Review: "Beautiful and Terrible Things" by Amy Butler

Beautiful and Terrible Things by Amy Butler
Published October 2023 via The Dial Press
★★★★

I grew up in a religious tradition in which women warmed casseroles, taught children's Sunday school classes, and sometimes—with the endorsement and supervision of the male pastor—taught women's Bible study classes. It's not that I had ever heard anyone preach or teach about specifically why women couldn't be pastors, it was just that I'd never seen a woman pastor. I honestly didn't even know such a thing could exist. (loc.137*)

Butler was perhaps an unexpected pick for a minister: growing up conservative and evangelical, her understanding was that if she wanted to be involved in ministry, her best bet was to be a preacher's wife. But in college, something shifted: she realized that she had more options than she'd thought—and then, as she sallied forth on the path to ministry, she learned over and over again how hard that would be as a woman in a very conservative tradition.

Beautiful and Terrible Things is a memoir in essays, structured partially around lessons Butler learned—and the people she learned them from—in her years in ministry. I don't live in her world, so I didn't realize until I was midway through the book that she's a prominent figure in the evangelical world—the first woman pastor at more than one historic US church, and one who has been very successful at both growing church membership and (as she describes, and as far as I can confirm from outside sources) bringing the churches she led into a somewhat more modern age.

But it sounds like a hard, hard path at times. In earlier years, Butler was involved in churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which...does not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to women's welfare. And her family was not ready to see a woman minister either: years later, after I'd been a pastor for more than a decade, I paid him [her grandfather] a visit in his retirement home. When I approached his chair and kissed him hello, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close, looked me straight in the eyes, and said: "You are the biggest disappointment of my life." Love never managed to penetrate that hardness; those were the last words I ever heard him speak. (loc. 293)

The book is not all, or even primarily, about those earliest years, but they're necessary to set the scene for the ups and downs to come. It's worth noting that the book is fundamentally about people rather than about religion—that is, while readers who are shocked by the idea of women in ministry (or women wearing trousers) will probably have a hard time getting beyond the basics, it's written with the explicit understanding that not all of Butler's readers will share her views, and that she does not expect them to. I am a Christian minister, she writes, and in that work, I have a personal conception of God. But I want to leave space for what you imagine God to be, too, if the Divine is a reality in your life at all. Whatever God is for you, I hope that looks like a lavish and unrestricted love (loc. 65).

I could go on (and on), but I'll leave that here. Interesting and timely; I will be recommending especially to some minister friends who have faced similar challenges.

*Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.