, to get something that will please them or satisfy an appetite or need. The human heart is a relentlessly efficient factory for producing idols. Congregations commonly see the pastor as the quality-control engineer in the factory. The moment we pastors accept the position, though, we defect from our vocation... With the development of assembly-line mass production, we are putting these idols out in great quantities and in a variety of colors and shapes to suit every taste. Living in golden calf country as we do, it is both easy and attractive to become a successful pastor like Aaron. p81
The spiritual geography of 'congregation' is mapped east of Eden. In our eagerness to please, and forgetful of the penchant for idolatry in the human heart, we too readily leave the center of worship and, with the freely offered emotional and religious jewelry the people bring, fashion a golden calf-god and proclaim a 'feast to the Lord' (Exodus 32:5). Hardly knowing what we do, we meld the religious aspirations of the people and the religious dynamics of the occasion to try to satisfy one and all. There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ’s lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. p84
We must do only what we are there to do: pronounce the Name, name the hunger. p87
Jonah had been to school to learn to pray, and he prayed as he had been taught. His school was the Psalms:
my distress (18:6; 120:1)
Sheol (18:4-5)
all they waves and they pillows passed over me (42:7)
from thy presence (139:7)
upon they holy temple (5:7)
the waters closed on overt me (69:2)
my life from the Pit (30:3)
my soul fainted within me (142:3)
into thy holy temple (18:6)
deliverance belongs to the Lord (3:8)
This is amazing. Prayer, which we often suppose is truest when most spontaneous - the raw expression of our human condition without contrivance or artifice - shows up in Jonah when he is on the rawest condition imaginable as 'learned'. p100-101
Jonah in the belly of the fish was in the worst trouble imaginable. We naturally expect him to pray a lament. What we get, though, is its opposite, a psalm of praise, in the standard thanksgiving form.
He was capable of prayer that was adequate to the largeness of the God with whom he was dealing.
This contrasts with the prevailing climate of prayer. Our culture presents us with forms of prayer that are mostly self-expression - pouring ourselves out before God or lifting our gratitude to God as we feel the need and have the occasion. Such prayer is dominated by a sense of self. But prayer, mature prayer, is dominated by a sense of God. Prayer rescues us from a preoccupation with ourselves and pulls us into adoration of and pilgrimage to God. .. the distinction between culture-prayer and psalm-prayer. p102,103
The Psalms are the school for people learning to pray. Fundamentally, prayer is our response to the God who speaks to us. God's word is always first. He gets the first word in, always. p104
For there is no lack in us of the impulse to pray. And there is no scarcity of requests to pray. Desire and demand keep the matter of prayer before us constantly. So why are so many lives prayerless? Simply because 'the well is deep and you have nothing to draw with.' We need a bucket. We need a container that holds water. Desires and demands are a sieve. We need a vessel suited to lowering desires and demands into the deep Jacob's Well of God's presence and word and bringing them to the surface again. The Psalms are such a bucket. p105
When we begin life, we have no need of eating utensils; we are given the breast, and that supplies all our needs. But as we grow, the breast is withdrawn and we become competent with the tools of eating. The new life in Christ involves a similar progression. p109
-> Lord's Day Worship with Your Community ->
<- Daily Praying the Psalms ->
<- Recollected Prayer though the hours of the Day.->
Jonah shows us to recover an awareness of the comprehensive and integrating reality of prayer. For pastors, whose primary task is to teach people to pray and to pray for them, are treating prayer as a ceremonial gesture. p111
The alternative to acting like gods who have no need of God is to become contemplative pastors. p114
4- Finding the Road to Nineveh
“In my late adolescence and approaching adulthood … All the while I was looking for work to do, hoping I could find something that would have to do with God and the scriptures and the church.” p120
Geography: It is in the nature of pastoral work to walk into an alien world, put our feet on the pavement, and embrace the ‘locale’. Pastoral work is geographical as much as it is theological. p122,123
When Jonah enters Nineveh, he becomes a pastor. Nineveh is a place on the map in a way that Tarshish is not. Tarshish is a dream, a vision, a goal; Nineveh is mappable, has dust and dirt in the streets, is full of the kind of people you don’t particularly want to spend the rest of your life with, and locates a defined task.
