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by: Barbara Brown Taylor
List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 283.092
EAN: 9780060872632
ISBN: 0060872632
Label: HarperOne
Manufacturer: HarperOne
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: April 01, 2007
Publisher: HarperOne
Release Date: April 10, 2007
Sales Rank: 8322
Studio: HarperOne
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Product Description:
By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.
Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me -- that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human -- seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.
After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing 'compassion fatigue' and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave.
Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places. Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - To Live a Life of Love
This gracefully written narrative tells the story of Taylor's journey toward ordained ministry, her years as an Episcopal priest, and her departure from that life into a new vocation as a college professor. She decides that the most important calling is not to be ordained or to be religious, but to be fully human and to live a life of love. This is a touching autobiography, an eloquent memoir of faith.
Rating: - Too abstract to be a real memoir, but thought-provoking
I read a lot of memoirs these days. In fact they are probably my favorite literary genre. Maybe I should have been warned by Taylor's subtitle - not simply "a memoir," but "a memoir of faith." Because this is not a memoir in the usual sense. There is precious little of Taylor's childhood, youth or young adulthood - no real concrete stories and examples from her life. Too much of this book remains caught in the abstraction of ideas and beliefs, with not nearly enough examples. The people who show ... Read More
Rating:  - A memoir of Experience
This book would have been more accurately described in the subtitle as a "Memoir of Personal Experience".
She dismisses orthodox Christian Theology and doctrine as something that the Apostles and Early Church had to "come up with" to explain this or that.
Ultimately it is a story of how the narrow Christian path and Church "didn't work" for her, and many of her thoughts and experiences confirm the fact that women were never meant to be "priests" in the first place (though ... Read More
Rating:  - A Precious Memoir
Over the course of my life I have learned certain things about salad; it has good, nourishing things in it, like spinach, almonds, feta cheese, and olive oil. Sometimes you can add strawberries. With a splash of balsamic vinegar, it sings. Other times it is dressed with slightly less healthy things like mayonnaise or sour cream, but generally its ingredients have a clear line of succession back to something alive; apples, raisins, eggs, potatoes.
Then I moved to South Dakota, where I was ... Read More
Rating: - Well worth reading
This book just "popped" up as an advertised suggestion for me, and after looking at the details on Amazon, I decided to order it. I am doing a lot of soul searching about my own faith journey, and am having a struggle with the Institutional Church not truly following the teachings of Jesus, having gotten enmired in politics and building empire. I felt this book was speaking to me, and is one I could hardly put down. It is well written, and certainly one I would, and have recommended to others.
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