Eugene H. Peterson

Eugene Peterson spent twenty-nine years as pastor of a single congregation, Christ Our King Presbyterian in Bel Air, Maryland, which he founded in 1962 and stayed with while writing. The Pastor: A Memoir, published by HarperOne in 2011, is his account of that work, and its argument is that a pastor is not a manager of a religious business and that the American church had largely forgotten the difference. He is better known for The Message, his rendering of the Bible into contemporary American speech, published in stages between 1993 and 2002 and sold in the many millions, which brought both a very large readership and a long argument with scholars over how far a paraphrase can go. He later taught at Regent College in Vancouver and retired to Montana, where he died in 2018, aged 85.