I remind you that Jonah in Nineveh is not an ideal pastor - Jonah is not an ideal anything - be he ‘is’ a pastor.
Every church is located someplace. p123
“He has risen .. he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:6-7). In every visit, every meeting I attend, every appointment I keep, I have been anticipated. The risen Christ got there ahead of me. The risen Christ is in that room already. What is he doing? What is he saying? What is going on? p127
A Day’s Journey into Nineveh.
The gospel is emphatically geographical. Place names - Sinai, Hebron, Machpelah, Shiloh, Nazareth, Jezreel, Samaria, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Bethsaida - these are embedded in the gospel. All theology is rooted in geography. p129-130
Our work is not to make a religious establishment succeed but to nurture the gospel of Jesus Christ into maturity.
When I work in the particulars, I develop a reverence for what's actually there instead of a contempt for what is not, inadequacies that seduce me into a covetousness for someplace else. p132,133
“You have but a corner of the vineyard, and cannot appeal to all men; humility is a better equipment than ambition, even the ambition of doing much good.” (- Peter Forsyth, The Cure of Souls, 133) p139
Eschatology: I am saying two things here that are often separated and may appear contradictory. One, the pastor must stand in respectful awe before the congregation, the holy ground. Two, the pastor must be in discerning opposition to the congregation’s religion, for awed appreciation does not exclude critical discernment. Without diligent, clear-sighted watchfulness, congregations relapse into golden-calf idolatries, much as cultivated fields without care relapse into weeds and brambles. Religion is the enemy of the gospel. This is why pastoral work is hard work and never finished: ‘religion’ is always present. It is the atmosphere in which we work. There is no use trying to get rid of it, striving after the ‘religionless Christianity’ that Bonhoeffer fantasized. p140
‘Yet forty days, and nineveh shall be overthrown.’ Pastoral work devoid of eschatology declines into a court chaplaincy - sprinkling holy water on consumerist complacency and religious gratification. Without eschatology the line goes slack and there is nothing pulling us to the heights, to holiness, to the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus. p144
5- Quarreling with God under the Unpredictable Plant
The Stunted Imagination
Jonah is angry. The word ‘anger’ occurs six times in this final chapter. Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighbourhood. .. What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us. p157
The Recovered Vocation
The world of religion generates a huge market for meeting all the needs that didn’t get met in the shopping mall. Pastors are conspicuous in this religious marketplace and are expected to come up with the products that give customer satisfaction. Since the needs seem legitimate enough, we easily slip into the routines of merchandising moral advice and religious comfort. p173
Messiahs, Managers, and Spiritual Directors p178
Spiritual direction is the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation. A prerequisite is standing back, doing nothing. It opens a quiet eye of adoration. It releases the energetic wonder of faith. It notices the Invisibilities in and beneath and around the Visibilities. It listens for the Silences between the spoken Sounds. p181
Communication is not as much interested in using words to define meaning as to deepen mystery, to enter into the ambiguities, push past the safely known into the risky unknown. The Christian Eucharist uses the simplest of words - this is my body, this is my blood - to plunge us into the depths of love, to venture into what is not tied down, into love, into faith. These words do not describe; they reveal, they point, they reach. p193
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Read
December 20, 2023This book is worth a slow reading to really let it sink in
October 8, 2016
I really liked this book. Using Jonah as an example, Eugene Peterson challenges the modern pastor ideal and shows what the pastoral vocation is really like. He offers a lot of insight into the pastoral world and offers advice on how pastors can keep their focus on God.
He does, however, stretch the Jonah story too far to make it fit his ideas. He also uses only the Jonah story to explain the pastoral vocation. I wish he had extended into other biblical texts on pastors.
Nonetheless, his example is powerful. As a student in Bible College training to be a pastor, I was challenged by what he had to say. I am guilty of striving for the ideal congregation and looking for the best programs to impose on them. This is a wrong mindset to be in.
Some quotes that impacted me:
"The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders: in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, for covetousness, for lust, or so many excellent disguises at hand to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account" (15)
“I didn’t want to keep people from dying; I wanted to show them how to live” (47).
"It is not my task to impose a different way of life on these people in this place but to work with what is already there" (131)
He does, however, stretch the Jonah story too far to make it fit his ideas. He also uses only the Jonah story to explain the pastoral vocation. I wish he had extended into other biblical texts on pastors.
