Nancy Ammerman, Jackson W. Carroll, Carl S. Dudley, and William McKinney, Studying Congregations: A New Handbook. Abingdon Press, 1998.
Referenced in: Church Leadership Foundations, Church Dynamics, Research
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Any responsible planning process includes congregational assessment and evaluation. Most planning workbooks will include their own mechanisms for this, but if one wants to go deeper into any phase of assessment, this is the tool. It is the magnum opus of congregational assessment. It presents more resources than one church can use. A planning team must be selective. A leader would benefit from this volume, however, whether in planning or not, simply from the rich understanding of congregational life.
One of the helpful pieces is the layout on best practices of a congregational research, in the “Invitation to Practical Theology” (pp. 26-27):
1. Describe the situation in which the church finds itself. In this practice, the congregation describes what it is now doing. – its own congregational culture and what members say about who they are, the way decisions are made, their use of resources, and the like.
2. Examine the stories, creeds, doctrines, and scriptures that are the historic resources of your faith tradition. Here you look especially for parallels to your current situation and instances in the tradition that illumine and challenge the situation.
3. Engage your current situation and your historic faith tradition in conversation. The ideas and narratives of the tradition should call your current practices into account. But the things you are discovering about God can also bring about new understanding. How does the congregation’s story illumine and give a fresh perspective on the biblical story or other stories from the congregation’s heritage? And how do the faith stories illumine or challenge the congregation’s story about itself? This is a “dialectical hermeneutic” wherein two sets of stories interpret each other and offer each other new insights and perspectives.
4. Renewed faith and practice, “strategic pastoral theology,” which results from one having listened to the conversation between your congregational story and the rich resources of your faith tradition, and which allows you to imagine and plan the next chapter.
“The whole task of studying the congregation, then, can be seen as an exercise in practical theology. Although it uses tools drawn from many other sources (as the following chapters make clear), the end result is not intended to be only a demographic, sociological, or financial profile. It is, rather, a picture of a living community of faith that struggles to be faithful to its understanding of God and God’s purposes for the congregation and for the world. That is why understanding the study of your congregation as a theological undertaking helps keep your efforts in focus.” (p. 27)
Several considerations enter the process of congregational research, and the remainder of the book addresses each one:
- Ecology – Seeing the Congregation in Context (Eiesland and Warner in Studying Congregations, Chapter 2)
- Culture and Congregational Identity – What “culture” have the people of your church created? What kind of people and congregation have they created in interaction with their ecology? (Ammerman in Studying Congregations, chapter 3)
- Process: Dynamics of Congregational Life – The formal and informal ways the congregation works in the three common processes: program planning, group building, and conflict management. (Dudley in Studying Congregations, chapter 4)
- Resources – the capacity or potential a church has to accomplish social and religious goals, both hard resources (money, people, staff, and buildings) and soft resources (stories of suffering together, connections to institutions, strength of member commitment, etc.), with a reminder not to focus only on the measurable. (McKinney, Ruger, Cohen, and Jeager in Studying Congregations, Chapter 5)
- Leadership – The role of appointed leaders and other key influencers, and how a congregation’s potential for understanding its present and entering its future is either helped or hindered by the health of its leadership. (Carroll in Studying Congregations, chapter 6)
Chapter 7of Studying Congregations is an extensive discussion of the methods for researching each dimension of the congregation. This is perhaps the best discussion one can find on the strengths, weaknesses, and best practices of the following assessment methods: direct observation, interviewing, focus groups, congregational timeline, archival document analysis, census data and secondary source records, questionnaires and surveys. It also instructs on data storage, data analysis and interpretation, and presenting the findings.
From the Publisher
Studying Congregations: A New Handbook is a revised and updated edition of Handbook for Congregational Studies, replacing that previous text.
In this new edition, the authors update what has become the primary textbook in the field of congregational studies in the seminary classroom. Studying Congregations: A New Handbook will also be a useful reference for pastors, denominational leaders, and strategic planning committees. It includes Appendix A: Parish Profile Inventory and Appendix B: Standard Demographic and Religious Involvement Variables.
About the Editors
Nancy T. Ammerman is Professor of Sociology of Religion, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of Congregation and Community. (1998)
Jackson W. Carroll is the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Professor of Religion and Society, and Director of the J. M. Ormond Center for Research, Planning, and Development in the Divinity School of Duke University. He is author of several books, including As One With Authority: Reflective Leadership in Ministry.
Carl S. Dudley is Co-director of the Center for Social and Religious Research and Professor of Church and Community at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. He is author of several books, including Making the Small Church Effective and Basic Steps Toward Community Ministry. (1998)< p>William McKinney is President and Professor of American Religion at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California. He is co-author of American Mainline Religion and the Responsibility People. (1998)
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