Book Review: "Congregation: The Journey Back to Church"

Congregation: The Journey Back to Church by Gary Dorsey (Viking, 1995), hardback, 400 pages

As a pastor of a congregation, I am sometimes asked, "What does your church do?"  This has different meanings when asked by different people.  If it is another pastor or church leader, it is a question about what makes the congregation I serve unique.  If it is someone who does not have much experience with any church, it is probably rooted in curiosity about what goes on behind closed doors.  (Needless to say, if it is someone who is worried about certain churches, they are listening for certain warning signs, such as speaking in tongues, handling snakes, or, worst of all, aggressively evangelizing anyone who shows the slightest interest.  "By the way, I'm glad you asked... and I'll be by your home tonight to continue this conversation.")

Truthfully, it is a difficult question to answer honestly.  While a congregation has a straight-forward focus -- we are a community that worships/follows God -- there are almost unlimited variations of how Christians live out such communal faith.  In fact, this question seems almost like asking, "What does your family do?"

Despite the challenge, most congregations have an unspoken answer to this question.  Somewhere, in the midst of worship services, Sunday School classes, pot luck dinners, committee meetings, mission trips and annual budget campaigns, there is a subconscious list of activities and nurtured relationships that are central to the identity of a specific congregation and their understanding of what they do: what they do for God, what they do for each other, what they do for those beyond themselves.

It can be almost impossible to explain the things on these lists in their entirety.  Partially, it is because few people in any congregation are completely comfortable with the entire list; after all, one person's "cherished tradition" is another's "sacred cow."  Mostly, though, this is because the web of relationships and motivations is both shadowy and complex.

Gary Dorsey, in his 1995 book, Congregation: The Journey Back to Church, attempts to demystify and describe the unique organism that is a Christian congregation.  A journalist, Dorsey basically embeds himself in a specific congregation, First Church of Windsor, Connecticut, for a year. He attend most activities and conducts interviews with many in the congregation, including extensive ones with the three pastors on staff.

The result is a sympathetic portrait of an organization that exists to reach out to others, but is constantly fighting the resistance of those who insist that it also must serve the members.  Certain key leaders are constantly worried about money, but this congregation has the ability to hire a consultant to guide the capital campaign.  Alongside fellowship dinners, organizational meetings, spiritual programs and special services, there is also a low-level "turf war," as different individuals and groups in the congregation compete for space and time in the building, in the calendar, and in the attention of the staff and wider congregation.

There are disagreements, large and small, throughout the year, over such issues as the language used in worship, the annual stewardship campaign, and the associate minister's public campaign challenging city action on behalf of the homeless.  There is uneasiness in the fairly intellectual and straight-laced congregation over recent efforts to introduce more spirituality-centered programs into the church, such as the hiring of a spiritual director and the activities of the healing prayer circle.

Against this backdrop, Dorsey documents a year in the spiritual journeys of several in the congregation, including the ministers.  Someone who feels a call to mission work in Central America is encouraged and supported in a trip to the area for several weeks.  A young mother, who feels somewhat different from others in the congregation, finds support and even emerges as a leader in her own right.  And the pastors are a study in contrasts -- the senior minister apparently coasting toward retirement, but who also may be crazy like a fox in his approach to leadership; the older associate, a Yale-educated man who is struggling with his role in the congregation and questioning whether he should be a minister; and the younger associate, who works with outreach programs and sometimes appears to be only tangentially related to the life of the congregation.

Dorsey, despite attempts to simply be an observer, undergoes his own spiritual pilgrimage during the year -- as much due to his immersion in the life of the congregation as to personal challenges as he and his wife struggle to begin a family.  This leads to a conclusion which is a personal testimony of the congregation Dorsey himself discovered and needed -- an ending dear to the heart of any pastor.  His flowing words near the end of the book are, in many ways, a love letter to the promise and possibility of any congregation that nurtures people in their faith.