‘Practice Resurrection: A Conversation in Growing Up in Christ’ is the final book in a five set series by Eugene Peterson on spiritual formation. Peterson is a prolific author, perhaps best known for his Message paraphrase, yet has stated this particular series is intended to be seen as the climax of the over 50 years he has spent as a pastor and teacher. In the previous four books, Peterson looked at themes like worship, Bible reading, preaching and praying, but this final effort could be summarised in one simple phrase: Grow up!
Using a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the book of Ephesians as his foundation, Peterson challenges the church to remember that growing to maturity in Christ is what we are all called to, and argues that our over-dependence on strategies, goals and other means of measuring ‘growth’ are intrinsically unhealthy. Growth, insists the Professor emeritus at Vancouver’s Regent College, is not really something we can micro-manage, plan or control but instead should be lived out of the resurrected life that was first in Jesus, and which is now made available to us all. Peterson argues that the church, with all its dependence on marketing, management and growth in numbers, is actually very immature about HOW it wants to grow up. Peterson says that this depersonalises God and also settles our visions of growth into arithmetic rather than biology. We miss the point of growth, which according to Scriptural books like Ephesians, is far more rooted in passivity and interdependence than we would care to admit. Interestingly enough, Peterson is one of the few significant contemporary church leaders calling the church to do less not more. Peterson says that in order to practice resurrection life, we need to ‘acquire passivity,’ to center and submit our lives to those conditions in which growth can most effectively occur: “quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management.”
Peterson’s main bugbear is that the church should be the primary place of this type of growth, were people can practice authentic resurrection life, but instead it is too often concerned with matters that God is not concerned with at all. Here Peterson draws on all his wisdom and considerable scholarship to remind us how the Ephesians church lived, filled as it was with the broken, corrupt and scandalous, and yet, nevertheless, it also provided God-shaped holes in life where people could draw aside to be formed and matured, and to 'practice resurrection' in Christ.
Reading a Peterson book is much like having a cup of coffee with that wiser and more compassionate mentor we all wish we had. Perhaps my imagination takes it too far, but sitting down with one of his books, I sometimes feel as if Peterson is sitting across the table from me, his eyes piercing all too easily through my pretense and immaturity, challenging me to be more. He speaks that directly into my soul. It is like he loves the church too much not to utter the truths we don’t want to hear. Yet, at the same time, you can also sense a warm, crinkly and weathered smile shining through his words, encouraging and uplifting in a ‘you-are-loved-and-believed-in’ kind of way.
The simple truth is I have yet to read a Peterson book not worth my time. Of course that does not mean I agree with absolutely everything he has ever written, but rather that almost everything he says is worth thinking a little more about. Don’t buy this book intending a quick read-through, because as Scott McKnight correctly says, one does not skim Peterson, one ponders Peterson.