Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

To thousands of readers, Barbara Brown Taylor is best known as a writer of resources for the ordained (Home By Another Way; The Seeds of Heaven; etc.). Her books have become a staple in the mainline Protestant clergy diet, like casseroles or Frederick Buechner. Clergy will find multitudes in this new book, as well. Just as Buechner's memoirs helped clergy twenty years ago, Barbara Brown Taylor's will, today. Clergy will understand when she tells what she's thinking and how she's scrutinizing while administering communion (p. 34), or as she movingly describes what it felt like to be ordained a priest (p. 43). Her descriptions of unease and insecurity in the role will speak most profoundly to fellow clergy, but also to anyone who has counted a priest, pastor, or deacon, a friend. On the other hand, Leaving Church is too limiting of a title for Taylor's new memoir. I hope that the phrase will not keep those in the pews, or even those who left the church long ago, from reading it. A quote from William Faulkner opens Part One of the book, and would do well to open every memoir: "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself." The simple facts are these: Baptized Catholic, she wanders in and out of a few Protestant denominations. Drawn to a life of divine importance during high school in the sixties, she attends Yale Divinity School in the seventies on a scholarship; is among the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church USA a few years later; serves a large church in Atlanta (All Saints') for a decade as one of several clergy; seeks and finds a rural parish to lead on her own (Grace-Calvary in Clarkesville, GA); and after several years, quits, exhausted, taking a job teaching religion to college undergraduates. Part One, "Finding," begins with Taylor's desire (at age 40) to leave the large staff of that Atlanta congregation in search of a country life and parish. "The idea was to skip right over the suburbs and head for the countryside," she explains, as she and her husband take day-trips around northeast Georgia searching for a new life. Eventually, upon arriving in Clarkesville and finding the small Episcopal church there, she yearns so deeply for this new life that her yearning becomes a series of physical reactions to touching the church building itself: "I could feel the clenched muscle of my mind relax. My shoulders came down from around my ears. I shook out my arms and put my hands flat on the side of the church." (p. 11) And that was before she ever stepped inside. But things did not go as planned. Having originally given a commitment of a decade, she is burned out within a few years. The demands of being priest to all people at all times get to be too great. Ultimately, Taylor's leaving the church and the priesthood put her in a jeopardy that is easily understood by anyone who has questioned or struggled to find their vocation: "By leaving church, I was about to leave everything I knew how to do and be."

Truth tellers are rare, especially if they are telling hard truths from deep love. Taylor's deep love for the church and for the God worshiped there provide the basis for her faithful and critical truth telling. Her truths -- which others whisper -- include the ways in which churches wound their leaders, overly limit the laity's ability to engage God and one another theologically, and need new visions of God and the people of God in these hard days. As ever, Taylor writes beautifully as well as truthfully. This isn't by any means a "Dear John" letter to the church -- it's a love letter demanding the best of what each person can bring to and receive from communities of faith.

Many scholarly people have written intelligent and poetic reviews of Barbara Brown Taylor's new book, "Leaving Church: a Memoir of Faith. My reading of it was on an emotional level and I was filled with respect and awe for Barbara's strength and honesty. Priests are trained to reserve their emotions, mask their opinions, and set the self aside for the job of ministering to their community. To bare her soul, admit her weaknesses, doubts, and desires, and finally to share her resolve to bring the Divine back into her life was a task beyond most people's ability. She has laid her life out there for scrutiny and that took a lot of courage. Simply put, to be honest with and about ones self and reveal that self to others to not only see but to learn from and ultimately to forgive and grow. Many people have read the book and picked out the parts they want to use to fight battles within the church or defend issues they have with the church. The book was written for exactly the opposite reason- to set all that aside and find the divine in your life, spread the word, and share the love of God. Barbara has not given up her collar, is not an "ex- priest" She is an Episcopalian priest who has for the time ceased to be a parish priest. She is now searching, growing, learning, and sharing the word of God with the community of man outside four walls. I want to thank Barbara for her honesty and for sharing the good and the bad from her journey thus far. Barbara has the ability to reach into your soul and speak the gospel on a personal level that we can absorb and lead each of us to examine our own souls and our relationship with God. Her book has opened many hearts to the possibility of a more personal relationship with the divine and freed many to let go of guilt and the feeling of not belonging, to one of basking in God's love and sharing that joy with our fellow man.

I was fascinated by Barbara Brown Taylor's searchingly honest story of her struggle between wanting to serve God as an Episcopal priest and wanting to love God as one of God's beloved children. Doesn't sound as if the two desires conflict, does it? But in fact they do, and this is her story of that profoundly wrenching conflict and how she has tried to resolve it. Taylor, who as a child fell in love with God as first revealed in the beauty of nature, became a famous preacher and famous writer in the Episcopal Church. She describes how much she loved the people both in and out of church that she served. She also describes how much she loved God, and how the busy-ness of her ministry came between her heart and God. Finally she got to a breaking point, and she chose: she ceased her "professional" ministry and became a college professor of religion. And after a dark night of the soul she found herself where she believes she needs to be -- back in "right relationship" with the Divine. But this all came at a high price. She is quite unsparing in her description of what she's lost as well as what she's gained. She's also eloquent about the pressures on the Episcopal Church, and sounds a prophetic warning about its future if it continues in the hierarchical way it currently follows. If you yourself are involved in ministry, or if you know someone who is, this is a vitally important book. Read it!