Excited to announce that the contract has been signed! I’ll be partnering with Dr. Richard Flory and his team at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture to bring scholars and practitioners a new book: How Congregations Thrive: Fostering Community, Identity, and Mission in Today’s Churches. It will be part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Civic Culture series, led by CRCC.

This book explores the Los Angeles subset of the Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations study, a national study housed at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and led by Dr. Scott Thumma. It is a fascinating dataset that shows both the fragility and the resilience of today’s congregations in the midst of and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The book is taking shape as I dive more deeply into the data, especially the observations and interviews. One big observation that shapes the book is that congregational “thriving” is often not a binary (either you’re thriving or you’re not) and really there are typically areas that congregations are doing well in (e.g., outreach) and other areas in which they are struggling (e.g., connecting with teens and young adults). This framework helps scholars and clergy alike really understand and assess a “typical” congregation, rather than the handful of “exemplary” congregations that typically characterize books on congregational health. I’ll put updates on my “books” page throughout the process!