Like our beloved Michelle and Cheryl D., I belong to an enormous online group for working Christian writers called The Writer’s View (I think we have something like 1,000 members.)  A few weeks back, we had a thread in which members answered the question, “What was the best book you read in 2007?” Being behind the times as usual, I printed out the list so that I could read everyone else’s 2007 favorites in 2008.

One of those books is Lisa Samson’s Quaker Summer, named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the best books of 2007. I’m only a few chapters in and I already love it. The main character, Heather Curridge, is this very real, size 14ish, snarky, introspective Christian wife who knows she’s living a materialistic, superficial life and is tired of it.

Still, Heather seems trapped. As much as she yearns for a simpler life and a Purpose — a Purpose she dreams about, but can’t quite name –she fills her days with baking and volunteering and clearing her stone-gabled lakeview home of perfectly good accessories so she can buy new ones. (One can do that when one is married to a successful heart surgeon.)

The most interesting thing about the book so far — and why I bring it up here — is that as it entertains, Quaker Summer serves as a sharp commentary on modern evangelicalism. Heather is tired of attending huge, sparkling churches where worship is impeccably choreographed but spiritually empty. (Therefore, she’s been “church shopping” for a year).

She is tired of youth groups that make Christianity ”all about you” with a side of pizza. She is weary of the women’s ministry minuet in which steel-jawed ladies smile politely while elbowing for control. But Heather can’t seem to bust out of the Christian ghetto, either externally or within her own heart. But she yearns, she yearns…

“Do you picture Jesus as perfectly coiffed or kind of messy?” Heather asks her family one day.

“Messy,” her husband Jace answers.

“Most definitely messy,” says her son, Will.

“I’m kinda messy, at least on the inside,” Heather says. “Is there a church out there where people can be messy?”

Heather’s inner and outer dialogue resonates with a lot of people I know. A friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that if he heard one more self-help sermon he was going to scream. Another told me he’d like to see less pew-sitting and more Matthew 25-ing.

Do you ever feel like Heather Curridge?