Nov/Dec 1995

ARTICLE TOOLS

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"Congregation: The Journey Back to Church," by Gary Dorsey. Viking, 388 pp.; $24.95

"American Congregations" Volume 1: "Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities;" Volume 2: "New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations," edited by James P. Wind and James W. Lewis. University of Chicago Press, Vol. 1, 712 pp.; $34.95, Vol. 2, 292 pp.; $22.50

"The Black Churches of Brooklyn," by Clarence Taylor. Columbia University Press, 297 pp.; $27.50

The boomers are returning to church: of that the Lord Hucksters, spiritual and temporal, are well aware as they kneel in reverence once again to milk their demographic cash cow. Academics, too, have been quick to identify a trend: a subject ripe for conferences and monographs. And we experience the familiar paradox of a phenomenon so widely proclaimed that it begins to seem unreal, cover-storied and talk-showed to death. To get at the reality of the "return to church," we need to see it in the larger, messier context suggested by the books under review: the history of American congregations.

Gary Dorsey's "Congregation: The Journey Back to Church" offers a Tracy Kidder-style immersion in the life of a single congregation. The author first appears on stage as Boomer Rampant: the journalist returned from an overseas assignment, seeking out a new project to go along with the new house and the new wife. Why not religion, a pretty sure bet in the bookstores? Why not, in particular, the secret heart of an ordinary parish, the mystery he senses in the "erotic" smells of a musty Connecticut church? But if conceived as Couples Redux, Congregation becomes a story of a plot gotten out of hand, of how voyeur turns visionary. The book may or may not stand as the chronicle of the boomer's quest, but it memorably ...