A Stone in My Shoe: Confessions of an Evangelical Outlier
Ebook
Overview
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.
“As someone suddenly not at home in the evangelical circles in
which he has lived and worked his whole life, Walters offers a
passionate call for the evangelical church in America to extricate
itself from captivity to culture and hear again the call of Jesus.
Resisting easy answers, Walters addresses difficult topics with
theological sensitivity and the wisdom borne out of many years of
deep study and dedicated service in the church.”
—Kristina LaCelle-Peterson, author of Liberating Tradition:
Women’s Identity and Vocation in Christian Perspective
“A Stone in My Shoe offers the musings of a ‘holy
wrestler’ I trust. Walters demonstrates a keen awareness of the
inextricable interconnectedness of race, Christianity, and politics
in American life and the reimagining of moral possibilities for
Christianity in the twenty-first century. Walters centers the
margins and marginalization in a way that is honest and complex and
underscores the role of faith in cultivating the truth-telling,
antiracism, and gospel-centered social engagement American
evangelicalism is missing.”
—Julian Armand Cook, Houghton College: Buffalo East
“Many people are uneasy about evangelicals. Many evangelicals have
found themselves aliens in their religious tradition. The personal
narrative of Walters provides an intimate view of the evangelical
world by one walking with ‘a stone in his shoe.’ It is scholarly,
passionate, honest, wise. Walters reflects on issues including
gender, race/racism, science and religion, politics (earlier and
present), abortion, consumerism, militarism, and classism, urging
evangelicals not to hide in orthodoxy. The narrative will be moving
for untold hundreds of thousands of white ex-evangelicals, as well
as those on the margin of the tradition. It provides an important
case study for understanding the textures of white evangelicalism
by an insider who was an outsider.”
—David Bundy, Manchester Wesley Research Centre, United
Kingdom
- Title: A Stone in My Shoe: Confessions of an Evangelical Outlier
- Author: Michael J. Walters
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2021
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666702002, 9781666701982, 9781666701999, 1666702005, 166670198X, 1666701998
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666702002
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-02-18T08:18:23Z
J. Michael Walters is Emeritus Professor of Christian Ministry
at Houghton College (New York). He is the author of James: A
Bible Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, and Can’t Wait
for Sunday: Leading Your Congregation in Authentic
Worship.