A Stone in My Shoe

Book excerpt: What’s more miserable than trying to walk with a stone in your shoe? Many American evangelicals are experiencing pain and discomfort in their relationship to the church. “Stones” in their shoes make the faith journey uncomfortable and increasingly untenable. They either leave the church altogether, become “church shoppers,” or live on the margins of the church as outliers. This book presents the vantage point of a lifelong evangelical pastor and religious educator who sees himself as an outlier. Walters draws on decades of pastoral life and classroom experience to engage the church in a conversation aimed at clarifying the concerns and discomforts of evangelical outliers. While this is one person’s story it intersects with the stories of many others in American evangelicalism, especially clergy. In identifying the stones which trouble and discomfort so many like him, Walters continually calls the church, his church, back to its biblical and theological foundations.