Author: Sara Palmer

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Of Memoirs, Memories, and Missing Pieces

Paul K Hooker, reviewer

Braselton, Georgia

David Brown Howell, Tethered to an Appalachian Curse: A Surprise Calling (Eu­ gene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2021) 181 pp.

It happened, I think, when I was five years old. Maybe six. It was a middle Tennessee summer, maybe June or July, hot enough to be in shorts and tee shirts. My family was at some now-forgotten camp and conference center composed of open-air wood-frame cabins connected by dirt paths beneath oaks and pines. I don’t remember how it started, only that I was being chased by an older, bigger boy, heavi­ er and stronger and faster than 1, bent on avenging some offense I can’t remember. Maybe I was just the new kid. I ran into the cabin where we were staying, desperate to escape the beatdown I was sure was coming. The only refuge I could find was a closet—or perhaps it was a wardrobe—^where I hid in hopes of saving myself. I curled into a fetal ball, face close to the laces of my dusty Keds sneakers. But my tormenter found me, despite my efforts at silence and stillness. He ripped open the door of my ersatz sanctum and glared at me. I can still remember his Butch-waxed crew-cut, the tangy smell of his sweat. I remember his left hand grabbing my arm and pulling me out and his right fist punching me—hard—in the stomach. Then he turned and ran out of the cabin. Or did any of this happen at all? Years later, as an adult, I told this story to my fa­ ther. It’s a dream, he said; it never took place. He corrected elements of my so-called memory that conflicted with realities he recalled. And he told me what I had never known: that during the weeks and months prior to my putative beating, my mother had been severely depressed and had threatened to kill herself, my sister, and me. He had taken us along to this camp meeting to ensure that she did nothing of the sort. It was the trauma du jour of our familial life, he said, and my “dream” was the way I coped with it. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, and everyone I could ask about this is dead. What I do know is, memory or dream, I have all my life feared the punch in the gut—spiritually, intellectually, financially, as well as physically. David Brown Howell’s memoir. Tethered to an Appalachian Curse: A Surprise Calling, begins with a spiritual punch in the gut. He tells the story of his parents. Jack and Lena, seated on the rough pews of the Bom Again Church in the tiny Appala­ chian hamlet of Boonford, NC, and listening to the fiery oratory of Pastor Leroy. As Pastor Leroy’s sermon rises to its emotional climax in the appeal to come forward and be saved, Lena rises and heads toward the altar. Jack, a hard man accustomed to hard thoughts and harder ways, grabs her and drags her back down the aisle and out of the church. Watching Jack steal his convert, leather-lunged Pastor Leroy delivers himself of a curse: “All the Howells are going to Hell!” There are more Howells

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consigned to perdition in that moment than might be obvious: Lena is pregnant with the son she and Jack will name David Brown Howell. Howell’s memoir is the chronicle of his lifelong effort to live under, live with, and ultimately live down Pastor Leroy’s howled invective as his parent fled that Pen­ tecostal altar. Three quarters of the story involve reminiscences—all narrated in first person, present-tense breathlessness—of the pranks and perils that punctuate How­ ell’s upbringing in Boonford, his academic successes in grade school, and his wan­ dering and ultimate self-discovery in college. These stories carry a sort of whimsical air about them, entertaining, sometime thrilling, occasionally embarrassing. More often than not they end with a near-moral, delivered as though by an Appalachian Aesop, reminding the reader that, once again, Howell has escaped a quick and dirty consignment to the netherworld. At the book’s three-quarter mark, after the author’s graduation from college and entry into the working world in Southside ‘Virginia, the tone and diction of the nar­ rative change. Gone is the whimsy, the sense that the author has escaped the inferno by the skin of his teeth. In its place is an adult awareness of the realities of life in the rural South of the 1970s: grinding poverty, economic disparity, ecological collapse, and a racism so deep in the bone no spiritual cleansing will ever wash it away. Howell begins to sense a call through his ministry in a small Southern Baptist congregation, and at the same time to sense that the ministry to which he is called is not a fit for that Baptist congregation. He finds his way to Presbyterianism and the PC(USA). The emerging young adult we meet in these pages begins slowly but steadily to foreshad­ ow the David Brown Howell known to most of liberal Protestantism from the 1990s onward: founding editor of Lectionary Homiletics, convener for more than three decades of the largest homiletics gathering in the world, the Festival of Homiletics, wise psychotherapist and pastoral counselor, seminary faculty member, confidant to some of the most widely read and widely heard preachers of our times. Gone is the mountain boy living under an “Appalachian curse”; in his place is a wise, urbane, thoughtful leader in the field of homiletics and practical theology. As the accolades that cover the opening leaves of the book attest, the brightest and best of those fields find Howell’s stories “engaging; fine,’ 99 66Jinspiring,” and “a rollicking ride.” 99 46.

