Peterson, too, sets himself against the dominant trends in both church and culture. “The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans,’’ he writes early on in a scathing critique of much of what passes for pastoral ministry in contemporary American culture. Indeed, he says, it is that very culture the pastor must navigate and resist.
“I love being an American,’’ Peterson writes. “I love this place in which I have been placed””its language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love ”˜the American way,’ its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed”¦.The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.’’
Peterson takes for the book’s epigraph a sentence from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.”