Every congregation pursues its mission within a specific culture, and in the US today, that culture is deeply polarized. The Congregations and Polarization Project spent its first 18 months asking pastors which issue they found most polarizing in their congregations or in the larger community they served. We created focus groups of pastors all…
Most importantly, this framing teaches us that everyone should exercise caution when generalizing about what “conservative churches” or “liberal churches” are likely to do. Our sample of pastors may not be representative of all pastors, but claims about the political activity in churches, especially from the media, appear to be overgeneralizations. We just do not…
The Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program (WPLP) is a two-year, early-career, mentoring program for Indiana pastors. Because my research focuses on demographics and religious change in Indiana, I have spoken to all nine WPLP cohorts, and I routinely join their annual alumni reunion. Through these twenty years, I have learned that most pastors do not…
Communities across the US are facing challenges that may seem too great to overcome. The streets have become dangerous, even deadly, and it’s tempting to think that congregations have nothing to offer. But nothing could be further from the truth. Hard times are not the moment for underestimating the resources congregations bring to the…
We hear a lot about ‘food deserts’ or ‘health care deserts.’ But are there ‘congregation deserts’? That is, neighborhoods where there simply aren’t any nearby places for religious gathering. When the Boston Globe did a story about a neighborhood grappling with questions about a major redevelopment project, they noted that neighbors had a hard…