Lillian Daniel

Lillian Daniel is a nationally recognized preacher, teacher and writer who cares deeply about clergy and congregations. Featured in the New York Times and on PBS, ​Lillian Daniel’s writing has been described as ​“biting, hilarious, pitch perfect, tender, and often stunningly beautiful,” and her book This Odd and Wondrous Calling is taught in many seminaries.

Her book, Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To generated international conversation about the changing religious landscape, continuing the theme of her 2013 book When ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ Is Not Enough about the growing number of people who claim “none” as their religious preference.

After pastoring four unique congregations in the UCC, in 2022 Rev. Dr. Daniel was called to her current position of leadership as a Conference Minister in the United Church of Christ, where she is responsible for the care and oversight of 140 congregations and several hundred clergy in the state of Michigan. Her newest book is Defrocked: Good News from a Bad Pastor for a Better Church.

“Lillian 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 and author of Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair

“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. I think this story will be important for you to read, not to mention engaging and instructive, just as it was for me.”

—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 and author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World

“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. Of course, the quite 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. You heard it first from me: Defrocked is sure to be one of the most well-received and widely read books on Christian ministry in our time.”

—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

“Defrocked is a brave and generous as well as deeply faithful book—one that tells the truth without rushing toward easy redemption. In this memoir, 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. ‘Our stories are gifts, not ransom,’ Daniel writes, insisting that confession and grace must never be coerced but received as holy, human practices. 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

“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. The church talks a lot about grace but rarely shows us what it looks like when we actually need it. Daniel shows us. This is not a self-help book about bouncing back; it’s a resurrection story about being broken open. Defrocked is both a personal confession and a prophetic critique, a love letter to the church and a lament over its failures. If you love the church enough to tell the truth about it, then get some company and pick up Defrocked.”

—Tripp Fuller, host of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast and Visiting Professor of Theology and Culture at Luther Seminary

“I teach ethics under what Wendell Berry called a ‘Methodist Cathedral.’ I grew up in parsonages hearing, with ear cupped to keyhole, excruciating problems facing good church people. Some were big, gaudy Texas transgressions. Others were imperceptible, hidden under layers of decorum. People training for ministry want a road map to resilient leadership. Thankfully, Daniel’s book is not a road map. It is a truth. And her words are more helpful than most purportedly cartographical lessons of leadership dispensed from above. Highly recommended for seminarians, whether wizened or blissfully ignorant.”

—Amy Laura Hall, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke Divinity School and author of Erecting the Pulpit: Muscular Christianity from Teddy Roosevelt to Donald Trump

“Defrocked puts us in the hands of a keenly observant master of wordcraft. Daniel broaches the difficult and fraught subject of how we, as a church, deal with our own and our leaders’ missteps. Scrubbed of self-pity, her book not only offers a grueling firsthand account of a pastor struggling through the disciplinary ‘process’ but also suggests how that necessary practice might be marked more by human (rather than bureaucratic) sensitivity and a deeper faithfulness to a God who has already decided not to give up on any one of us. Somehow, Daniel never loses her sense of humor so that her book exhibits wryness throughout. Truly edifying (that is, upbuilding), Defrocked is essential reading for church administrators, ‘bad’ and good pastors, and laypersons who may be drafted onto disciplinary committees.”

—Rodney Clapp, author of Living Out of Control: Political and Personal Faith in Waning Christendom

“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 Congregational Church United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin, and coauthor of Love Letters to God

“No one goes into ministry thinking that we’ll end up in the Bad Pastors’ Club. But, since we’re human, some of us do. What almost no one does is talk about it. In Defrocked, Daniel bravely and candidly does. No spin. No punches pulled. She tells the truth, and truth-telling is the hallmark of great writing. This book took courage to write, and it will help a lot of sinners—in other words, human beings.”

—Tony Jones, author of The God of Wild Places: Rediscovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors