Book Review: Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor

I once heard Barbara Brown Taylor at a preaching conference in Atlanta, GA. She carried herself with such poise and spoke so elegantly, we were all knocked out. Every preacher I know wants to preach like Barbara Brown Taylor, and all her books are wildly popular. To top it all off, Taylor has been named as one of the “Top Ten Preachers in the English language,” so her reputation is stellar.

In her book, “Leaving Church”, however, Taylor has shocked us. She tells the story of how she decided to leave the pulpit for academia. She resigned her position as rector of a church and now teaches religion and philosophy at Clark College in Georgia. One of the brute facts that preachers face these days is that many pew-sitters are “leaving church” and not coming back. So it seems hard to accept that our champion preacher has herself left the church.

Taylor details the circumstances that brought her to become the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Georgia. She fell in love with the building on her first visit. “Simply to stand in the presence of that building was to rest. Peace poured off the white boards and caught me in its wake.”

By virtue of her preaching and her pastoral presence, the church grew rapidly, and she soon had to increase from three Sunday services to four. The demands on her time mounted and she began to feel burned out. Her old back troubles returned and she fell into depression. “I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as me, and my huge appetite for approval.”

This is a familiar story to those of us in ministry. Overwork leads to burnout which leads to physical and mental breakdown. Taylor’s romantic dream of the country parson didn’t come true. Looking back, she writes, “My desire to be as near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue.”

It ain’t easy being a minister today. The conflicting demands wring you out, and if you’re not careful, you end up “leaving church”, like Barbara Brown Taylor. We’re fortunate, though, that she left this pungent memoir of her plunge from the pulpit. She's still preaching occasionally and writing her luminous books. It's just that they’ll be a little more remote from our lives now that she’s not in the pulpit every Sunday with us.

-