★★★★ ☐ The publisher has provided a copy for review.

What a stir of pastors transgressing in moral and legal areas, church boards that are dysfunctional and controlling (or disengaged), and the failures of its members and leaders. It seems to be an ongoing headline. No wonder culture is losing trust in the Church.

McKnight and Barringer suggest another way - forming accountability and vision that shapes a trusted and useful institution "that resists abuses of power." That would include empathy, grace, and a focus on people. With the model of their congregation, the authors lead church leaders and members through practical steps toward health and significance.

Wouldn't you like to be part of a church like that instead?

Man, this one's tough. On one hand, everything the authors are saying is wholly true, but like with so many things, it's not the whole truth. There is one essential element missing, and without it, I don't think the church ever truly gets to tov. That element is grace.

Hear me out - this is coming from someone who has been in a toxic church culture for too long, but knew it when it was tov and has dreams of tov again. It also comes from someone who has been in a toxic world, longing for tov in secular relationships. So I speak from experience. But when I read this book, I don't see anything about how the church is to deal with the pastor who is at the center of the toxicity. This book doesn't speak to how to engage the abuser, and that is an essential part of who we are in Christ. It seems the suggestion of the book is to turn all of our attention toward drawing hard lines on things, and I'm torn by a Christ who doodles in the dirt.

See, the truth is that we can't speak with condemnation of a man (or woman) when we condemn his/her actions, no matter how vile they are. What the pastors used as examples in this book have done is wrong. What the leaderships of these churches have done is wrong. What these women have gone through is an atrocity and a stain of sin on the church. But those accused of (and guilty of) these abominations are not evil men; they are broken men. And if we don't figure out grace for the broken even while we hold compassion and justice for the ones broken by the broken, then we have missed an essential element of Christ...and of tov. So I really would have liked to see more fullness of the discussion, more talk about how we engage not just the abused, but the abuser. Not just the poisoned, but the poison itself.

Part of the issue that got in the way, I think, is residual woundedness in the authors. These events are, in terms of history, relatively fresh. And when the book shifts to trying to promote a culture of tov, the authors do not give up their condemnation of pastors and leaders and structures who are getting it wrong. Even in the chapters that are meant to focus on how to build a tov culture, there are large sections of what is not tov - which has already been covered in its own section. So the repetition of aggregiousnesses reads like the voice of the wounded; it just seems to be something they cannot let go of.

I actually liked this book. Like I said in the beginning, it is spot on in what it says. It lays out things that are wholly true about toxic church cultures, and they are things that we need to understand and fights that we need to take up. But there is a glaring blindspot in the book itself, and if we think that this is all that it takes to achieve tov, we are fooling ourselves. If we simply shift who is getting alienated and ostracized and demonized in our churches from the parishioners to the pastors, we haven't really solved the problems that we're facing. It's not easy; it's a hard work. The hardest. And I thank these authors for offering a starting point for conversations we need to have and should not so easily give up.