Divine Nobodies (by Jim Palmer)

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It was in 2009 that I first came across Jim Palmer and his book ‘Divine Nobodies’.  I loved the title, and enjoyed the book very much, too. It’s well-written, and includes some personal anecdotes as well as descriptions of encounters with ‘ordinary’ people who are demonstrating the love of Christ.

Jim Palmer, as we learn in the two introductions, is a person who grew out of an abusive, and very sad background. He became a Christian in his late teens, then trained as a pastor. For a while was very successful in what he did. He is clearly outgoing and caring, even if he also calls himself obsessive-compulsive. He’s interested in people and, he says, likes weepy movies. 

However, he and his first wife got divorced, and he then had to leave the church where he was pastor, and that led to some depression, and serious questioning about life, God and ‘organised religion’. Palmer uses that phrase to refer not just to formal, traditional churches but Baptist and non-conformist churches, which inevitably develop their own styles and ways of doing things. And his experience with the evangelical churches in the United States, even a couple of decades ago when this book was written, is that they can be quite formulaic, coercive and uncaring. 

But Palmer was unwilling to give up on God, and in his seeking to learn more and to follow Jesus better, he comes across a lot of different people who demonstrate, in some way, what he is looking for. The first chapter describes his friend Doug, who is a drummer and likes all kinds of music that the author believed was ‘wrong’. He became a believer but felt as if the leaders in his church didn’t care for him, and only wanted him to check boxes in a do/don’t list. In Doug’s story as well as his own, the author finds new ways to think about God.

The second chapter is about a waitress in a waffle house. She gave up on church because she wasn’t academic and didn’t understand the preacher. And now she works Sundays, anyway. But she demonstrates the love of Jesus in her work, and the way she treats the clientele. This chapter digresses as the author mentions other people he knows who are similar in some respects, and - sharing his own learning process - realises that God can be present in those considered ‘nobodies’. 

Other chapters look at a girl in a wheelchair, children exploring the Bible together, Montessori-style, a swimming instructor, an Anglo-Catholic priest, and many more. As Jim Palmer meets and interacts with different people, some of them outcasts from churches, he finds more and more ways in which the love of God can be demonstrated. He acknowledges that God can be found in a variety of ways, in and outside formal churches, and in many different styles of worship. 

It’s all very readable, peppered with stories from the author’s own life. He regularly acknowledges his own failings and the misconceptions he had to work through in order to cast them aside. He admits to having done ‘good works’ for the sake of being recognised, and one of the later chapters charts a tyre salesman who is generous to a down-and-out, someone whom the author would probably have ignored or sent to a local charity. 

Reading this book after a gap of over fifteen years, I had entirely forgotten the stories, although the premise is not a new one to me, and there are a large number of other books that explore the same topic in different ways. But it's good to see different perspectives.

I have to admit I didn’t much like some of Jim Palmer’s later books, when he seems to veer further and further away from Christian belief. But in this one, his comments are rooted in his knowledge of Scripture, and he doesn’t try to preach or even explain himself too directly. Told as his own personal journey, it makes a lot of sense and leaves the reader open to make up their own minds.

Recommended.

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