A five-year-old girl loves her Sunday school, loves listening to her parents harmonize on the old gospel hymns, even loves the fire-and-brimstone preaching antics of Brother Munroe—loves everything about the First Church of God in Moultonboro, New Hampshire. In Mrs. Nichols' class she is memorizing the books of the New Testament, eagerly anticipating her reward—a gold necklace with a tiny glass bulb containing a real mustard seed, just like in Jesus' story.

But then everything goes wrong. Her father becomes so sick her mother must support the family by waitressing, which includes serving drinks. To the First Church of God, serving alcohol means "breaking the covenant." Hands of friends and neighbors are raised to vote the family out of the church. As Kate Young Caley writes in The House Where the Hardest Things Happened: A Memoir About Belonging: "And so I, who loved the church … I too was out."

Former friends now ignore them. Even Mrs. Nichols turns her back when little Kate runs into her in Ellen's General Store. Her family walks away from church and never returns. In her teens Kate tries a "Jesus People" church on her own, until the leader's wife receives a "prophecy" that Kate must give up her boyfriend because "God says" the wife's niece, not Kate, is intended for that boy. Kate enters young adulthood concluding, "As much as I wanted God, I was sick to death of His people."

Kate Caley sounds like one more statistic in the casualty list showcased by Ruth Tucker in Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief. Tucker wants to understand how born-again Christians end up as seemingly contented agnostics or atheists. Early chapters offer the author's own struggle with unbelief, reflections on the mystery of knowing God, and case studies of the lives of author Hannah Whitall Smith and Chuck Templeton, a dynamic young partner of Billy Graham who followed an opposite trajectory. Drawing on personal interviews, biographies, and postings on "unfaith" websites, her profile of a typical "walk away" shows these not-too-surprising characteristics: fundamentalist or highly conservative background; inability to grapple with philosophical, theological, and/or scientific challenges to Scripture's reliability; painful life experiences eliciting deep disappointment with God or God's people.

Tucker devotes the middle third of the volume to a workmanlike summary of intellectual challenges to faith, from early Enlightenment skeptics to Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marcus Borg. At times she gets carried away: "It would be impossible to imagine how many once-professing Christians have abandoned their beliefs after having studied Freud and his negative views on religion." Yet as evangelicals celebrate the end of modernism, she rightly reminds us that Enlightenment intellectual challenges are still virulent for many Christians.

"Those who are troubled by scientific and philosophical complexities (fueled by modernism)," Tucker writes, "often deny religious belief altogether. On the other hand, those whose issues relate to psychological and lifestyle factors (fueled by postmodernism) redefine the terms of their religious faith to better fit their lifestyle and psychological needs." Her sample offers far more of the former; as a local church pastor, I see far more of the latter.

Tucker's compassion in really listening to those who "walk away" is nobly expressed in her best chapter, "Answering Doubt and Unbelief." She resists the common notion that intellectual questions are only a smokescreen for a rebellious will. Believers expressing doubts are not helped by well-meaning Christians angling for a "quick fix." Her Reformed commitment to the sovereignty of God suggests that bringing someone back to faith is ultimately not up to us; we can relax and listen lest our anxiety to argue or convince pushes them even further away. (Good and true advice,

yet a real test when the "walk away" is our own child or friend.)

In a concluding chapter, Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L'Engle, and Annie Dillard are offered as three "walk aways" who returned (although none seems to fit the prototype). In different ways, each testifies to two elements that facilitated their return: spiritual roots (Norris: "If I had to find one word to describe how belief came to take hold in me it would be 'repetition'") and recognizing God's mystery (L'Engle: "The questions worth asking are not answerable").

If, at the end of the day, Tucker does not accomplish what her subtitle promises, she nevertheless shows us quite intentionally that the passage from belief to unbelief (and sometimes back again) is indeed a Mystery too deep to unravel. Perhaps our best hope for reaching "walk aways," she writes on her last page, lies in stories, an undervalued resource: "stories that have a universal quality, stories that stir spiritual curiosity in those whose senses have been numbed by rational arguments and complex explanations."

Rejoining Kate Caley's memoir, we find just such a story. While Tucker dissects, Caley's spare, clean style and good ear for dialogue invite us inside a living, breathing "patient" alive to the mysteries of faith. She stirs spiritual curiosity. This book is one I would gladly put in the hands of any friend struggling with doubts or unbelief.

We feel her disappointments with God and God's people—reactions to her brother's homosexuality, her beloved father's death, her multiplying rejections by church people. In a chapter called "The River of Loss," we meet many unchurched people who offered kindness and love to her shunned family. As they leave this earth, she wonders what God has in store for these good folk who never claimed him yet were the only ones in the story who acted like Christians. In "Bob's Transmission," a chapter worth the price of the book, Caley's struggle to answer a man sick to death of hypocritical Christians becomes one of the best pieces of down-to-earth apologetics I have ever read.

We are invited as well into the restless ambiguity of a prolonged illness that saps her body and spirit. We remember our own "dark nights" as she ponders: "Did I dare risk my relationship with Him, the relationship I had struggled so hard to reclaim, by asking for anything at all? Was it better not to ask? To avoid disappointment? Because if God doesn't respond at a time like this, what does that mean about every darn thing I have allowed myself to believe?"

One day, Kate and her husband spot a full-cassocked priest who seems incongruously at ease in the teeming city and literally follow him back to a vine-shrouded Gothic church. The very next Sunday they attend. Unfamiliar sights and sounds of high Episcopal liturgy—chanting, incense, solemn dignity—act as the warming sun to gradually unfolding blossoms. At the highpoint of the Eucharist, kneeling at the altar rail, graciously lingering in this holy moment, she and her husband know they have "come home" at last: "In the tradition we came from, Communion was our monthly right. We did not think of it as a gift. As sustenance that might change us if we let it. Or if we did, we so rushed that we only had about three seconds to take it in before the ushers came looking for those tiny plastic cups."

One Christmas morning years after they've returned to the church, Kate receives from her own ten-year-old daughter (to whom she had told the story) a child-sized mustard-seed necklace, the necklace of her childhood hopes and despair. How does one gain this tiniest-of-all-seeds faith, this faith that remained dormant yet eventually bloomed again in Kate? How does this faith endure, so that Kate never finally walks away despite having all the right "symptoms"? Who can say?

Now a Sunday school teacher herself, Kate introduces Laura, a tough 11-year-old city kid drop-in who—unlike the other children, who have heard it all before—"can't even spell Jesus." One morning the class acts out the story of the woman caught in adultery. When they come to Jesus' words, "Let him without sin cast the first stone," Jesus suddenly becomes real for Laura. It is a holy moment. She is horrified when told that Jesus was later killed, yet she learns too that his death was not the end: he rose—he is always with us.

But then, Laura stops coming. She is not rejected as Kate was, but she never returns to the church. Kate feels guilty. Did she fail Laura? But Kate has learned something precious about mustard seeds in this mystery of faith and belonging: "Just as the search for God began and stopped in me many times, I am counting on more to come for Laura. Maybe that's simplistic. But I know what I've seen. What she received the day we acted out the story of the forgiven woman nobody gets to take away." May it ever be so.

Richard P. Hansen is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Visalia, California.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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