Leaving the Church-A Memoir of Faith

In Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, Georgia Author of the Year Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of her decision to leave full time parish ministry after fifteen years, trading her church for a college classroom and her Sunday vestments for plain clothes covered in chalk dust.

“When it is my turn to talk, I generally skip the points and get right to the plot,” she wrote recently. “Narrative is not a choice I make when it comes time to tell the truth; it is the way that truth comes to me–not in crisp propositions but in messy tales of encounters between people and people, between people and creation, between people and the Divine.”

The following is an excerpt from the full review by Fred Plumer: 

A couple of weeks ago I picked up the book on a rainy weekend and read the entire book from beginning to the end. Certainly Ms. Taylor has not changed but apparently I have. There was not word that I would have wanted her to leave out. There was not one story in the memoir that I would have wanted to miss. There was not one drop of tears that I would have been willing to give up. And it all led to the culmination of the wonderful short section (Keeping) that alone was worth the time and the investment of the entire book.

Ms. Taylor does a marvelous job of reconstructing a powerful, cohesive, and spiritual approach to the Christian faith with integrity for the twenty first century. And she does this in a few short pages.

Anyone who is thinking about going to seminary; anyone that is thinking about leaving the church; anyone who is wondering why church has become so difficult; anyone who is wondering why good clergy are becoming more difficult to find; anyone who cares about the postmodern church; anyone who is trying to find a way to re-conceptualize their Christian faith so that it matches the reality of the twenty-first century should read this book.