Ordained Christian ministry can be messy, raw, frustrating, and plagued with judgment errors. It swings between poles of despair and joy, resentment and gratitude, isolation and community, depths of pain and healing. It occurs in a church body wrestling over fundamental expressions of ministry in times of division. The word of God abides within all of it. Such is the experience which Neal Anthony--an ordained Lutheran minister for over twenty-five years--has woven together through various threads of first-person ministry narrative. Broken Hallelujahs provides at once a powerful narration of Christian ministry, both its personal investment and a penetrating development of many theological themes within that context. What results is more than a pastoral memoir, but a profound theology for ministry which sketches the crucified solidarity which unites minister and laity. Ultimately, Anthony professes, the beauty of the church's hallelujahs is not in the heights to which they soar, but the crucified depths from which they are uttered. In those depths stirs both the liturgy of Christ's presence and the healing begotten of that presence. Within these pages are narratives of the church's crucified praise, the majesty of Christ's Broken Hallelujah.
