During worship at Immanuel Lutheran Church (Evanston, Illinois) on Sunday, September 24, 2017, 135 newly-made quilts were blessed and dedicated for distribution to refugees through Lutheran World Relief (LWR). Thinking about how this came to be can help us see how new resources were brought together by making connections to people and organizations throughout the…
Question: What do we know about congregational size? In the United States, most congregations are smaller than 100 people, but most people attend congregations that are large. This points to the fact that many people attend “megachurches,” or churches larger than 2,000 people (see the earlier post on why someone would attend a megachurch by…
|| Written by Paul D. Numrich, Methodist Theological School in Ohio and Trinity Lutheran Seminary || What happens when a Catholic church provides overflow parking to a Hindu temple? Is it primarily an exchange of resources? Or is something more going on? In our book on immigrant congregations, Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement, Fred Kniss and I…
Figuring out whether or not a program works poses an interesting challenge. It’s something that leaders often want to do, but the impact of our work is often in the everyday lives of people, and it would be impractical to follow people around all day. In one recent program evaluation, we tackled that challenge using…
As disasters strike – all too often, it seems – we often see churches, synagogues and mosques in the news. They may be shelters or food distribution centers or coordinators of volunteers or places to comfort and grieve. As the most ubiquitous form of voluntary organization in the U.S., congregations are present in every community,…