The author is too much in love with his own cleverness of style, I think, as the structure of the book often becomes incoherent streams of consciousness that muddy the waters of the stories he tells.

At other times, he makes some truly puzzling snap judgments, ironically while describing how well he learned to love this inner-city body of Christ.

In the end, it seems that he's not learned that much except how to blend in to a different community from the one where he grew up, and then how to become fiercely and harshly dismissive of those outside in the name supposedly of defending those whom he thinks need him as their shield.

He revels in threatening the city council with a hostile newspaper column, and weeps in repentance of preaching Jesus's unconditional redeeming love too...fiercely, I suppose, to a woman on her deathbed who in the end, doubted Christ's love for her because of several hard turns of life. Instead, he sees her as having been better than him, because she "never depended on anyone for anything" and "imposed her will everywhere she went", while he'd just been trying to prove to himself that he was a good pastor by telling her that Jesus's love is not absent during hardship or death.

Mixed in here somewhere is a story of a young man learning to love an all-but-abandoned church and community. Unfortunately, rather than sourcing that love from Christ and striving to be Christ to and among them - and to teach them to do the same to a lost world - he instead became a jealous and angry avenger on their behalf, deeply suspicious of the outside world and anything that could be perceived as a slight.