Michelle Huneven’s homage to church life

These days there is little sympathetic comedy about the church. On screen, viewers are offered choices such as The Righteous Gemstones, Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, and Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. In popular media, church life and church people mostly get skewered as luridly hypocritical or unbearably dull. In real life, church story lines may be less operatic but are growing more dire: attendance is dropping, clergy are quitting, and volunteers are exhausted. Amid this reality, Michelle Huneven’s new novel offers hope, comfort, and a comic reality check for those of us who continue to throw our lot in with this wacky, disorganized, earnest experiment we call church.

Huneven is not an ordained minister, although she went to seminary, was once in the discernment process, and has been a member and lay leader for decades at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church, a congregation in Pasadena, California. This woman knows church. Search is a novel posing as a memoir, and I often forgot that the protagonist, Dana Potowski, is not Huneven and that the Arroyo Unitarian Universalist Community Church (“the AUUCC,” delightfully and appropriately pronounced awk) is not a real place. The details Huneven provides about church life, including conversations between members and observations about staff, grounds, worship, finances, and belief, were all too recognizable to me—sometimes uncomfortably so.

Also familiar were the reservations and doubts of the book’s characters, especially the narrator, Dana. In the first chapter, she confesses: “I wasn’t sure I still wanted to go to church. Almost everything in the Sunday worship had begun to annoy me.” More often than I care to admit, I feel this same way. But I had never encountered words like these in print, only in private conversation.