Strong in Broken Places: A Theological Reverie on the Ministry of George Everett Ross. By Leonard I. Sweet. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1995. xi + 270 pp.

Abstract

Press, 1995. xi + 270 pp. At the beginning of this book, Leonard I. Sweet writes that the "popular press loves to stick its forks in the crust of people's lives and test how easily morality can crumble" (p. xiv). Yet, although Sweet has written a book about a man with many faults, the message does not crumble. Sweet argues, through the life and preaching of George Everett Ross, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio, that God uses those who are called to ministry in spite of themselves. This is a case study about how the "treasures" of Christian ministry are always found in earthen vessels. Strong in Broken Places, as Sweet describes it, is a book "best classified as a sequence of insights into matters spiritual, ministerial, theological, and biographical and into the craft of preaching wherein they all are incarnate" (p. xi). It is a book, he writes, which "keeps crossing the borders between biographical reportage, theological rumination, and homiletical reverie" (p. xi). Yet, Sweet confesses, "I wanted the reader to discover for himself or herself Ross's engaging combination of grandeur, montrosity, generosity, self-irony, unsentimentality, and detached sensibility" (p. ix). George Everett Ross was a great preacher. Sweet notes that St. Paul's Church is a place "where people expect great sermons, where they get great sermons or get rid of the reason why, and where they treasure great sermons." Whether people liked or disliked George Everett Ross as a person, they wanted to hear his sermons. "At his touch, feelings fleshed into images, and thoughts became things." In the congregation Sweet discovered people who collected Ross sermons the way some people collect stamps or butterflies (p. xii). Ross himself, however, was a mixture of the divine and the diabolical. Sweet says that "how Ross produced such exceptional sermons or pastored so deftly such a difficult parish, in the midst of his own inner turmoil, marital strains, and incalculable obstacles, while fighting alcoholism and wrestling with inner demons, is the story of this book" (p. 8). In order to understand this remarkable man, Sweet has not written an ordinary biography. Rather, he has written a five-part essay on the "brokenness" or "woundedness" of life and illustrated each part with four or five of Ross's sermons. Sweet suggests that life is a "perpetual piecing together," which is the same for clergy as it is for laity. Therefore, "This book is a spiritual reverie on the ministry of one 'pieced together' Episcopal clergyman, George Everett Ross, who found in this metaphor of 'brokenness' the essence of the Christian faith; the mercy of God in the brokenness of life, the 'savage grace' of God amid the suffering of life" (p. 2). By looking at Ross's ministry in the light of the wounds of Christ, Sweet probes "how brokenness can become a source of soul force and an avenue of creative energy" in all human lives (p. 19). "My hope is also to connect our wounds to the five wounds of Christ: his broken hands and feet, symbolic of broken pieces ...