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Her new memoir brings her voice into the story of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye". It also brings in an entirely different gospel.
I read Boy Meets Girl decades ago as an adolescent alongside thousands of other church kids in America. It was the much-anticipated follow-up to Joshua Harris’s now-infamous book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. As a very young adult, Harris had told us all how to date (or rather, how to court) in a pure way, so that we could all make it to our wedding night as virgins.
Boy Meets Girl was going to tell us how this had all worked out for Josh on a personal level. It also introduced us to Shannon, who I pictured as Josh’s leading lady. Turns out, however, she was more like his backstage help. As Shannon Harris makes clear in her recent book The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife, she longed to fulfill her dream of being a singer and actor, but was instead tasked with passing out cake to the cast.
I naively read Boy Meets Girl as a love story. I thought of Joshua and Shannon Harris as an example for all of us kids out there trying to date the “right” way. The book felt like a kind of promise that, if I followed the same rules, I, too, might find my future spouse and live happily ever after.
Decades later, holding Harris’s memoir , I can practically feel the weight of her untold stories in my hands. In it, she finally inserts her own voice into the narrative, giving us an entirely different perspective on the marriage, their ministry, and how being the pastor’s wife of a famous evangelical leader left her “starving” with “nothing left to give.”
Handling ‘heavy bricks’
What turned Harris from being a new, excited Christian into feeling like she had been handed “heavy bricks” by the local church? Those who knew Harris before ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
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