Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. In Greek the word is psyche, meaning not only “life” but also the conscious self, the personality, the soul. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching, in other words. You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

I paid careful attention to movies with Christians in them, which spanned the gamut from Spartacus to The Lilies of the Field.

It is not clear whether the author is referring to the actors or the characters. In the case of Spartacus, none of the characters were Christians as these events took place BEFORE Jesus was born.

being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.

one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

In years to come, when people would ask me what I missed about parish ministry, baptisms and funerals would be high on the list—that,

Notice that she did not mention weddings. I haven’t met a pastor yet who prefers weddings to funerals. This pastor concurs.

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.

a great deal of Christian theology began as a stammering response to something that had actually happened in the world.

John MacQuarrie wrote that experience is one of what he called “formative factors “ of theology.

For some, the issue was that they believed less than they thought they should about Jesus.

Such is one great chasm in the Church. For many, it is vital that a “baby Christian” strive to check off all the Jesus boxes. One left blank leaves that person marginalized, not a true believer.

These people not only feared being shunned for their unorthodox narratives, they also feared sharing some of the most powerful things that had ever happened to them with people who might dismiss them.

This reader made the mistake of telling the story of my “rebirth”, an event as powerful now as it was then. However, because it did not fit into the pattern of conversion these folks ascribed to, my experience was dismissed out of hand.

Did the Nicene Creed really cover all the bases of the Christian story? Was the Bible always the word of God? Freed from defending the faith, I began to revisit what faith really meant to me and found that much of the old center did not hold.

As a pastor and chaplain I am still a defender of the faith but look forward to the day when I may speak out on national issues without fear of reprisals from the IRS and others who would separate pastor from principles.

I had arrived at an understanding of faith that had far more to do with trust than with certainty.

That truly speaks for this reader.

magi knelt before his manger in Bethlehem.

The Bible does not tell us that the magi knelt before the manger. It says they went into the house, not a barn.

many books of the Bible are at glorious odds with one another, as Job argues with Proverbs, Ruth with Ezra, Mark with John, and James with Paul.

I have Elaine Pagels to thank for the revelation that the word heresy comes from the Greek word for “choice.”

All these years later, I recognize this as the way that winners often speak of those they have harmed beyond repair. Trying to find some way to live with what we have done, we find solace in the idea that their doom was their own doing. They were savages, after all. It was them or us.

The genocide recorded in the Old Testament is a classic example.

Cleto’s timing left no room for more than about two exquisitely self-conscious questions like this, leaving me no recourse but to speak from my struck heart—or as near to that spot as I could get—which means that I do not remember one word I said.

This reader had a similar experience although not nearly as exquisite. Long before I answered God’s call to ministry, about 15 years, I was asked to offer the blessing prior to a wedding rehearsal dinner. With absolutely no time to prepare, I prayed from the heart as the Spirit moved me. Later that evening, the mother of the groom asked me for a written copy of the prayer. I had to respectfully decline as I had no memory of what I prayed.

I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends. In the words of W.H. Vanstone, set to a hymn that never fails to bring tears to my eyes, “Here is God: no monarch he, throned in easy state to reign; here is God, whose arms of love, aching, spent, the world sustain.”

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.

the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there—not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene—promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall. Ironically, those who try hardest not to fall learn this later than those who topple more easily. The ones who find their lives are the losers, while the winners come in last.

I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?

Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance, to gather up all the life in that room and do with it what God alone knew how to do.

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.”