At the risk of seeming unappreciative of Howell’s theological journey (I am not), I am left with a question: where is the connective tissue that gets us from the raw-throated threats of eternal damnation and a mountain boy trying to outwit them to a long and faithful ministry under the aegis of a theology founded on grace? How exactly does one accomplish such a transformation? Does Howell internalize and transform the curse, or combat against and overthrow it? How, and when? That, I think, is what is missing in this book. Good memoir writing requires a lot of things, but among them is the sense that there is a central struggle that the author must come to terms with over the arc of the narrative. A memoir is more than a catalogue of episodes, a “this-happened-then-thathappened ” collection of events. A good memoir is the biography of its author’s soul.

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David Brown Howell is an engaging raconteur. He knows how to tell a story. All the more fascinating to me, then, that he doesn’t deliver on this key task of memoir-writing. His stories about his life in Boonford are tales of close scrapes and narrow escapes, ar­ ranged in chronological but episodic fashion, and capped off with a sort of “see there— beat you again, Leroy” conclusion. Missing is what those scrapes and escapes teach him about the curse and his life both within and beyond it. When he becomes an adult, we see him coming to terms with the vicissitudes of parish leadership, but hardly a word about how Pastor Leroy’s Damoclean curse still hangs over him—if in fact it does—or what it costs him to evade it. Throughout the chapters describing Howell’s stellar career in both psychotherapy and homiletics, the curse makes no appearance and apparently has no bearing whatsoever. Only at the beginning of the last chapter are we told, in an almost off-hand way, that “After a theology class in seminary, I no longer take Pastor ‘Grim Condemner’ Leroy seriously.” A single, matter of fact sentence disposes of this

95 curse which has dominated his identity and to which he has all his life been “tethered. We are not even permitted to know what words and ideas in that course were so power­ fully liberating. In the end, we know that Howell defeats the curse. We don’t know how he does it, or what it cost him to do so. We—or at least I—don’t know his soul. Which brings me back to that five (six?) year-old boy hiding in the closet. In some respects, he is the image that would hang over any memoir of mine, the way Pastor Leroy’s curse hangs over Howell’s. All the occasions and encounters I have run from in fear of confrontations that would undo me, all the gut punches I have re­ ceived from bullies both figurative and literal that left me with belly- and heartaches, all the closets of mental self-protection I have sought refuge in only to be rousted and routed, even all the times I have dried my tears and steadied my heart and gone back out in the sunlight where both bullies and buddies were waiting—all this would have been part of that story, in much the same way as Howell’s escapes and escapades are part of his. But in addition, what I hope I would do is ruminate on what the weal and woe of my experience has cost me, as well as what it has taught me about fear and self-confidence. If I were writing that memoir, I would want to leave a trail that others could follow, one that limns the soul’s path from hiding to hope. That’s what I wish Howell’s memoir had done. David Brown Howell’s Tethered to An Appalachian Curse has a powerful and evocative core image. It has a long series of entertaining and well-told episodes from a life few who don’t hail from the hollers of Appalachia can imagine. It begins in curse and ends in grace. It is missing, however, the ruminations that illumine the meaning of both curse and grace. It is missing what he learned from the experience of living with that curse and accepting that grace. Those learnings would light the way, not only for Howell but also for others of us who live under the curses of racial, sexual, gender, economic, and societal prejudice. The path out of the curse and to­ ward the grace needs signs to mark the way, like blazes on the trunks of trees beside a trail through an Appalachian forest. I would like to have followed those blazes. I would like to have read that book.

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Book Review of The Great Dechurching

Katie Nakamura Rengers

Birmingham, Alabama

The Great Dechurching: Who s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will it Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan R Burge. (Zondervan , 2023.)

Some months ago, I had lunch with “Stuart,” whom I hadn’t seen at church in over six months. “I don’t want you guys to think this has anything to do with the church,” he tried to reassure me. “You guys are fine, you’re great. This is about us. It’s just so hard with work and kids and school during the week, then every Saturday is taken up with dance and art class, and by Sunday we have this heaping pile of laundry and dishes to do so we can be ready to start everything over again on Mon­ day morning.” Sound familiar, anyone? It was a handful of conversations like this that compelled me to pre-order a copy of The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge—a book I’d seen referenced in sources from the Neve York Times to The Atlantic to The Christian Post. The book opens:

In the United States, we are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country, as tens of millions of formerly regular Christian worshipers nationwide have decided they no longer desire to attend church at all.

