In my last year of university I became good friends with two students from Nigeria with unpronounceable last names, Augustine Njokuobi and Elijah Odajara. They had been sent on scholarship from their Christian high school in Lagos City with the intent that they would return and teach in the school. They had also been instructed to recruit someone to teach English literature. I didn’t know it at the time, but they had decided that I was the one. They told me stories about Nigeria, the storied tribal culture, and the school they were going to return to, an outpost of the kingdom of God in Africa. Eventually they got around to the business of recruitment. Nigeria needed me. Their high school needed me. Africa was seething with opportunities for serving Christ. They could arrange for an appointment to their high-school faculty.
It seemed like an answer to prayer. In four months I would be graduating, and I had no idea what I would do. I would have a diploma in philosophy and literature, but what kind of job did that qualify me for? I had never really thought about it. My university years had consisted in enjoying my friends, studying my books, being active in student activities, and competing in track-and-field athletics. I had not really thought beyond that. I had a vague idea of becoming a professor of philosophy and literature, but I knew that would require more schooling, and I had made no plans for it and no money. Who would hire me, and for what, when I showed them my degree in philosophy and a handful of gold medals I had accumulated in running the mile in various track meets in the Northwest? And one more thing: I was engaged to be married that summer. Was this an act of providence or not?
We talked about it, Augustine and Elijah and I. It didn’t take long for the lure of exotic Africa, the prospect of immersing myself in a new culture, having a respectable job (the school would provide travel expenses and a salary), a couple honeymoon years in a world of wonders, and taking my place in an outpost of the kingdom of God—all of that and more seemed to require a grateful Yes. I said yes. Letters were exchanged, my dean wrote a recommendation; within a month I had received a letter of invitation, a two-year appointment to the faculty of the Christian high school in Lagos City.
Meanwhile things hadn’t been going well with my fiancée. She called off the engagement. The termination of that romance at the same time put an end to my romance with Nigeria. The thought of going to Nigeria by myself drained all the appeal out of Africa. I told Augustine and Elijah. They were devastated. I wrote to Lagos City and resigned the position that I had not even begun. The day following graduation I packed my car and set out for Montana, a ten-hour drive, ten hours of reorienting myself to my now nonfuture. I already knew what I would be doing for the summer. I had earlier agreed to work for my father in his butcher shop and save money as I got ready for whatever was to come.
But what? The only thing I could come up with was to be a pastor. I had never considered being a pastor. For me, being a pastor was what you did when you couldn’t do anything else, one step up the ladder from being unemployed. Right now I couldn’t think that there might be “anything else.” I was not exactly qualified to be a pastor, but in the church culture in which I grew up it didn’t take much to qualify. Three years at a Bible school was standard. With my university degree I was probably already overqualified. It seemed better than nothing.
I talked it over with my parents. The next morning I called the person in charge of church appointments in our denomination in Montana. I had never met him, but he knew my parents. I asked him if there were any churches looking for a pastor. “Not right now, Eugene. But we have been hoping to start a new church in Townsend or in Fort Benton. You’d be welcome to give it a try.” Both small towns were across the mountains at the beginning of the prairies. I had never been to either town. I arbitrarily chose Townsend and told him I would start in September. “Do you have any counsel or direction for me?” He didn’t. “The Lord will teach you what you need to know.”
So in September I drove across MacDonald Pass and the Continental Divide, an extravaganza of glacial-cut peaks and alpine meadows, and descended into the flat, featureless plains of Townsend to begin my life as a pastor. The topography of the five-hour drive was a metaphor.
I arrived at noon on Friday faced with two tasks: find a job; find a place to live. I went to a butcher shop and got a job as a meat cutter—I would start work on Monday. I then drove through the town looking for a place to live. I spotted a sign in a house window: Apartment for Rent. It was a basement apartment, and I took it. So far things were easy. The next day I went through the town, knocking on doors, introducing myself: “Hello. I’m Eugene Peterson, and I’ve been asked by my denomination to come here to start an Assembly of God Church. Can I talk to you about it?” Things were no longer easy. Over the next six hours I knocked on every door in town. I never got inside a single house. Everyone in town was either a Methodist or a Mormon. And apparently they all went to church.
I was out of houses but kept walking. I left the town and found a trail along the Missouri River. The sun was setting over the soaring peaks of the Rockies fifty miles to the west in a blaze of glory, and I was down here dragging my feet across this colorless flatland without a compass. Fort Benton, which also “needed a church,” was on this same Missouri River about a four-hour drive northeast. Maybe I should just get in my car and try it. Maybe I had picked the wrong place. It was getting dark. I came to a diner, got a hamburger and a slice of apple pie, then went to my apartment and unrolled my sleeping bag.
But I didn’t sleep. I wrestled with an angel all night, praying, asking questions, going over the ground of the last four months. When the sun came up, I knew I was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. I was not a pastor.
On the drive home across the mountains I considered my options. I could work as a butcher with my father—all along he had wanted to make me a partner in his business. I could join the army—the Korean War was on. Or I could go to seminary. I had never considered seminary before—graduate study in philosophy, yes, but not seminary. In the church culture in which I was raised seminary was out of the question. But I couldn’t get seminary out of my mind—a shift from philosophy to theology wouldn’t be that difficult. I could be a professor in theology. When I arrived home at about three o’clock that Sunday, my mother met me as I drove up and asked, “What are you doing here?”
I told her, “I’m not going to Townsend.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“What would you think of my going to seminary?”
“I always thought you would go to seminary.” That was a surprise—I just assumed that she harbored the hostile suspicion pervasive in my sectarian church culture that all seminaries were cemeteries.
There was a seminary in New York City that a friend I greatly respected had attended. And two professors at my university were graduates. A few telephone calls the next day made the way clear for admission. I didn’t unpack my car. Within a week I was enrolled as a student in the Biblical Seminary in New York at 235 East Forty-ninth Street. (The name has since been changed to New York Theological Seminary.)
It had been quite a six months. From Augustine and Elijah’s planting of the dream of Africa, to the devastation of rejection that woke me from the dream, to the attempt to become a pastor for all the wrong reasons, to an unlikely and unplanned enrollment in a New York City seminary. All steps on my way to becoming a pastor. But talk about haphazard.