Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and

My own “wholesome example” was Christ, and when I looked at his life I did not see any beach cottages or all-night cafés. Instead, I saw someone who was always feeding people, healing people, teaching people, helping people.

“Martha is sitting on the toilet and we are out of toilet paper,” she told me on the telephone one afternoon. “If I came over right now, could you write me a check to the grocery store so she can get up?”

Still acting on my lifelong and generally mistaken notion that most people want to be listened to as much as they want money, I asked him to come inside and tell me his story.

Listening to one another read Holy Scripture, some of us learned what is meant by “the living word of God.” We also sang things we could more easily have said. The Lord be with you. And also with you. None of us would have dreamed of doing this in the grocery store, but by doing it in church we remembered that there was another way to address one another. Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord. Where else did any of us sing anymore, especially with other people? Where else could someone pick up the alto line on the second verse of “Amazing Grace” and give five other people the courage to sing in harmony? Sometimes, when we were through, we would all just stand there listening until the last note turned entirely to air. We could even be quiet together, which was something else that did not happen many other places in our lives. Silence was so countercultural for most of us

that it took a lot of practice before we could do it together. At first, when one of us paused after reading a prayer out loud, the rest of us would tense up. Did she lose her place? Is it someone else’s turn to speak? Maybe mine? But after a while we learned how many ripples one prayer can spread when another does not land right on top of it.

I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the Bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, “People of the Book risk putting the book above people.”

If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape. Neither I nor anyone else knows how these stories will turn out, since at this point they involve more blood than ink. The whole purpose of the Bible,

it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.

In practice, this means that my faith is far more relational than doctrinal. Although I am guilty of reading scripture as selectively as anyone, my reading persuades me that God is found in right relationships, not in right ideas, and that a great deal of Christian theology began as a stammering response to something that had actually happened in the world. Because Jesus died instead of ushering in the messianic age, Paul responded with a doctrine of atonement. Because the risen Christ struck his followers as very close kin to God, the early church responded with a doctrine of the Trinity. Because Christians did not turn out to be much better behaved than anyone else, Augustine responded with a doctrine of original sin. T...

can also lead people to look to outer authorities for direction instead of to the inner teaching of the Holy Spirit. At Grace-Calvary, a parish with both gay and lesbian members, I grew increasingly weary of arguing over what Paul and the author of Leviticus may or may not have meant in half a dozen passages written a couple of thousand years ago while I watched living human beings wince at the vitriol they heard from those with whom they worshiped God. Human sexuality was only one of the issues dividing Christians in those days. We could also argue about the inspiration of scripture, the uniqueness of Jesus, and the salvation of non-Christians. We could argue about abortion, gun control, just war, and capital punishment. Few of these were live fights at Grace-Calvary, where the congregation had long ago learned to live with its own religious diversity, but the tension in the ...

church people tend to think they should not fight, most of them a...

feared being shunned for their unorthodox narratives,

those who have excused themselves from traditional churches because they see too little or too much.

Episcopalians began vetting one another on the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and his physical resurrection from the dead.

My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.

For Christians, at least part of the answer is that many of us have been taught to think of God’s kingdom as something outside ourselves, for which we must search as a merchant searches for the

pearl of great price.

“The people you think love you don’t love you as much as you think they love you,”

“and the people you think hate you don’t hate you as much as you think they hate you.”

his way endures as a way of emptying the self of all its goods instead of shoring up the self with spiritual riches. Only those who lose their lives can have them. Sometimes known by its Greek name, this kenosis is captured best in the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” he writes, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” The important thing to notice is that no one emptied this Christ Jesus. He willingly emptied himself, leaving his followers a baffling example of how powerful the surrender of all power can be. While my taste of this truth was admittedly no more than a drop on my tongue, I could still taste it. My new powerlessness in

church gave rise to such a riot in my ego that I became freshly aware of how much emptying I had left to

Early on, before the Christian church had a solid center, a wide variety of people who all called themselves Christian understood the Christ in a wide variety of ways. There were the Ebionites, who understood him as a thoroughgoing Jew. There were the Arians, who understood him as an exemplary human being, and the Docetists, who understood him as God in human disguise. For almost three centuries, these choices existed in wild disarray. Then the emperor Constantine, in his imperial wisdom, understood that a faith with no center would never anchor his crumbling empire. So he called all the bishops together, fed them lunch, and asked them to say something definitive about the nature of God in Christ. He asked them to sort through the choices

and agree on one that the Christian church could go forward with. This required many more lunches and some theological bloodletting as well; but, when the bishops had finished crafting a central confession of Christian faith, those who did not choose this option became known as heretics.

Twelve was the traditional age for confirmation in the Episcopal Church, when adolescents were invited to confirm the promises made for them at their baptisms. It was their turn to decide, we told them. We had spoken for them when they could not speak for themselves, choosing membership in Christ’s body for them the same way we chose warm clothes and nourishing food for them. On the verge of adulthood, they now had the choice. Did they desire to live the Christian life? Since it is difficult to say no to a question like that, most of them said yes. When the bishop came for his annual visitation, they lined up before him for the laying on of hands. Calling each of them by name, he dipped his thumb in holy oil and made the sign of the cross on their foreheads. Then he clapped his big hands down on their heads and summoned the Holy Spirit to descend upon them, making them fit servants of the living God.

Afterward there was a big party in the parish hall, which many of those young people mistook for graduation. The first adult decision that some of them made was to not attend church anymore, which helped explain why so many grown-ups held adolescent views of faith. Sixth grade was as far as they had gotten in their schooling, which meant that many of them lived the rest of their lives as spiritual twelve-year-olds.

As a priest, I was trained in the preparation of sacred space. The altar hangings, the linens, the flowers, and the candles were all as important to worship as the words and the songs.

ecclesiastical

My vocation was to love God and my neighbor, and that was something I could do anywhere, with anyone, with or without a collar. My priesthood was not what I did but who I was.

Like most Christians, I have my own canon, in which I hear God speaking most directly to me, but I also like the parts in which God sounds like an alien, since those parts remind me that God does not belong to me. I do not pretend to read the Bible any more objectively than those who wrote it for me. To read it literally strikes me as a terrible refusal of their literary gifts.

I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I. As beautifully as these witnesses write, their divine inspiration can never be separated from their ardent desires; their genuine wish to serve God cannot be divorced from their self-interest. That God should use such blemished creatures to communicate God’s reality so well makes the Bible its own kind of miracle, but I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve. I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field. With the expert notes kept by those who have gone before me, I will keep hunting the Divine Presence in the world, helped as much by the notes they wrote

In Luke’s gospel, there comes a point when he turns around and says to the large crowd of those trailing after him, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (14:26). Make of that what you will, but I think it was his way of telling them to go home. He did not need people to go to Jerusalem to die with him. He needed people to go back where they came from and live the kinds of lives that he had risked his own life to show them: lives of resisting the powers of death, of standing up for the little and the least, of turning cheeks and washing feet, of praying for enemies and loving the unlovable. That would be plenty hard enough for most of them.

“Be kind,” wrote Philo of Alexandria, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

Susan B. Anthony’s statement that “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires”?