● Preach Like the Greats · 42 of 87
Preach Like Eugene
Peterson.
Read the text, find its one word, and walk it into your people’s ordinary week.
- ✓8 of his sermons, studied start to finish
- ✓Ten steps to preach the way he did
- ✓A fill-in outline in his shape, 9 pages
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Fill this in and the PDF is yours on the next screen.
— Why he’s one of the greats
Read the text, find its one word, and walk it into your people’s ordinary week.
Postwar suburban America, from a new mainline congregation outside Baltimore. Eugene Peterson grew up in Kalispell, Montana, the son of a butcher, and in 1962 became the founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, which he served for 29 years until 1991. He preached to the same few hundred people week after week, and later said that “preaching wasn’t preaching if I didn’t know these people.” His secret: he preached as a pastor, not a performer. He read the text first, then let one plain word or image carry the whole sermon (“awake,” the preposition “in,” the Sabbath, the belly of the fish, topsoil). He brought novelists, poets and theologians into the pulpit alongside his own small confessions, and he kept moving from doctrine toward the ordinary week: Sabbath, the hospital visit, the to-do list. He ended quietly, usually on the text or a single line, with “Amen.”
- 29Years founding pastor, Christ Our King, Bel Air
- 49Bel Air sermons in As Kingfishers Catch Fire
- 15M+Copies of The Message sold by 2018
What makes his style unique
“An exegete and a poet, Peterson opens up to us not only the text but its world.”
— Who wrote this
We’re pastors. We’ve had your Monday.
Pastor Center is built and written by pastors — a lead pastor who planted churches, and a church planter who grew one to 4,000 in four years. The same team teaches 9 free courses and 164 lessons. This guide is the short version.
- 9free courses
- 164lessons, all free
- ARCChurches partner
— What you get
What’s inside
Preach Like Eugene Peterson — Read the text, find its one word, and walk it into your people’s ordinary week..
- 01Why he’s one of the greatsThe story, the numbers and what made his style his own.
- 02What he does8 of his sermons, studied start to finish, and the shape they share.
- 03How he does itTen steps to preach the way he did.
- 04His outlineWhere the time goes, movement by movement.
- 05Write one like Eugene PetersonA fill-in outline in his shape, ready for your own text.
- 06SourcesEvery quote and number, cited.
— The plan
Three steps. Starting today.
Tell us where to send it
One short form. The PDF is on the very next screen — no trial, no card, nothing to wait for.
Study him in one sitting
9 pages: 8 of his sermons studied, ten steps, and an outline you fill in with your own text.
Preach it Sunday
Fill in the outline with your own text and preach your next sermon the way Eugene Peterson would.
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