Plunging from the pulpit | Leaving Church

Beautifully written | Leaving Church


	• Leaving Church HarperCollins e-books, 2007 average customer review:based on 91 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Rich, Beautiful Textured Read

This is a beautiful book that should be enjoyed slowly over a good cup of coffee and cake. She has an amazingly gentle and firm grasp of the English language which gives her the ability to describe her relationship with God in a special yet real way. Coming from a background where the church structure has been so fundamental, I could relate to many points she brought up.

If you liked this...
I read this just a day after Have a Little Faith: A True Story. Together with that and The Shack, these books have helped bring down some of my religious scales of who God is and where he is.

Parting Thought: The Sabbath
The way she related this Jewish tradition was one of the most eye-opening things. The concept of full rest and not doing any work is lost in our modern society where it just often means to turn up in church. She brought this to life in terms of how it honors God and how in turn, God honors our rest.

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Plunging from the pulpit

I once heard Barbara Brown Taylor at a preaching conference in Atlanta, GA. She carried herself with such poise and spoke so elegantly, we were all knocked out. Every preacher I know wants to preach like Barbara Brown Taylor, and all her books are wildly popular. To top it all off, Taylor has been named as one of the "Top Ten Preachers in the English language," so her reputation is stellar.

In her book, "Leaving Church", however, Taylor has shocked us. She tells the story of how she decided to leave the pulpit for academia. She resigned her position as rector of a church and now teaches religion and philosophy at Clark College in Georgia. One of the brute facts that preachers face these days is that many pew-sitters are "leaving church" and not coming back. So it seems hard to accept that our champion preacher has herself left the church.

Taylor details the circumstances that brought her to become the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Georgia. She fell in love with the building on her first visit. "Simply to stand in the presence of that building was to rest. Peace poured off the white boards and caught me in its wake."

By virtue of her preaching and her pastoral presence, the church grew rapidly, and she soon had to increase from three Sunday services to four. The demands on her time mounted and she began to feel burned out. Her old back troubles returned and she fell into depression. "I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as me, and my huge appetite for approval."

This is a familiar story to those of us in ministry. Overwork leads to burnout which leads to physical and mental breakdown. Taylor's romantic dream of the country parson didn't come true. Looking back, she writes, "My desire to be as near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue."

It ain't easy being a minister today. The conflicting demands wring you out, and if you're not careful, you end up "leaving church", like Barbara Brown Taylor. We're fortunate, though, that she left this pungent memoir of her plunge from the pulpit. She's still preaching occasionally and writing her luminous books. It's just that they'll be a little more remote from our lives now that she's not in the pulpit every Sunday with us.

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Beautifully written

I underlined most of the book. Beautifully written nuggets of wisdom all the way through. And it is NOT about leaving faith -- or even the Church. It's about leaving the profession of the Priest in the Church and embracing the priesthood of all believers, as well as her own.

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Inspirational

Book delivery was what I expected, on time. Book is in very good condition. I recommend this vendor.

By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.

Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me -- that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human -- seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.

After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave.

Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places. Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.

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