Winn Collier
Waterbrook, 368 pages
Reviewed by Jo Forrest
The mere mention of Eugene Peterson’s name arouses a sense of comfort from those pastors schooled by him personally or who devoured his many books, commentaries and essays. Even one of my younger colleagues, generations apart from Peterson and typically immersed in writers focused on digital ministry, smiled as he recalled Peterson teaching him to love the people as a pastor.
“A Burning in My Bones” presents Peterson’s life and ministry, honed through successes and missteps, as a pastor deeply committed to the craft of writing about faith and God. Provided complete access to eight decades of papers, journal, manuscripts and letters, Winn Collier puts Peterson’s flesh into what might otherwise be dry bones of his life.
Collier weaves together the distinct communities that shaped Peterson’s vision and voice. The hardscrabble landscape of Montana, listening to the customers at his father’s butcher shop and the butchers themselves instilled an appreciation for common language to articulate deep truths. His mother’s Pentecostal preaching sparked an imagination in ministry and proclaiming the Word. While in the academy, the voices from long-departed scholars influenced him as viscerally as those with whom he walked the halls. Throughout the biography, a reader feels Peterson’s tension of intense longing for Montana’s open skies and the intellectual rigor of the library and classroom.
Once marrying his beloved Jan, he found a home in the parish with fellow pastors and certainly the congregation he served. They held him, supported his faith and compelled him further into ministry with the grit to change lives.
Reading the breadth of these varying communities reminds those of us serving today of the need to actively engage across the confines of community, congregation and denomination. As Peterson taught, “Being as pastor is always relational work.”
Rather than permit anyone to presume Peterson’s career glided from the parish to the academy to writer’s desk, Collier bares the desperate time in Peterson’s church plant in Harford County, Maryland. After an energized start, Peterson described the long slog of serving as the “badlands,” referencing a barren landscape filled with potential hostility. This preacher’s eloquence only went so far as he frustrated congregants in meetings and drove the governing body to contention. Even the pastor’s pastor found the road of ministry lonely.
And it was these same readers and hearers of his words who spoke the loudest, encouraging him to continue to illuminate ancient texts and obtuse theologies in a common vernacular.
As Peterson’s writing career began to flourish, Collier infuses the narrative with excerpts of his letters and journals, lifting the veil on his joy and motive. Peterson described translating “The Message” as a personal encounter with God, every word “arrived on the page in the context of rhythms of syntax and diction learned on the roads of Harford County … with considerable composting in the humous of Montana.”
These brief passages from Peterson’s own hand will inspire the reader to return to “The Message” or any of his books, seeking the divine source to which he always points. Peterson never sought the spotlight but to shine a light toward Christ — and Collier accomplishes the same with his deft prose illuminating Peterson.
“A burning in my bones,” from Jeremiah 20:9 (MSG), inspired Peterson and this biography. This biography reminds readers that God is at work in and through you, just as Peterson trusted.
Jo Forrest is senior pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.
