During the early part of 2006, I spent some time working in a large national-chain bookstore. It was a natural choice for me, and I was much more comfortable telling my friends I worked there than if I were working, say, for FEMA, which no doubt would have brought their wrath down on me. At any rate, when you love books as much as I do and you spend your day surrounded by upwards of 200,000 titles, you find books you want to buy. Books and books and books...and there's that seductive employee discount! So by the time my bookstore career ended in early summer, I had a huge stack of books to read. Some are still waiting to be read, but of the ones that I have devoured, I can name one my personal Book of the Year. It is Barbara Brown Taylor's autobiographical Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).
I already owned at least seven of her books, mostly collections of sermons but also essays and lectures. She has been calleld "one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world," and she writes beautiful narrative-based sermons that catch you by surprise with their insights into the Biblical text. Not a bad preacher to read when you are starting out as a preacher in your own right!
In Leaving Church, I discovered that she and I are the same age, although our lives have taken very different paths. She served on the staff of a large urban Episcopal church in downtown Atlanta for a number of years. The long hours, the endless adminstrative tasks and meetings involved in big-church ministry were burning her out, and when an opportunity arose for her to pastor a small-town church in the North Georgia mountains, she grabbed it. She and her husband moved to the country and built their dream home on mountain acreage. It sounds like the idyllic life, but when you are a world-famous preacher like Barbara Brown Taylor, your small church in a small town doesn't stay small very long. Soon she had associate pastors working under her, multiple services every Sunday, and the potential for a huge building program as the church grew by leaps and bounds. She found herself putting in the same crazy hours as she had back in the city, with little time to read and reflect and experience the holy. And so she left parish ministry to teach religion (in an endowed chair) at Piedmont College, and also to be adjunct faculty at my seminary outside Atlanta. She writes of the sense of loss at "leaving church," but the book cover shows a white bird in flight, escaping from a cage. It is clear that she left parish ministry in hopes of finding the freedom of the white bird in flight. (Anyone remember the 1960s song, "White Bird" by It's a Beautiful Day? "White bird/in a golden cage/on a winter's day/in the rain...White bird must fly/or she will die.")
Like Barbara Brown Taylor, I too left parish ministry a little over a year ago, but it is my hope to go back. For the last six months I have been a guest preacher somewhere every Sunday, and I know my call is, indeed, to preach and serve in a local congregation. I have had that affirmed time and again in these last six months. I do believe that sometime in the new year, God will show me where I am supposed to be. But in the meantime, I have a great stack of books to read...
1 comment:
When I finish Dawkins' "The God Delusion," maybe we can trade. I'm serious. I am not being ironic here. In the New York Review of Books, I read in a review of Dawkins latest that he has made his current book too middlebrow; that is, he does not argue the best and brightest on the side of theism, choosing rather to pile up anecdotes and rhetorical tactics. I certainly don't want to be glib and shallow when it comes to skepticism. I respect Pastor Kathy. End of story.
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