Wise teachers, sound teaching

Christian Century, Dec 15, 1999 by Eugene H. Peterson

Looking back, I could not have picked a more ideal student body for my teaching. As I taught my fledging course in spiritual formation, using Ephesians as my text, I learned the difference between information and wisdom, and that wisdom was all that mattered to these three women. It was slow work, but gospel words have power in them. These women learned with their lives. The three women are now dead. I sometimes wonder if they are amused as they see me teach bright and gifted students from all over the world who pay high fees to be in the class. They paid by putting a dollar or two in the Sunday offering.

All wisdom is acquired relationally, in the context of family and friends, work and neighborhood, under the conditions of sin and forgiveness, within the complex stories that the Holy Spirit has been writing and continues to write of our lives.

Paul tells Timothy: "Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it ..." (2 Tim. 3:14). From whom--that is the only way to get wisdom--from whom, a person. And so what better place to teach persons personally than in a congregation where you have access to everything that makes up their personhood--their families, their work, the weather, their neighborhood, their sins, their stories-and over a period of years, sometimes decades. In a church, you get people in the setting where their main business is living, up to their armpits in life.

I can't think of a better or more important place to be a teacher, a wisdom teacher, than in a church. As Paul put it: "If you put these instructions before the brethren, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and the good doctrine which you have followed."

Eugene H. Peterson is professor emeritus at Regent College in Vancouver. This article is adapted from The Unnecessary Pastor, by Marva Dawn and Eugene Peterson, published this month by Eerdmans and used by permission.