Nonetheless, his example is powerful. As a student in Bible College training to be a pastor, I was challenged by what he had to say. I am guilty of striving for the ideal congregation and looking for the best programs to impose on them. This is a wrong mindset to be in.
Some quotes that impacted me:
"The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders: in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, for covetousness, for lust, or so many excellent disguises at hand to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account" (15)
“I didn’t want to keep people from dying; I wanted to show them how to live” (47).
"It is not my task to impose a different way of life on these people in this place but to work with what is already there" (131)
July 15, 2019
Excellent, and the best book in this series so far. I know Peterson meant for this to be a comparison of Jonah's life and my life as a pastor (and it's great at that), but it's also an amazing and different look at Jonah. Peterson doesn't write Bible commentaries, but his books still end up being amazing Bible commentaries because his focus on whatever topic he's writing about (inadvertently?) shines such a fresh light on what the Bible is saying. Sometimes it's just an example he's using from the life of Elijah, or a comparison between the abrupt endings of Jonah and Mark. But I always leave his books amazed that he so effortlessly brought to life a brilliant teaching from scripture that I had never thought to wrestle with before.
March 26, 2008
This book is Peterson's attempt to synthesize everything he learned about vocation in thirty years of ministry as a pastor. It has a lot of good stuff in it, and I was especially interested to learn how he balanced his dual calling as a pastor and a writer. However, his decision to use Jonah as an overarching metaphor didn't work. He strained the metaphor too often for my tastes.
Another thing to be aware of, Peterson's theology is fairly conservative, and a liberal reader will find herself chafing at some of his ideas -- particularly his eschatology, and his thoughts about what Sabbath should look like.
Another thing to be aware of, Peterson's theology is fairly conservative, and a liberal reader will find herself chafing at some of his ideas -- particularly his eschatology, and his thoughts about what Sabbath should look like.
July 23, 2008
In Under the Unpredictable Plant, Peterson takes the story of Jonah and pairs it with vocational ministry, emphasizing how ministry is often not as glamorous as might be thought. Throughout the book Peterson is quite honest with his experiences of the trials of ministry, while at the same time managing to continually uphold the office as being worthwhile.
Although I have not formally been a pastor, I found myself resonating with Peterson and, from his words, found myself encouraged, still wanting to pursue ministry and finding ideas for future sermons.
Although I have not formally been a pastor, I found myself resonating with Peterson and, from his words, found myself encouraged, still wanting to pursue ministry and finding ideas for future sermons.
February 20, 2019
Great book For Pastors
The more that I read this book, the more I thought “Eugene Peterson gets it...” he understands the nuances and complexities of pastoral ministry and the intersection of the Word of God (and God’s invitation to us as faithful ministers) into that vocation. This book is filled with an invitation... to lay aside the need to be program and ‘results’ driven and take up the amazing invitation to faithfully minister to our congregations. This book is just as relevant now as when it was written.
The more that I read this book, the more I thought “Eugene Peterson gets it...” he understands the nuances and complexities of pastoral ministry and the intersection of the Word of God (and God’s invitation to us as faithful ministers) into that vocation. This book is filled with an invitation... to lay aside the need to be program and ‘results’ driven and take up the amazing invitation to faithfully minister to our congregations. This book is just as relevant now as when it was written.
January 15, 2019
This book was like taking wine for communion as a kid. I thought I was disgusted by it, but i really just wasn't ready for it.
I threw this book on my shelf next to all the books I planned on reading in the next 20 years, and didn't pikc it up till about a month ago. It was a godsend. Seemed like an important read for where I'm at right now in life, having been through multiple 'pastoral' seasons. Crucial.
Wiped tears off the cover when it was finished.
I threw this book on my shelf next to all the books I planned on reading in the next 20 years, and didn't pikc it up till about a month ago. It was a godsend. Seemed like an important read for where I'm at right now in life, having been through multiple 'pastoral' seasons. Crucial.
Wiped tears off the cover when it was finished.
February 11, 2018
He is risen indeed, and he has gone ahead of me to the schools, communities, and relationships ahead of me, just as he said he would. I substitute “teacher” for “pastor” in this volume, and it rings true to my calling: to be a guide toward the Lord and toward truth, and not toward an empty social and educational program.
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