Search: A Review

Search was recommended to me by a ministry colleague. Although she did not know that I had served on a pastor search committee a couple of years ago, I welcomed the recommendation and found the topic intriguing. Most ministers do not have the opportunity to be part of a pastor search committee and those who do may have a difficult time processing their experience. Author Michelle Huneven has written this novel about a congregational search committee told as a memoir with recipes. I shared with a group that I found it both amusing and terrifying!

In the novel, Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer who is also a longtime, but increasingly dissatisfied, member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Coming off a successful book launch, she is asked to join the search committee for a new minister. Seeking her next book idea, she agrees, and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. Search follows the travails of the committee and their candidates.

If you are minister and are part of a faith tradition that practices a congregational polity in which the church identifies and calls a prospective pastor, you should read this book. If you are a member of a pastor search committee, you should read this book. If you have ever been a member of a pastor search committee, you might not want to read this book.

The process that Huneven recounts shows us both the best and the worst of congregational polity and human nature. The committee and, in turn the reader, are brought face to face with the forces at work in a call process—spiritual discernment, personal prejudice, groupthink, and cultural pressure.

The author has good humor, a keen eye for detail, and an epicurean bent. The recipes are a nice touch, but her insights into people are the most valuable part of the book. Enjoy!

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