Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery

Doubleday/ Broadway Books

Twenty-eight years after I left a small parish in southern Illinois, I wrote about my first try at ministry there. I might have called it “The Education of a Pastor.” The stories had been brewing in me for a long time. My wife Tracy once reminded me, “Nothing happened out there.” Which sounded like the perfect plot for a church memoir! She was right, of course, but also mistaken, given the secret triumphs, conflicts, and tragedies, that brew just beneath the surface in any congregation. The Collect for Purity in the Book of Common Prayer says it well: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid . . .”

From the chapter “Gossiping the Gospel”

“. . . the teenage baby-sitter comes home from the parsonage where she has been minding Pastor and Mrs. Lischer’s two kids, and reports to her grandmother that Mrs. Lischer does not really leave the property when she hires a baby-sitter. What she does is she puts on a bathing suit, takes a lawn chair and a stack of books out behind the garage facing the cemetery, and hides from the kids for hours on end while she reads books. . . . The community first asks the historical question, ‘Have we ever seen anything like this? Have any of our other ministers’ wives hid behind the garage to read? . . . . Does such behavior indicate anything about her fitness as a mother or a pastor’s wife? [Morally], must one leave the premises if one hires a baby-sitter?’” (pp. 97-99)

“This is a beautiful book—beautifully conceived, beautifully executed, and rare in the beauty of its pastoral and theological sensibilities.”

— Richard John Neuhaus, First Things

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— Clint Schnekloth, Patheos