I serve a wonderful congregation. Every Sunday I stand on the platform and sing with them face to face. My heart brims with gratitude. Twelve years in, I know many of their stories. For so many, I know there is pain–sometimes unspeakable pain–embedded in their praise. Yet they show up and faithfully testify about a God who is bigger and a hope that is greater than anything this world has to offer. And I’m strengthened, humbled, and profoundly blessed.

This is a special church.

But perhaps you’ve been in a church where all was not well. Perhaps you’ve sat under a pastor who was not well. Either case is not only possible but common I’m afraid. The worship service can descend into scolding and thinly veiled attacks or defensive screeds that only perpetuate the dysfunctional cycle of animosity. Kyrie eleison.

Eugene Peterson has some wise words to help pastors recognize these patterns, and to do the work to find gratitude in prayer.

“The practice of such a prayer [of gratitude for the congregation] will also prevent what Bonhoeffer sternly warns against, that ‘A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.'”

Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 65. Peterson is quoting Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, 29.

“The pastor must not fail to understand the congregation just as it is, as a historical community brought into being, warts and all, by God; and must not fail to be grateful for it, just as it is, warts and all, to God.

Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 236.