Leaving Church: A Memoir by Barbara Brown Taylor

I really enjoyed this book. I was a pastor for about five years, with significant journey there and then a pretty painful letting go of the job. I was not the lead pastor, but I really did resonate with a lot of her journey, both into and out of church work.

For example, one of her concluding statements that resonate with my own experience: "On the twentieth anniversary of my ordination, I would have to say that at least one of the things that almost killed me was becoming a professional holy person. I am not sure that the deadliness was in the job as much as it was in the way I did it ... As many years as I wanted to wear a clerical collar and as hard as I worked to get one, taking it off turned out to be as necessary for my salvation as putting it on."

I like the way she says that ... whether the job was dangerous or the way she went about it. I agree. Probably a good measure of both.

Here is another moment - she is describing lessons that came with losing the power of being a priest/pastor

    - "I got a taste of the spiritual poverty that is central to the Christ path." This is big and hard to see in person when you are in the job. You get it theoretically and we all have things that make us feel poor, but there is so much power in that position that you fail to really embrace it or show it. It is your flock that is poor and you are the rich merchant, generous enough to share ... again the position is dangerous to the soul.

    -  "The third thing that happened when I lost my power was that my priesthood emptied into the world. As I became a sojourner in congregations where I had no official role, I began to understand that while I had lost institutional power, I was still a priest. No longer tied to one particular community, I began to sense myself part of the far larger congregation of humankind. No longer responsible for one particular alter, I began to see altars everywhere."

That was one theme she beautifully expressed, the idea of the world as vast and Christ at work, God at work in that vast world and how the church often becomes the safe "inside" place vs the wilderness where everyone camps and sleeps under the stars. "There were no slate roofs or signs to the restroom out there, no printed programs or friendly ushers. There was just the unscripted encounter with the undomesticated God whose name was unpronounceable--that, and a bunch of flimsy tents lit up by lanterns inside, pitched by those who were either seeking such an encounter or huddling in their sleeping bags while they recovered from one. These people at the edge kept the map form becoming redundant."

Here is perhaps my favorite line and a good question, one that I feel from my own experience: "might it be time for people of good faith to allow that God's map is vast, with room on it for both a center and an edge? While the center may be the place where the stories of faith are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happened." Bonhoeffer said that you must always pair the world for Christ (crusader and triumphant) with Christ for the world (outcast, suffering, the cross). The map is vast and in some way we must all "leave church" to see that for ourselves.