Congregational Studies in the UK

Christianity in a Post-Christian Context

Karin Tusting, Mathew Guest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351949606
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book presents the first comprehensive introduction to congregational studies in the UK. Through a series of innovative essays, it explores the difference that the increasingly post-Christian nature of British society is making to life in Christian congregations, and compares this to the very different scenario which exists in the USA. Contributions from leading scholars in the field include rich case studies of local communities and theoretical analyses which reflect on issues of method and develop broader understandings. Congregational studies is revealed as a rich and growing field of interest to scholars across many disciplines and to those involved in congregational life.

PART ONE

THE EMERGING FIELD

Chapter 1

Congregational Studies: Taking Stock

Linda Woodhead, Mathew Guest and Karin Tusting

By the mid-1980s the field of congregational studies in the English-speaking world had produced a sufficiently rich crop for Hopewell (1987) to offer a typological survey. Hopewell divided the studies into four types: contextual, mechanistic, organic and cultural. He himself championed and helped to shape the last approach, particularly within ecclesiastical and theological circles. Since Hopewell wrote, the field has grown considerably, and has taken directions he could not have anticipated. It is now fed by many disciplines including theology, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, organizational studies, linguistics, social theory and gender studies. It takes shape in many institutional settings, not only in theological colleges, seminaries and churches, but in university departments and by way of funded research projects. Its practitioners range from clergy and lay people seeking to understand and resource their own congregations, to social scientists seeking to discern the fate of ‘community’ in late-capitalist societies.

This chapter provides a fresh survey of congregational studies which takes account of developments in the last couple of decades, and modifies and develops Hopewell’s typology in light of them.¹ It focuses primarily on congregational studies from the UK, including books, influential articles and PhD theses.² Coverage of congregational studies in the USA is limited to studies that have been influential on both sides of the Atlantic.³

The typology offered here divides congregational studies into two main categories, extrinsic and intrinsic, and a number of subcategories:

Extrinsic Studies	Intrinsic Studies
Communitarian	Self-contained
Church-growth	Typologizing
Organizational	Contextualizing
Church-health	Multi-focused
Theological

Extrinsic congregational studies are those whose study of a congregation or congregations has some broader good, such as a concern to assess the role of congregations in the generation of social capital, or a desire to enrich theological reflection with ‘congregational voices’. Intrinsic studies are those that study congregations for their own sake and for the sake of understanding them. Some intrinsic studies focus narrowly on a congregation or congregations alone, others focus more broadly on congregations in relation to their wider context. Obviously, both of these categories are ideal-types, since most extrinsic studies also seek to achieve some understanding for its own sake, and most intrinsic studies have some wider agenda, even if this remains unspecified. But the fact remains that peculiarities of overall aim, method and style allow most congregational studies to be placed within one of these two main types.

This chapter traces the development of both types of congregational study in Britain and argues that a first phase of activity which was primarily extrinsic in orientation has given way since the 1970s to a second phase that is characterized by a predominantly intrinsic approach. It compares this situation with that in the United States, suggesting that the field there has been more progressive in its development and has tended to adopt a largely extrinsic approach throughout. In its conclusion the chapter attempts to explain this contrast by reference to the very different religious contexts in which congregational studies now takes place on either side of the Atlantic.

Extrinsic Studies

Communitarian

The first significant congregational studies in the UK appeared in the 1950s. Though they were written from a variety of perspectives and had very different aims, many shared the assumption that community was in danger of breaking down under the pressures of modernization, particularly rapid industrialization and urbanization. Attention therefore turned to congregations as exemplars of community, as ‘intermediate institutions’ whose health was intimately bound up with that of civil society, and as places where claims about the breakdown or survival of community could be tested. These were the first ‘extrinsic’ studies of congregations. Their motive was to understand and help preserve healthy human community.

