The Preaching Life

Rating:
Summary: Half and Half
Review: Barbara Brown Taylor is a wordsmith of the highest order. This book provides the reader with an insight into her views of real Christian ministry--bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to the world through the ordinary. Barbara Brown Taylor sparks the imagination to creative heights and inductively draws the reader into a broader understanding of the preaching life (with the emphasis on "life." If you want your senses and your imagination to be stimulated...if you want to have a greater understanding of God's call to all Christians, then this book is for you!

Rating:
Summary: The Preaching Life
Review: I just recently finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor's The Preaching Life. The book is a must read for any woman who either is considering or has made the decision to enter into a life of ministry. As a woman entering into the preaching life, I have been filled with many hesitations and even fear. Although there are several women in ministry these days, I still hunger from the lack of positive female role models in this career calling.

Barbara Brown Taylor's candid writing of her life's journey to the preacher that she is today is a breath of fresh air in a traditionally male role. She invites all who would like to accompany her into her years of spiritual growth that span the ups and downs of her childhood days through her ordination vows. She is open, honest, and shares her faith with all who would hear. She doesn't hide the truth during the dry times of her life, but rather shares openly the growing pains of her spiritual journey.

The book ends with a brief selection of sermon transcripts. These give testimony to her growth and development as a pastor and a preacher. The book is a must read for women entering ministry.

Rating:
Summary: The Preaching Life
Review: I just recently finished reading Barbara Brown Taylor's The Preaching Life. The book is a must read for any woman who either is considering or has made the decision to enter into a life of ministry. As a woman entering into the preaching life, I have been filled with many hesitations and even fear. Although there are several women in ministry these days, I still hunger from the lack of positive female role models in this career calling.

Barbara Brown Taylor's candid writing of her life's journey to the preacher that she is today is a breath of fresh air in a traditionally male role. She invites all who would like to accompany her into her years of spiritual growth that span the ups and downs of her childhood days through her ordination vows. She is open, honest, and shares her faith with all who would hear. She doesn't hide the truth during the dry times of her life, but rather shares openly the growing pains of her spiritual journey.

The book ends with a brief selection of sermon transcripts. These give testimony to her growth and development as a pastor and a preacher. The book is a must read for women entering ministry.

Rating:
Summary: Required reading for preachers
Review: I require my homiletics students to read this book. Not only does the author offer approaches, ideas and stories to nudge their imaginations, but she also models a way of reflecting on ministry that has honestry and integrity. One of my students suggested that this book should be required reading for seminarians BEFORE they begin their studies. I think that the book is so on target that it would appeal to preachers at any stage of experience.

Rating:
Summary: The Preaching Life: A Graceful Invitation
Review: Stretched across the top of the cover like some literary victory banner - above the title, above the reflective graphic (sunrise? sunset?) - are coveted endorsements by the venerable Fred B. Craddock and the prolific William H. Willimon. Across the bottom, in understated script, is the name Barbara Brown Taylor. Who would need any more enticement to read this book?
Having read and shared with others Gospel Medicine, I was prepared for Taylor's richly personal writing style and her thoughtful probing of sacred text and meaning. The Preaching Life adds a third dimension: the lens of her personal experience as an Episcopal priest. "Part One: The Life of Faith" and "Part Two: The Preaching of the Word" present themselves as theological textbook topics while the individual chapters - "A Church in Ruins," "I Am Who I Am," "The Prodigal Father" - read like her best memoirs slowly simmered into sermons.
As a seminary student, I discovered new connections between theory and practice on every page. For example: "God reaches out to us in countless ways through the material things of our lives: there are altars everywhere with sacraments just waiting to be discovered and celebrated."
As a United Methodist local pastor, I appreciate both the resilient nature and inherent challenge in her description of the church. "In this age of a million choices," she writes, "we are the remnant, the sometimes faithful, sometimes unfaithful family of a difficult and glorious God, called to seek and proclaim God's presence in a disillusioned world."
Finally, as a woman of faith, I am so very grateful that Barbara Brown Taylor and I love the same God ... and that she has so beautifully expressed her experience of that love to the world. "In faith, we imagine ourselves whole," she suggests, "imagine ourselves in love with our neighbors, imagine ourselves bathed and fed by God, imagine the creation at peace, imagine the breath of God coinciding with our own, imagine the heart of God beating at the heart of the world."
Page by page, Barbara Brown Taylor invites her readers to imagine such faith, and then she invites us to put the book down in order to discover our own.

