The Fools' Manual: A Study and Practice Guide for Foolish Church: Messy, Raw, Real, and Making Room

An early reader of Foolish Church, a layperson, stood up in front of her church and said, "Every church person needs to read this, because we will learn a lot to help us as a church!" She grasped the point of the book: it's about helping us do church differently. If you're foolish enough to want to try what Lee shares in Foolish Church, this fools' manual will help you do so. It offers book and Bible reflections for each chapter, along with practice suggestions that will help you and your church practice being more authentic, more relevant, and more open. You'll be invited to connect with others, using the hashtag #foolishchurch on social media, so that we all might learn together. C'mon, all you church fools! We've got work to do.

Lee is pastor of Women at the Well in Mitchellville, a church based inside the walls of the Iowa women's prison. She has been transformed by her connection with women there who demonstrate amazing resilience, faith, and wisdom as they navigate overwhelming obstacles. She is pursuing a vision of the church outside the prison embracing persons right in their communities who face challenges like the ones we see so often inside the prison: addiction, mental illness, sexual assault, and domestic violence. The church on the whole is impoverished by the absence-and the silence-of those experiences and voices in our midst.

Lee previously served (2003-2011) as co-pastor of Polk City United Methodist Church, a small-town church near the Des Moines metro. A 2007 graduate, with honors, of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, Lee was ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church in 2009.

Lee's ministry career follows what she had thought would be a career in law. After college, she went east to Harvard Law School and began her career at a private law firm in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1995 she and her family moved home to Iowa and she worked as an in-house lawyer at a life insurance company. A lifelong United Methodist, she sensed a call from God after she began praying in earnest at the age of nearly 40. Her ministry has combined a delight in the creativity and wonder of worship with a deep commitment to social justice and how we mobilize the church to be a Spirit-led force to transform the world.