This communitarian agenda was shared by two superficially very different sorts of congregational study. The first, mainly secular, took place under the auspices of ‘community studies’. In the UK the Institute of Community Studies was established in 1953 (Willmott, 1985). Its methods were informed by anthropology and sociology, but its aim was to influence public policy. It was influenced by the politics of the ‘post-war consensus’ and the establishment of the British welfare state. Studies associated with this movement typically took a town or suburb as a focus and engaged in intensive (usually team-based) research in that locale over a number of years. The better-known studies include Williams (1956), Young and Willmott (1957) and Stacey (1960). Their aim was to build up what would now be called a ‘thick’ description of the community, and to assess the impact of social change. Study of religion – almost exclusively of Christian churches and chapels – was often an integral part of the task. The primary interest was not congregational life per se, but the role and place of congregations within the wider community. (While such studies have a great deal in common with the American tradition of community studies which perhaps begins with the Lynds’ pioneering portrait of Middletown (1929), the latter sought ‘maximum objectivity’ through the adoption of ‘the approach of the cultural anthropologist’ (p. 3), and did not entirely share the socio-political agenda of later British community studies. It was, in other words, more ‘intrinsic’ than ‘extrinsic’.)

The second, contemporaneous, form of congregational study in the UK also had a left-wing bias, but was Christian rather than secular in origin and motivation. It shared the sense that modern Western society was in danger of becoming atomized and individualistic and that men and women craved a fellowship that was rapidly disappearing, but sought the solution not in public policy but in Christian churches. Here, it was argued, could be found the true community around which society could be re-formed. This was as much a programme as a hypothesis, and its proponents tended to be priests within a broadly Catholic tradition of Christianity (which included Anglo-Catholics from the Anglican Church as well as Roman Catholics).⁴ In the 1950s, a number began to publish studies of their own congregations and initiatives within them. The Abbé Michonneau’s Revolution in a City Parish was translated into English in 1950, and inspired a number of British studies, including Southcott’s The Parish Comes Alive (1956). Southcott quotes with approval Michonneau’s exhortation that ‘every parish [should] strive to make its liturgy splendid and full of meaning … [that] each parish [should] strive to make of itself a real community’ (p. 19), and he documents the attempted implementation of this programme in his (Anglican) parish in Halton, Leeds. While Southcott does not offer a comprehensive congregational study, he describes and records the main services, regular activities, chief organizations and initiatives of his parish. His intention is to inspire other clergy, and thereby spearhead a movement of community renewal both in church and wider society.⁵ Related issues are addressed in Wickham’s Church and People in an Industrial City (1957). Wickham explores how churches may facilitate urban mission by offering an effective response to the fragmentation of community in industrial Sheffield. While again not concerned with congregational specifics – presenting an historical rather than a sociological account – he conceives an ecclesiological agenda which has congregational reform at its centre (Wickham, 1957, p. 225).

From the Roman Catholic side, Ward’s study of a Catholic parish in Liverpool (Ward, 1958; 1961) drew on observation, document analysis and informal interviewing in a more rigorous way than Southcott, reflecting the achievements of the growing field of Roman Catholic sociology in Europe. Ward found parishioners to have a strong individual (‘vertical’) identification with the parish, but weak communal (‘horizontal’) social bonds between one another. This was explained in terms of the ecclesiastical organization of the parish; strong individual relationships between priests and people, fostered particularly by a system of regular parish visiting; and the structure of parish societies formed largely from a small core of parish activists. Ward’s (1958) conclusion draws out a number of points relating the research to contemporary conditions in urban communities and questioning the long-term viability of ‘the parish’ as an organizational unit in these settings. In the USA at the same time, the most significant Roman Catholic congregational study was Fichter’s intensive study of a parish in New Orleans, which drew on detailed factual data concerning the parish, its priests and people and an account of religious attitudes (1951). While the full study was never published, Fichter (1954) contains reflections on various aspects of parish life arising from the study. Both of these works remain influential today.

