Also by this author: The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment
Published by Zondervan on April 8, 2025
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life, Theology, Social Justice
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May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you…
We have received the blessing countless times, but what does it mean for the Lord to shine his face upon us in a time when many Christians are disillusioned with their faith, wrestling to reframe their relationship with God and with the church?
But another inner struggle often lurks unacknowledged, unconfronted—the struggle to rediscover one's own identity and relearn one's own story. Aimee Byrd finds this experience best described in the metaphor of finding one's face. Through this beautiful meditation, Byrd shows how the church has "been defaced" by its own spiritual abuses, by its loss of imagination and wonder, by empty words without actions.
The author of Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has often asked hard questions of the church. In Saving Face, she develops her reflections still further, daring to wonder: what if the crises in the church today are not because we don't have the right doctrine, but because we have lost sight of something much deeper?
What if we are spending all our time pointing fingers at those we consider "wrong," when we should be looking in a mirror instead? What if God has something to reveal to us there? Perhaps we should be seeking the presence of Christ in our own reflections just as we look for him in the faces of the others.
Creatively weaving together stories, memories, journal entries, and Scripture meditations on the divine face, Aimee invites the church to seek the face of Christ by recovering the values of beauty, contemplation, and deep relationship.
Saving Face is a deeply personal book that flows from the author’s experiences with church trauma. She reflects on her lifelong spiritual journey, ways that her experiences in recent years have changed her, and what it means to seek God’s face in the midst of disillusionment. In many ways, this book is the follow-up to her previous book, The Hope in Our Scars.
In The Hope in Our Scars, Aimee Byrd shared her story about enduring public humiliation and smear campaigns within her denomination and many online spaces, and she explored themes about what it means for the church to be the bride of Christ, even when you have experienced church trauma. Now, in Saving Face, Byrd unpacks themes and stories that naturally follow from and build on that earlier book. You don’t have to read both books to glean wisdom from this one, but I got more out of it because I read it second.
In this new book, Byrd shares about her and her husband’s struggle to find another church, and she contemplates themes about what it means to truly know your own face and show it to others, without masks of religiosity and pretense. She reflects on what it means for a person to seek God’s face, and the book offers a blend of spiritual meditations, journal entries, and retrospective insights from different eras of her life. I appreciated this book, but I sometimes felt like it was overly metaphorical and meandering. This memoir is so personal that any reader’s experience with it will be highly subjective, based on how much they relate to the author, or how invested they are in her journey.
Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church is a thought-provoking, unique book that explores spiritual themes through the lens of the author’s struggles and life experiences. This book will appeal to others, especially women, who are reevaluating their lives after spiritual trauma and looking for a deeper, richer relationship with God.