This book is my attempt to do that.Īfter nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me - that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human - seems important enough to witness to on paper. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own.

By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing.

Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor