All around us, we face requests for help. Colleagues may ask us for advice, friends may need a listening ear, a social service organization may be raising funds or looking for more volunteers, and an elderly family member may need our care. Social scientists have found that religious people are more likely than non-religious people…
The focus of this site is the study of congregations, understood in the most basic sense as local religious assemblies. But concepts of “the congregation,” “congregational,” and “congregationalism” have both more precise and more contested meanings. As a form of “church polity,” congregationalism holds the local religious assembly to be the source of earthy ecclesiastical…
David Gibson at the Religion News Service describes the changing roles of Catholic priests in the parish. He outlines the role priests must take in a parish’s finances, human resources, facilities, and security. He writes, Once upon a time, the parish staff usually consisted of a janitor and a parish secretary, maybe a volunteer, while a…
NPR featured a story about a Washington Post reporter who simultaneously reported on drug crimes while being addicted to heroin while living in Washington D.C. in the 1980s and 1990s. From the article: In a new book, S Street Rising, Castaneda writes that S Street was once an epicenter of the drug war. Now, it’s much quieter. Neighbors walk by…
Dan Hotchkiss at the Alban Institute wrote an interesting piece on the strength of committees. Committees, he argues, are instituted to reduce decision-making from a large group to a small group. Most “committees” he sees in congregations are actually in charge of a particular activity, and thus work as leading and organizing the ongoing needs…