Nicholas Rowe

“Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren’t bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“There are a thousand ways of being religious without submitting to Christ’s lordship, and people are practiced in most of them. We live in golden calf country. Religious feeling runs high but in ways far removed from what was said in Sinai and done on Calvary. While everyone has a hunger for God, deep and insatiable, none us has any great desire for him. What we really want is to be our own gods and to have whatever other gods that are around to help in this work.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all, is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but flourish under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness

“Thomas Merton wrote, “it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not ‘what he ought to be.’ If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether.”50”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant an Exploration in Vocational Holiness