A 20TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

Since Chasing Francis first appeared in 2006, one in three Americans raised in a faith tradition have quietly walked away from it—not because they stopped believing, but because the faith they were handed stopped making sense. This is the story of one pastor's very public unraveling, and the 800-year-old saint who helped him put the pieces back together, differently.

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IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

This book might be for you if...

  • You love Jesus, but you can't bring yourself to love the church.
  • You've quietly stopped believing in the God you were handed, and you're not sure what to do with that.
  • You're tired of celebrity pastors, culture wars in the pulpit, and a faith that feels more like a brand than a relationship.
  • Someone has called you "spiritual but not religious," and privately, you thought: "That's fair."
  • You want a faith with room in it for mystery, beauty, joy, and doubt, not just answers.
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"Beyond the beauty of the spiritual journey presented within these pages, Ian Morgan Cron is a masterful storyteller. I laughed out loud at some of Pastor Chase's presuppositions about Roman Catholics. Cron does a masterful job of bridging the gap, not to convince us to "switch sides," but to demonstrate that God is at work and has been at work in a variety of places and traditions."

– R.Spirling, reader

THE STORY

A pastor's unraveling, and the saint who put him back together

Pastor Chase Falson had everything a successful minister was supposed to want: a booming megachurch, a growing congregation, a platform. Then a child in his church died — and in the middle of a Sunday sermon, his faith collapsed in front of everyone.

With nowhere left to turn, Chase flees to Italy to visit his uncle Kenny, a Franciscan friar living in Assisi. What begins as an escape from crisis becomes the most disorienting, life-altering pilgrimage of his life. Walking the same cobblestone streets that Francis of Assisi walked 800 years ago, Chase discovers a Christianity so different from what he’d been living and preaching that it upends everything he believes — and then slowly, painfully, puts him back together.

“St. Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”

– IAN MORGAN CRON

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