Congregation Book

In an age of exotic spiritual quests, Gary Dorsey set out in search of an American tradition. He settled in the least exotic of places - a 360-year-old Congregational church whose white clapboards and steeple looked like a picture postcard of New England. In an astonishing year of reporting, Dorsey takes us on his initiation into the trials and pleasures of mainline congregational life: taking flight through the cemetery of First Church in Windsor, Connecticut, with an irrepressible minister and his rambunctious dog; praying at the New Age shrine of a middle-aged nursery school teacher; fighting City Hall with the radical outreach minister cum Jeremiah; eavesdropping on church gossip about a million-dollar building campaign; making a pilgrimage through the congregation's precolonial motherland in England. Dorsey lifts the roof off First Church and lets us peer inside, among the pews, and into the hearts of ordinary people who are leading extraordinary spiritual lives. Yet not until a moment of personal crisis does he begin his own search for an authentic religious home within the community of First Church, a journey that puts him back in touch with his own Southern revivalist roots - and brings him to a new sense of what it means to have a life in the spirit. With Congregation, Gary Dorsey has written a remarkable book: a spiritual documentary that shows us how the traditions of myth, redemption, and salvation are reinvented daily in a church's otherwise quiet life. Compassionate, funny, mystical, and deeply affecting, it is a clear-eyed account of mainstream Protestant life in the late twentieth century - a tonic in an age of often overheated searching - and a refreshing source of everyday wisdom for anyone thinking anew about life's oldest questions.