Rating:
Summary: Fresh and much needed.
Review: Taylor has a gift for capturing the tiniest detail of life and seeing the infinite God of heaven. Her creativity and freshness was very filling. This book has already helped catalyst the growth of significant fruit in my ministry. Thank you, Barbara, for sharing.

Rating:
Summary: A must for preachers
Review: The Preaching Life challenges us to share our faith and our imagination in new ways--would that all preachers could grab the text and make it come alive so vibrantly!

Rating:
Summary: Master of Gray
Review: There is little that can be said about Barbara Brown Taylor's The Preaching Life that has not already been said in the 10 years since its publication, except, perhaps, to quote Luke 24:11 as the official church response to her work: " . . . these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." Like Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James the Younger, and Joanna (and many others) Barbara Brown Taylor's Christian witness hits home. She has been to the cross: "As best I can figure, the Christian era ended during my lifetime." (5). She knows death prefigures life: " . . . it is not a bad thing to lose the lies we have mistaken for truth." (8) And like those first witnesses of the Resurrection, she isn't afraid to speak her hope: " . . . fear of the unknown takes on an element of wonder as the disillusioned turn away from the God who was supposed to be in order to seek the God who is." (9).
Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men (sic) - that is genius." This is also the genius of Tayor's book: an autobiographical tale, even an old-school confession of how one articulate person was called by God even in the midst of a church in ruins and how she followed that call and lived into her calling as the years went by. The Preaching Life she speaks of is full of a cast of characters that, seven years into the ministry, I know too well, including myself: the lay woman who says "I don't want to be that important" (28) when asked that she understand herself to be God's person in and for the world; the mourner who didn't know what to believe anymore (7); stepping into the pulpit like you are walking on a tightrope (76) and having someone "quote" part of your sermon back to you that you never said (85); even the little girl, who, hearing the cup as "the blood of Christ" says "Yuck!" (73). It is her life, but it could be any preacher's life. The work has a nice progression to it, like she is writing as if she is walking beside herself on this path. The steps are in order and they go somewhere. She traces her pilgrimage from her calling to acceptance of her vocation to the imagination necessary to reveal a church renewed, and then how that vision plays itself out from reading the Bible almost like the Germans must have in the 1500's, into Worship, and through Preaching.
Having then reached the culmination of her preaching life, she proceeds to give us thirteen examples of her preaching. My favorites were I Am Who I Am ("We tried to nail him down once but he got loose"), The One To Watch, where she points out that the widow gave her mite to a corrupt institution just as Jesus gave his life to a corrupt world, and None of Us Is Home Yet for its painful yearning for God. I got the feeling in reading her sermons that she was open to her life during the course of the week for sermon illustrations (the broken down car on Thursday in Do Love, for instance). This made me feel better for no other reason than I often do the same, by chance or choice. I liked her real-life choices and conflicts, her thinking out loud rhetoric, her careful reading of scripture ("Did you notice that?" she asks more than once), her not being afraid to cop to mistakes and "un-Christian" behavior; and in the middle of it all one slippery Jesus.
She writes as a person living as comfortably as one can in the gray areas of life, and that is where a preaching life is often lived as we act as God's midwives, helping God to be born in the world, often pulling people kicking and screaming from darkness to light.

Rating:
Summary: Magic and Mystery and Preaching
Review: This is a truly wonderful book, full of magic and passion, written by one of the foremost preachers of our time. Although this book is ostensibly about preaching, it is really about experiencing and falling in love with God - over and over and over again. Barbara Brown Taylor has a deep sense of the magic and mystery of all of life, from the tiniest beetle's wing to the distant galaxies. She finds God in all people, including the ordinary folk of daily life, the proud and rich, as well as the crushed and downtrodden - the beautiful woman in the silken dress and the town drunk stumbling across the church lawn. And she is able to draw us into her vision, to make real for us the excitement of finding God in all people and all places.
The first half of the book is her own story, the often painful, often confused, and occasionally exciting journey towards an awareness of her vocation, her calling to be a priest and preacher. Along the way, she reminds the readers, though, that, for all of us, being Christian is about being a priest. Through baptism, we are all called to ministers, "representing God to humankind, representing humankind to God, and serving each in the other's name." She asks us to look at that calling with new eyes and live it wholeheartedly. The second half of the book is a sampling of her sermons, each a little gem, sparkling with fresh insights into old texts. Taylor has an unerring capacity to bring the texts to life in our present context, speaking openly out of her own life stories, and challenging her readers to experience the meaning of the text in the details of their daily lives.