James P. Wind

Not impressed. I tried to be understanding of the fact that this was now published almost 30 years ago, so of course it's going to be somewhat outdated. I'd love to see a revision of this specific book, with recent publications that are congregational histories or are about how to approach researching and writing such histories, as well as updated and more complete lists of denominational repositories.

Reading this as an outside lay person now doing congregational history, I felt like the book was largely geared for community members writing their own congregations' histories rather than for outsider, professional historians who are wondering how to go about this work. The most interesting part to me was seeing how much scholarship based in social science and about congregational life had been produced by 1990 and published not in the social sci publications I'm familiar with, but ones more specifically rooted in religion. It's an area of scholarly publication that had been previously unknown to me, so I appreciated realizing more about it.… (meer)