According to Davis, Graham, and Burge, my parishioners might belong to the “casually dechurched” category: people whose weekly rhythms have changed due to the birth of children, Covid, work, a move, etc. They are distinct from people who no longer attend church because of some wounding that has pushed them away from church and/or Christian faith altogether. Rather, as the societal pressure to attend church (and even to identify as Christian) ebbs, it is becoming easier for people to prioritize other activities and relationships at times that, in days gone by, might have been reserved for communal practices of faith. The Great Dechurching stands out from other books I have read recently on the changing dynamics of American religion. The authors partnered with reputable social scientists to collect more expansive, reliable, and analyzable data than can be gleaned simply through personal anecdotes (such as mine about Stuart). However, they also present profiles of the dechurched, telling stories of what is happening in the lives and hearts of people who have stopped participating in a faith community. In this way, the book gives both a sense of having responsibly collected real and

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relevant data across denominations and of caring deeply about what these trends mean for those of us who are trying to pastor through the “largest and fastest reli­ gious shift in the history of our country.” The authors talk about what might be at stake long term due to mass dechurching, including the loss of churches as places of goodwill in our neighborhoods and the worrisome rise of a secular political Right. What you will not find in The Great Dechurching is a litany of best practices for making your church more attractive to consumers. There is no advice on making church more “seeker-friendly,” improving the music, installing better signage, or hiring a more dynamic youth pastor. Rather, Davis, Graham, and Burge emphasize there is a far deeper need for relationship and personal invitation:

“If there is one single application from our research that you walk away v/ith, please let it be this: invite your dechurched friends back to a healthy church with you. But unlike a simple nudge to go back to the gym, we would do well to open the doors of our homes and chairs at our table. We aren ’t just telling them they should go back to church; we are inviting them into our lives, which includes church.” (p. 123)

A significant challenge for this idea of hospitality, however, is that the data re­ veals a clear correlation between socio-economic class and dechurching. Poorer Americans are leaving organized religion behind at the highest rates. The authors postulate that American institutions in general, including churches, tend to work best for people who successfully follow a particular life sequence. The authors share their strong opinion that churches must look critically at how we show hospitality, share friendship, and offer real belonging to people who are single or of lower income and/ or education levels. In their last chapter, Davis, Graham, and Burge attempt to help church-going Christians understand the change around them through a spiritual lens. Amid the reli­ gious shift underway, one of the most poignant experiences for American Christians will be the loss of (or at least decrease in) the levels of power and influence they have enjoyed over the last century. The authors describe this as a kind of “Exile,” and lift up the self-knowledge, discipleship, and generosity that such a period in the life of the American church might bring. Of course, others are describing this same moment more disparagingly, often in terms of “decolonizing” an American church that has often done great harm by favoring the wealthy and privileged. But I do appreciate the addition of these authors’ more gentle approach, which is to name the pastoring and “discipling people through the loss of power” that must happen—even along­ side prophetic critique of the church’s complicity in colonialism and other types of oppression. I read The Great Dechurching alongside a book group of clergy friends, most who serve in The Episcopal Church. The book was written by evangelicals and is mostly about evangelicals (though some of the research did look at dechurched

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mainline Christians and Roman Catholics), but its message of struggle and hope— when adjusted for different theological traditions—feels descriptive of what the vast majority of Christian institutions are facing in terms of declining membership and participation. The most challenging questions raised by this book in my study group were: What does it mean to “bring them back [to church]? ” And, should we even be trying to bring them back? Perhaps intentionally, Davis, Graham, and Burge do not spend much time defining what it means to be “churched.” For example, is regularly attend­ ing a Sunday worship service the most important practice of being “churched?” Is someone who does not (or cannot) attend Sunday worship, yet maintains other faith practices, necessarily outside of the church? Also, while the authors mention the reality of “dechurched casualties” (people who have been irreparably wounded by or disillusioned with church), this book does not focus on that experience. They enter the conversation with the assumption that the church is inherently a worthwhile thing to be part of. Most members of our book group were much more critical. They expressed a lack of confidence that what many of our institutions currently offer (Eurocentric traditions, systematically racist struc­ tures, communities that aren’t as welcoming as they purport to be) are really worth coming back to. I found The Great Dechurching to be, ultimately, a hopeful book. It is helpful to know that the patterns we are seeing are part of a much larger phenomenon—not solely due to our particular congregation’s inadequacies and failures. Yet God is at work, in the hearts of people who are saying “no” to the church as it currently is, and in the pastoral leadership of those who are called to guide God’s people through this time of uncertainty and into something new. The Great Dechurching gives me more compassion, and more hope, for both.