Product Overview
After public exile, Lillian Daniel found unexpected grace, deepened faith, and a new vision for a church that embraces honesty, healing, and restoration.
Pastor Lillian Daniel crossed a line that threatened to cost her everything. But the resulting scandal, which led to a yearlong exile from ministry and changed the whole trajectory of her life, also offered a pathway toward faith, hope, and a new vision for what the church can be for all, including those who stumble.
At a time when the church is facing both decline and its own public scandals, this is a story of what Daniel discovered about sin, repentance, and restoration only once she had fallen, as she puts it, "into the ditch," like the man left and ignored on the side of the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan. She realized that her understanding of what she was supposed to be as a pastor and as a Christian needed to shift dramatically, and she came away with new perspectives on what the church needs to become if it is to make it through its own time in the ditch. With its personal narrative of failure and redemption and hard-earned perspective on the church’s internal processes, Daniel’s story will be particularly valuable for church leaders navigating investigation procedures or seeking to build systems marked by transparency, healing, and restoration.
With soul-searching honesty, Daniel describes the isolating experience of being investigated by the church, as well as the good news she found along the way. She explains how the vital confidentiality protections put in place to protect victims can also overwhelm the whole church system, including those in charge of the process. And it is within that process that she found out who would show up and who wouldn’t, witnessing surprising grace in the unexpected company of wise, caring people who helped her make her way back after her transgression. Through those connections and deep reflection, she reconnected with the God who, it turns out, had never left—whom she’d spent more time talking about than talking to. Ultimately, through this experience, she saw that the church will survive only if it shows up for everyone—saints, sinners, and everyone in between. This is the vision she has for the church today.
Emphasizing compassion, repentance, and the spiritual work it takes to relate to those who stumble, Daniel reminds us that the ditch is the place to which the gospel speaks most deeply. It turns out to be a place not simply of disgrace or injury but also of humor, hard work, unexpected guides, and vital insight, where the God we have always been dependent on comes to find us. And it’s in that ditch, a place of real and lasting hope, where we can come together to begin building a better church.
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Reviews
"With amazing courage, riveting prose, prophetic truthfulness, terrific questions, blessed retrospection, piercing confession, and even occasional humor, Daniel candidly examines from several agonizing angles the ecclesiastical process that led to her yearlong exile from ministry and the unexpected resurrection that followed. This unforgettable book will assist any synodical or diocesan committee tasked with examination of clergy misconduct to acknowledge that well-intended (and historically overdue) church policy can sometimes become enamored with a legally obsessed secularism, forgetful of the gospel, and is perhaps incapable of arriving at a one-size-fits-all outcome of discipline and fairness."— Frank G. Honeycutt, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor and author of Genealogy Theology: Exploring Family Lines and Spiritual Legacies
"In an age when the church is hemorrhaging trust and when too many of our institutions respond to failure with silence and shame, Daniel does something prophetic: she tells the truth. Defrocked is a book the church desperately needs but is too afraid to ask for. With searing honesty, dark humor, and unflinching grace, she takes us into the ditch, where our carefully constructed lives fall apart, and shows us that God meets us there."—Tripp Fuller, host of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast and Visiting Professor of Theology and Culture at Luther Seminary
"With costly generosity, Daniel invites us on her journey from transgression to transformation. It is a compelling personal story told with painful honesty. The book also contends with difficult questions facing church bodies. Can we firmly address the errors of the past that ignored the gravity of clergy abuses while also responding with compassion and care for those who cross a boundary yet pose no ongoing threat? Daniel’s story details how a fall from grace can become a fall into grace. It is an illuminating narrative of struggle, insight, and ultimately hope for individuals, communities, and denominations."—Heidi Neumark, former pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church of Manhattan and author of Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx
"In Defrocked, Daniel recounts her harrowing ecclesiastical exile and her eventual restoration to ministry as a different pastor—perhaps even a different person. The person writing this book knows what it feels like to hurt people and be hurt by people, to desperately need grace, and to generously give grace. She knows fury, and she knows forgiveness. While she emerged on the other side of this experience with sturdy boundaries, we are lucky Daniel’s boundaries don’t preclude the telling of her tale and the sharing of her wisdom. This book is a gift to imperfect people, which is to say this book is a gift to all of us."—Katherine Willis Pershey, copastor of First Congregati
"Sometimes, we do things of which we are deeply ashamed. Sometimes we get publicly exposed for what we’ve done. Sometimes others, whether through malice or incompetence, make mistakes that deeply hurt us in response to our mistakes. Sometimes, things like this happen to a person who is an excellent and honest writer with the courage to tell their story in hopes it will help others. Only very rarely do all these things come together in one person who happens to be a pastor. That’s what makes Defrocked so special."—Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It and The Last Voyage
"Defrocked offers a perspective often missing from institutional religious discourse: that the ‘ditch’—the place of failure and public scandal—is actually where one core tenet of the gospel resides. Church isn’t just a place for the 'whole' to help the 'broken' but a community of the broken, where 'surprising grace' often comes in unexpected moments."—Jacqui Lewis, senior minister and public theologian at Middle Church
"Daniel reflects on failure and exile, vulnerability and restoration in ministry, offering an unflinching account of what happens when the church itself ends up in the ditch. This book is a vital resource for the church today, inviting so many to imagine forms of accountability, restoration, and belonging that are honest enough to name harm and hopeful enough to trust that God is still at work among imperfect people."—Mihee Kim-Kort, copastor of First Presbyterian Church in Annapolis, Maryland, and author of Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith
"Lillian Daniel’s Defrocked tells a story of mistake, loss, betrayal, and down-in-the-ditch disappointment followed by (so typical of Jesus) redemption, rediscovery, and rejoicing in pastoral vocation. The wonderful preacher, Daniel, tells her tale with confessional honesty and yet (so typical of Daniel) with wit, grace, and charity. Here’s the heartfelt, intimate, candid-to-the-point-of-uncomfortable testimony of a pastor who stumbles, is defrocked, and (by God’s grace working through the bumbling, beloved, and lovable church) is raised and restored to ministry." —Will Willimon, retired bishop in the United Methodist Church and author of Accidental Preacher: A Memoir
"The best communities of faith understand their leaders as the vulnerable and flawed people we all are. With wit and a generous vulnerability, Daniel reminds us that no one is forever defined by the worst thing they’ve ever done and that we must build and nurture lives and communities where there is always opportunity for redemption and healing."—Amy Butler, senior minister of Community Church of Honolulu and author of Beautiful and Terrible Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other
"Daniel offers readers an unvarnished view of the pain of ministry coupled with a beautiful narrative of spiritual discovery; with a preacher’s voice, a writer’s ear for language, and dashes of poetic reflection, Defrocked is a masterful account of agony standing next to amazing grace.” —Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