Shift Happens: a book review

Contemporary Churches (2015) is a short booklet by Louis Kavar, Ph.D. designed to aid churches in transition and in need of revitalization. Kavar is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ with thirty-five years of experience in pastoral ministry, a psychologist, and pastoral counselor, and spiritual director. He brings his wealth of ministry experience to bear on helping churches shift from traditional congregational gatherings to something more life-giving and sustainable in our postmodern context.

There are five chapters of Kavar’s book. Chapter 1 describes the cultural shift we are in, where the wider culture is not responsive to the church’s traditional and institutional structure. Kavar describes our need to move from where we are, to begin to configure and conceptualize church in new ways. Chapter 2 describes the movement from death to life, as congregations move through the stages of grief, a spirituality of bereavement, toward resurrection and new vitality. Chapters 3 and 4 moves toward a new model for the local church. Finally, Chapter 5 describes the spiritual practices and rituals that will sustain a church in transition. Kavar writes, “The vitality of the Christian life is not dying. Instead, structures that no longer represent the way of life our culture embraces are fading away.  In this transformation, the words of Isaiah 43 is true for us today, ‘Look I am doing a new thing. It’s emerging don’t you perceive it?'”(94).

I knew that Kavar was a clergy person, a spiritual director, and a psychologist when I picked the book up. I somehow got in my head that this book was about ‘contemplative church transformation.’ It took me waaay too long to realize I read that it was called Contemporary Churches, and not Contemplative Churches. But Kavar draws more heavily on psychologists than mystics. That isn’t to say that he doesn’t deal with spiritual transformation ( he employs Brueggemann’s orientation/disorientation/reorientation framework, the rhythms of death and resurrection, the example of Jesus, spiritual practices, discernment and the operations of the Holy Spirit. And he incorporates insights he’s gained as a psychologist and a church strategist.

Resources abound for church revitalization and congregational transformation. This isn’t the first resource of this kind I’ve read, though it is perhaps the most mainline one I’ve read. Kavar does reference mainstay evangelical authors like Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, George Barna, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons and even Willow Creek Association resources (but not Ed Stetzer, sorry Lifeway). The changing dynamics of culture effects evangelical and mainline congregations alike, though all anecdotes and illustrative material here are of Mainline congregations and contexts. Some of his examples of shifts (e.g. the move to LGBTQ inclusion and social justice awareness) will be contested in more conservative contexts, but the principles hold true across the theological spectrum. Kavar has some interesting things to say about how for postmodern people, there is a shift in our understanding of church membership from adherence to historic dogma first toward the primacy of communal belonging (members first,  dogma later). I’m confessional enough that this makes me uncomfortable, though I recognize he is right about the broader cultural shift.

Fellow clergy (and congregational leaders) will benefit from reading this whether or not you buy all of Kavar’s theological assumptions and conclusions. He is a good dialogue partner. I give this book four stars (Contemplative Churches, would have been an awesome book).

Notice of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book from SpeakEasy in exchange for my honest review