Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006
234 pp.

Reviewed by Kendra Irons

As I write, a new semester is staring me in the face, threatening to send me into apoplectic shock at any moment if I don’t start churning out syllabi and lecture notes at warp speed. So, why did I just spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing to avoid this catastrophic demise? I was in the grip of my latest Amazon.com postal bundle: Barbara Brown Taylor’s absorbing narrative, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. A courageous account, Taylor’s descriptive writing will reward most anyone with a renewed wonder of God’s creation and a transforming desire to relish life.

Leaving Church is a memoir of finding, losing, and keeping—although with none of the preachiness that sometimes accompanies such narratives and with an ever-present consciousness of doubt and uncertainty. Taylor’s honesty on these points pervades the narrative and makes it one not to miss.

The ambiguous title delivers Taylor’s intent: a distinction between faith and religion, a vocational crisis, not a buckling of faith. Through a series of surprises and unexpected turns, Taylor finds herself no longer serving as a parish priest. Rather, the reality of God’s call to be fully human, a call she believes we all share, is too encompassing to be contained in clerical collars and ecclesial polity. Some twenty years after her ordination in the Episcopal Church, she currently is a priest who ministers in the context of a college classroom and is not so disillusioned by the church that she can walk away, inclined to resist all ecclesial structure. She loves God and, as it turns out, loves the church, too. At least enough to hold out hope.

A deep awareness of Divine Presence during her childhood, especially in the midst of nature, formed the foundation for Taylor’s later faith and ministry. Not raised in the church, she did not have the language of faith that church structure provides, but she apparently did have deeply-felt and deeply-moving experiences of God. These are especially acute when she explores the natural world around her. A religion major in college, she continued to feed her curiosity about God, an interest propelling her to seminary. Eventually she was ordained in the Episcopal Church, drawn, she said, not by the beliefs particularly, but by the opportunity to behold others, to spread the love of God.

After serving a large urban church in Atlanta, Georgia, for nine years and a rural church in Clarkesville, Georgia, for five, where despite congregational growth she felt “compassion fatigue,” Taylor made the painful but necessary decision to leave church. Still, hers is not a diatribe against a particular church nor her Episcopal denomination. Rather, Taylor produces a narrative teeming with life, vibrant in its reassurance of trusting God, steadfast in its praise of creation and Creator. Lessons abound for the faithful and the faint of heart: practice Sabbath, be compassionate—very compassionate, realize that following Jesus is not easy and that none of us can do it very well, trust God with an awe of the many mysteries certainty can never deliver, and be aware of the Divine Presence infused in nature all around us.

Despite Taylor’s beautiful description of priestly vestments, communion, worship processions and so on, she does offer a well-timed word of advice for the chasm existing between conservative and progressive Christians. Using imagery of a circle that contains a center and a periphery, she calls the church to recognize its need of both: the center for its continuity, the edge for its prophetic voice. Taylor experienced the challenge of holding these often opposing groups together when, as the priest of the Clarkesville Episcopal Church, she was required to lead her parish in discussions about homosexuality. Maintaining a sense of neutrality, she became frustrated by the limiting notions of what she heard, by the certainty of some, by the idolizing of the written Word. This experience left her wondering, “If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common?” (111)

If there is one puzzling omission in Taylor’s memoir, it is about her popularity, how widely-known she has become for her preaching and writing. Surely this public life that is now hers has affected her faith and ministry. In fact, this is the one place in the book where it is difficult to identify with Taylor’s vocational switch. To have the luxury of a teaching appointment thrust at one, to have a safety net nicely in place, seems to put Taylor in a different category from most of us.

Still, Barbara Brown Taylor’s wise narrative is a helpful addition to other recent faith-filled memoirs: Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, Joan Chittister’s Called to Question, and Anne Lamott’s Plan B. Each of these are engaging narratives, replete with intelligent insight and witty humor. Taylor’s unique contribution is her encouragement to bask in the liberating presence of the Spirit, trusting God to lead—even to Clarkesville, even from the center to the periphery.

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Kendra Weddle Irons is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Her first book, Preaching on the Plains, a study of Methodist women preachers in Kansas, was published this year by the University Press of America. She is currently working on a second manuscript that includes a biography of M. Madeline Southard as well as several edited volumes of Southard's journals. Readers of Christian Feminism Today will remember Kendra’s earlier article, “The Alien among Us: Woman as Prophet” in the spring, 2006 issue.

© 2007 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus