Just Finished Reading: Loving and Leaving a Church by Barbara Melosh

Flannery O'Connor wrote about where she grew up in the south, creating fiction. And one of her favorite responses to a story she wrote was when someone told her: "Well, that's just what some folks WOULD do, isn't it?"

This book, Loving and Leaving a Church tells the story of Barbara Melosh's experiences as a second-career pastor in a working-class Lutheran church that's located in a gentrifying neighborhood in south Baltimore. As a pastor myself in Baltimore, MD (and onetime fellow member of her clergy Bible study) reading the memoir, I kept thinking, "That's just what these folks WOULD do, isn't it?" Memoir isn't fiction, of course, but it can be fuzzy and scattered or clear and convincing, and I found myself cringing with recognition over and over again, reading about Pastor Barbara and the Saints of "Saints and Sinners."

There are many experiences packed into one book - the new pastor's enthusiasm, the inward-looking congregation, 50 years of gradually sinking attendance, so much misplaced hope in the power of fundraisers, the rounds and rounds of attempts at change on the pastor's part, and patient forbearance on the part of the congregation. Over and over again, just when there seems to be some traction, some unexpected loss or setback puts the church back on the track of steady decline. The book ends, not with an amazing turnaround, but with Melosh's decision to finish her ministry there. "It's time," she tells the church matriarch. "It's not you, it's me."

When I first got out of seminary, I read a book by Richard Lischer called Open Secrets, that had a similar premise - in his case, a young man with a PhD in theology trying to convert a rural church into Illinois into something more, something different from what it was. In Lischer's story, he goes on to another, bigger church across the country. Melosh, on the other hand does not find a new permanent call, but moves into interim ministry and writing - the bigger opportunities do not come her way as they did for Lischer. And the next pastor at Saints and Sinners is a young man, newly married. She reads his newsletter updates, wondering if the enthusiasm in his writing reflects the reality on the ground any more than her messages had.

There are so many books out there about church growth - so many programs and schemes and ideas of what can turn a church around. And yet, the larger reality of mainline churches in the United States is that so, so many churches are caught in cycles like Saints and Sinners', if they're not already closed. That makes it really, really hard to be a pastor. Especially if you don't fall into the nostalgic ideal of a straight, married white man who is the "correct" age. That's not the main focus of the book, and there are many moments of deep connection and beauty, plus the kind reflection of several years of distance from the experience. But all that being said, I appreciate the honesty of this book and am grateful to have read it, even if the picture it paints is a daunting one.

https://www.amazon.com/Loving-Leaving-Church-Melosh-Barbara/dp/0664264344