For many, faith is a struggle, a wrestling – filled with questions, doubt, mystery and conviction. Some divide active church-goers as “winter” or “summer” Christians. A summer Christian occupies high communion with God and low complaint factor. Their experience of God is generally free of negativity. By contrast, a winter Christian is equally engaged with God, but it’s filled with complaint and struggle and doubt.

If you resonate with the description of a winter Christian, Out of Sorts will probably resonate with you. Early on in the book she makes this observation and personal statement:

“We create Jesus in our own image, don’t we? It is always true to some extent that we make our images of god. It is even truer that our image of God makes us. Eventually we become like the god we create.
In my twenties I decided to not be a Christian because I did not want to be associated with the church. But I was still fascinated with Jesus. For some time, I had become disenchanted with the industrial church complex.”

… I love that first idea. So true. And I appreciate her honesty, which gives a feel for where she’s coming from.

The Table of Contents
I always appreciate seeing the book Table of Contents. Here are the chapter titles:
1. Out of sorts: A beginning
2. There’s something about that name: on getting to know Jesus
3. Everyone gets to play: on theology and change
4. Getting into the Word: on reading the Bible
5. The people of God: on church
6. Be a person: on community and friendship
7. Truly human: on heaven and the kingdom of God
8. An unexpected legacy: on the ancient practices
9. Wild goose: on faith, the Spirit, signs, and wonders
10. Obey the sadness: on grief and lament
11. Beautiful façade: on justice and Shalom
12. Evangelical hero complex: on vocation and calling
13. Benediction

As you can tell, she hits a lot of subjects. Each chapter is a warm wrestling with how we sort out faith after it falls apart.

Parts/Ideas I loved
I would argue that a static faith is a dying faith. To grow in faith means we are asking questions – that we are changing and evolving. This is much of the point in chapter three, which was great!

If you have struggled with scripture, which for me the more I look at scripture, the more I struggle, then chapter 4 is a great summary. Here’s a fantastic quote:

I had to learn that taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean taking the bible literally. I had to learn to read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus, and I had to learn to stop making it something it wasn’t, a glorified answer book or rule book or magic spell. I had to stop trying to reduce the bible to something I could tame or wield as a tool. I had to let the bible be everything it was meant to be, to cast away the idols of certainty, materialism and control.”

For more on this, I recommend Peter Enns, who she quotes.

Chapter 10 was also so important – vulnerable and yet thought-provoking. The church can often be “happy clappy” and pretend things are fine, when they are not. We must acknowledge the darkness that we so often experience and feel.

Lastly chapter 12 is worth the price of the book, in my opinion. Evangelicals (and so many more religious people) divide the world into sacred and secular, thereby creating a hierarchy of jobs. Ministry is “sacred work,” and everything else is merely to finance the real work of saving souls. In this chapter she explodes this unhelpful division by telling her own story (and that of her family). It’s personal, powerful and profound. If only I had heard this idea (and taken it to heart) years ago…

Further Thoughts/Considerations

Books like this – which are part memoir, part theology – will impact you differently in different times in your life. At this point in her life, she seems to have wrestled through most of her questions and found satisfying enough answers for herself. If you are right in the mind of the struggle or the pain of sadness, she might rub you wrong. Or, if you are very beginning of your faith struggle, perhaps closer to high school, it may feel she has gone too far. Yet – if you find yourself in a similar place to her, I’m sure the book will speak joy and healing to your soul (as you
can find in many of the other reviews).

All that being said, you may have wrestled through your faith and felt Bessey stayed too close to the line. She is anything but some sort of radical heretic. Her love for scripture, the church, and especially Jesus is indisputable. She even ends her book with a beautiful prayer for us, the readers.

If you are looking for a sort of Christian agnosticism, I would recommend Wiman’s Bright Abyss or anything by Peter Rollins.

Conclusion:
Why just 3 stars? For me, it was good. Great for others, but unfortunately it did not resonate as much as I had hoped. Delightful, insightful, challenging, but left me wanting more.

Finally, one last quote:

“I tend to agree with Scot McKnight’s belief that ‘Kingdom of God’ is one of the most misunderstood phrases in the church today. We either neuter it into a social gospel or reduce it to an individual salvation experience. No, the kingdom of God is the church active and alive today -the disciples of Jesus in the world. The kingdom of God was the message of Jesus and it’s the work of every believer now.… I am not in the business of sin management anymore. Instead, I’m being transformed into his likeness.”

( )

This is an eclectic set of essays on challenging and resetting your faith journey. Poignant, frank, and beautifully written. ( )

This is one of those faith journey memoirs. Like the title suggests, this is Bessey's story about moving from a narrower conservatism to a broader more inclusive and mature faith. In Bessey's case, she was a pastor's wife in a Pentecostal/charismatic context before she felt 'out of sorts' about her church/faith experience. Like

What I really like about this book is that Bessey honors where she's come from and refuses to let go of the gifts from her tradition (praise and worship, healing, intimacy with the spirit, expectation of the supernatural), even as she critiques some of the ways that tradition failed to feed her soul. Fans of Kathy Escobar, Nadia Bolz-Webber, and Rachel Held Evans will appreciate Bessey's sensibility, though this feels more constructive and less iconoclast.

On a side note, I don't recommend the audiobook. Narrators make a difference and I don't think Joell Jacobs did Bessey justice. It was also amusing to hear her mispronounce names like Jean Vanier (GENE Van-Year) and Henri Nouwen (Henry New-win). ( )