Preaching Life [Paperback]

Barbara Brown Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 1993

In her bestselling preaching autobiography Barbara Brown Taylor writes of how she came to be a preacher of the gospel as a priest in the Episcopal Church. In this warm and poignant collection, Barbara Brown Taylor’s humor and wisdom delve into the meaning of Christian symbols and history—both her own, growing up in the Mid-West and Georgia, and the Church’s, from its earliest beginnings in the Near East. Seamlessly, Taylor weaves together reflections on her vocation with the long-standing struggles of the Church to hear, respond, and remain faithful to its mission of holy love. She moves effortlessly from reflection to homily, concluding the volume with thirteen sermons illustrative of the answered call. This rich meeting of memoir, theology, and sermon stands at the center of Taylor’s work, bringing into one book the origins and the vision of her remarkable preaching life.

But her voice is not sentimental. Instead, Taylor explores Christian meanings and histories in order to hear and speak, in the present, for God. “God has given us good news in human form and has given us the grace to proclaim it,” she writes, “but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why. While that knowledge does not yet strike me as prophetic, it does keep me from taking both my ministry and the ministry of the whole church for granted.” This book on the calling to preach is itself a call to reawaken to the activating presence of God.

“Because I am a preacher, it is through a preacher’s eyes that I see. . . , but because I am a baptized Christian too, it is from that perspective I write. Either way, my job remains the same: to proclaim the good news of God in Christ and to celebrate the sacraments of God’s presence in the world. Those two jobs are described as clearly in the baptismal vows as they are in the ordination vows, which give all Christians a common vocation.”
—from Chapter One

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Taylor, an Episcopal priest and acclaimed preacher, begins with a series of personal reflections on her life, her perception of the church, and issues of vocation, imagination, Bible, worship, and preaching. Her reflections on post-Christian environments (from a visit to Turkey and her own life in America), on baptism and ordination, and on studying the Bible critically lead the reader to a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the familiar words of faith. The second half of the book consists of 13 of Taylor's sermons, which continue her emphasis on story. Throughout, there is a good balance between biographical material and algeneral reflection; the sermons support the discussion. Taylor's work is recommended for seminary, church, and large public libraries.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Barbara Brown Taylor tells an engaging story of the birth of her own voice as a preacher, the struggles to bring the gospel to speech, and the joys of being an instrument of God’s will. (William H. Willimon William H. Willimon )

It is easy for those of us who preach to slip into thinking of preaching as a task, a chore, even a weekly homework assignment. . . . Taylor, as a parish priest, is fully aware of the incessant demands of the pulpit. But to her mind, preaching is not just a duty; it is also a ceaseless delight. . . . Her use of language is enchanting; her prose is luxuriant. Images spin across the pages like ballerinas. . . . Taylor has the rare combination of a sturdy theological mind and a receptive, almost wide-eyed, openness to experience. . . . In sum, this is a book about the life of a preacher, but more than that it is about being fully alive in the Christian faith. Barbara Brown Taylor is, to use her own words, ‘a detective of divinity, collecting evidence of God’s genius and admiring the tracks left for me to follow. . . .’ I am grateful that she is on the case. (Long, Thomas G. Princeton Theological Seminary )

The decision of the Episcopal Church in 1976 to ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate has brought us many blessings, not the least of which is the improvement in preaching. Probably no other woman has contributed as much to that improvement as Barbara Brown Taylor. Nor is it likely that another has received so much recognition for her contribution. . . . I am convinced that whoever reads the book will marvel at it, take pleasure in it, and be lured beyond their present stage of progress by it. . . . In his essay on Anglican spirituality in The Study of Anglicanism, A. M. Allchin pointed out the close connection between our spiritual writings and the creation of great literature. This he attributes to a sense of the presence of God in all things and all people. Taylor’s work has that quality. While all of us cannot expect to preach as well as she, reading her work can alert us to looking for what she sees and can also show us how she enables us to see it too and to show it to others. At the very least, we can quote some of her phrases and help them to continue doing their marvelous work. (O.C. Edwards Jr Seabury-Western Theological Seminary )

Barbara Brown Taylor has been called ‘One of the twelve most effective preachers in the English language.’ When you read her anthologies of sermons you can see why. She has a fabulous command of English and is a marvelous storyteller. These, combined with her deep and essential faith, make her sermons powerful and engaging. . . . This summer when I was chaplain at our Diocesan Family Camp, I read these sermons to adults as a morning meditation around the campfire. Everyone was engaged and found them immediately relevant to their lives. (Robert J. Gaestel )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: Cowley Publications (January 25, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156101074X
• ISBN-13: 978-1561010745
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Protestantism > Anglican
  • #9 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Protestantism > Episcopalian
  • #12 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Evangelism > Preaching

More About the Author

Barbara Brown Taylor's first trade book, Leaving Church, was met with widespread critical acclaim by popular media, including the New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly and NPR's Fresh Air. Her subsequent book, An Altar in the World, is now reaching an even wider audience. An Episcopal priest since 1984, Taylor served urban and rural parishes before leaving parish ministry to become a teacher in 1998. While she still preaches and teaches at churches and universities across the country, she writes more and more for the "spiritual but not religious" crowd
among whom she counts many of her own college students as well as a growing number of clergy colleagues. An editor-at-large for The Christian Century and a contributing editor for Sojourners, Taylor lives on a working farm in rural Habersham County, Georgia, with her husband Ed.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for preachers, July 3, 2000

By 

Dr. Linda L. Clader (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Preaching Life (Paperback)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master of Gray, April 12, 2004

By 

Mark D. Wilson (Bath, ME) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preaching Life (Paperback)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh and much needed., December 5, 1998

By 

Tim Parsley ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preaching Life (Paperback)

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.