Leaving Church: a memoir of faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Harper Collins (ISBN 0060771747)

 

I promised myself that I would blog more of the books I read - so easy just to put them down and read the next one. Over the summer I've read a pile of books, some for work, some for review, and some just for ME! One that I read purely for my own interest was Leaving Church: a memoir of faith – I think I saw it previewed on Prodigal Kiwi and ordered it right away. This is the book I quoted from in my Greenbelt talk back in August. Leaving Church is an account of Barbara Brown Taylor's own journey into faith, ministry, and then Ordination; then her experience of life as a parish priest, first in a big city and later in a small rural town. Eventually, the story begins to track how and why she leaves the life of a Parish priest, and what are the good and bad things about that experience. I trust (given the title) that that is not too much of a spoiler.

One of the reasons I love this book is because it traces the ambivalence that any Priest worth her (or his) salt is bound to live with - loving God, loving the Church and yet being painfully aware that commitment to Church brings as many constraints as it does freedoms, as many handicaps as privileges. She puts her finger on the tension between living out what you believe you were called FOR, and living within the expectations that others have of a priest (almost invariably not the same thing!) To be a priest with any authenticity you have to be fully human, and yet very often it is the Church community that works against that necessity. Sometimes people will not accept ministry if you are not a priest, and yet they won't accept your humanity if you are. Taylor also relates beautifully and tenderly the tension of living with a sense of calling, and the way in which that can so easily spill over into sheer workaholism and the inability to say "no".

The title, "leaving" might just as easily be read as "finding" - it's not a negative account at all, more an account of how, in order to continue a journey of faith and simply of human life, the season of ordained ministry had to be put to one side. One of the reasons I like the book so much is that - unlike so much other rhetoric that is very simplistically anti-priest and anti-institution - she treads her way between the real tensions of communities of faith and their leaders with real insight, and manages to illustrate how we are called first to be human, and only then to be ministers. She doesn't leave the Church because she doesn't believe in it any more, nor because she doesn't believe in what she has done thus far, nor does she hold the Church in any kind of contempt. Rather, she simply relates the complex reasons why at certain times a clear shift in role and direction becomes desirable, and what may be learned along the way. There are plenty of people who will give a bitter account of why they left, trashing where they have been before. It's refreshing to read someone who gives an affectionate and grateful account, despite finding in necessary to leave all the same.

I think anyone interested in Church would benefit from reading this - priests and leaders and ministers of course, but perhaps also those who take different roles within Christian communities - if we could think together about our mutual ministries and what our various roles give to the community, perhaps it would be possible to break down in some places the undesirable divide between the "professional" and the "rest" and start living as truly interdependent communities? Either that or I imagine that I and many others will eventually follow the pattern of life that Taylor has found essential.

Review by Maggi Dawn

With permission: http://maggidawn.typepad.com/maggidawn/