LEAVING CHURCH

Found this book at the Mid-Town Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA. 

Published in 2006 by Harper San Francisco, this “memoir of faith” was written by Barbara Brown Taylor, considered by many to be one of the greatest preachers of the gospel in US America today. I’ve never heard her preach. But she can write extremely well.

It is the story of a clergy person who, after 20 years of very effective pastoral ministry (my assessment), jumped to academia. Although I read carefully and listened for it, I did not detect more than an ounce of toxicity; mostly sadness really, and an awareness that if she did not move, the price for remaining a pastor would have been great.  She began to lose her way . . . and her soul, something she was not willing to do. She did not want to be a priest anymore (pastor is the term most of us use) and she became convinced that God did not want her too either.

I must say, I was impressed with her ability to express in no uncertain terms the difficulties and challenges associated with being a parish pastor. I resonated with most of these confessions. (not all) For instance, read this paragraph, one I shared with pastors recently in Ohio: I have substituted pastor for the word priest. 

A pastor is someone willing to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another’s love, turning back and forth between them with no hope of tending either as well as each deserves. To be a pastor is to serve God who never stops calling people to do more justice and love more mercy, and simultaneously to serve people who nine times out of ten are just looking for a safe place to rest.  To be a pastor is to know that things that are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are. 

To be a pastor is to suspect that there is always something more urgent that you should be doing, no matter what you are doing, and to make peace with the fact that the work will never get done.  To be a pastor is to wonder sometimes if you are missing the boat altogether, by deferring pleasure in what God has made until you have fixed it up so that it will please God more.  “When I wake up in the morning,” E.B. White once wrote, “I can’t decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.”

Sure.  Taylor is an Episcopalian and quite liberal. Most people will be able to “read around” that and hear the laments of one who wanted to remain a pastor for the rest of her life and be “buried in her vestments” but could not.  The pressure and demands were too great. (I’ve felt that way a time or two myself).

Having read this memoir, I am reminded that the work of the pastor is great and it requires, more than ever, the abundant grace of God.  I am also reminded that God’s grace is enough . . . that if God calls he enables, equips and empowers in cooperation with our sincere attempts to care for our souls.  Such soul care has always been critically important. 

But the “new reality” in which we minister the gospel demands that we (clergy) “take care of ourselves”.  The stakes have never been higher, don’t you think?”