In the UK the tradition of Roman Catholic sociology has been advanced by Hornsby-Smith. In The Changing Parish (1989) he constructs ideal-types of parish, priest and parishioner for the pre- and post-Vatican II periods in the Church, drawing largely on two previously published studies: one of a traditional parish in the North Midlands studied by Leslie (1986), and one of (his own) parish as described by its former parish priest (O’Sullivan, 1979), in which post-Vatican II liturgical and administrative changes were experienced as positive charismatic renewal. These data are brought together with other academic studies and reports from the USA, Australia, continental Europe and the Philippines to produce a picture of the parish as a focus of conflict between rival models of the Church. More recently Tusting (2000) addresses the role of written text in the construction of identity in a Catholic parish, again proceeding from participant observation in several of the communities which make up a large parish. Her study considers the roles of different types of written text in the construction of community identities. Both the latter studies move away from earlier extrinsic concerns about the health of church and society towards an ‘intrinsic’ desire to understand contemporary Catholic congregations for their own sake.

Church-growth

If the characteristic contribution to the development of congregational studies on the part of British Catholic Christianity was made by community-focused studies, the equivalent contribution from American evangelical Protestantism came from church-growth literature. This too had its origins in the 1950s, and generated an extrinsic form of congregational study. In this case, however, the preoccupation was not with the health of communities, whether local, civic or national, but with the size of congregations and the salvation of souls. The desirability of church growth is axiomatic within the evangelical worldview, with each new individual brought into the church representing another soul brought within the ambit of salvation. Research is therefore focused on investigating the factors which cause growth and decline in order to offer practical guidance on how to maximize church numbers.

Church-growth literature not only originated in the USA, but has always been more influential there than in Europe. Its pioneer was McGavran, who devised the key principles of ‘church-growth’ in his Bridges of God (1955; also McGavran, 1959). Subsequent studies, mostly focusing on churches in the USA, have developed and refined his approach (see, for example, Belew, 1971; Wagner, 1976). As Hopewell recognized, such studies typically assume that congregations may be understood in ‘mechanistic’ terms – as machines which function according to particular rules. While different writers formulate these rules differently – Wimber, for example, develops Wagner’s principles to include the importance of a present-day, charismatic encounter with Christ (Wimber, 1985) – all agree that it is by grasping such rules and adjusting practices accordingly that congregations will grow (for example, Wagner, 1976, p. 159).

Church-growth studies fall into two categories. First, there are those that look at individual congregations in order to discern the empirical evidence on which to base prescriptions for growth. Such evidence, including both attendance levels and attitudinal data, is generally presented in statistical form, offering numerical evidence to support church-growth theories. Second, there are those studies that observe the implementation of church-growth principles by individual churches, and draw conclusions about their efficacy.

The church-growth type of extrinsic study has had a significant but limited impact within the UK. The first church-growth conference was sponsored by the London Bible College in 1978, and Peter Wagner was its guest speaker. The British Church Growt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: The Emerging Field
• 1 Congregational Studies: Taking Stock
• 2 The Rise of Congregational Studies in the USA
• 3 ‘Conference People’: Congregational Studies in a Globalizing World Simon Coleman
• Part Two: Congregations in the UK
• 4 The Effects of Evangelical Renewal on Mainstream Congregational Identities: A Welsh Case Study
• 5 ‘Friendship, Fellowship and Acceptance’: The Public Discourse of a Thriving Evangelical Congregation
• 6 Display and Division: Congregational Conflict among Roman Catholics
• 7 Congregations, Narratives and Identity: A Quaker Case Study Peter Collins
• 8 Congregational Cultures and the Boundaries of Identity Timothy Jenkins
• Part Three: Theoretical and Methodological Issues
• 9 The Messiness of Studying Congregations using Ethnographic Methods
• 10 Are Congregations Associations? The Contribution of Organizational Studies to Congregational Studies Helen Cameron
• 11 Priests, Parish and People: Reconceiving a Relationship
• 12 Denominational Cultures: The Cinderella of Congregational Studies?
• 13 The Significance of Gender for Congregational Studies Kristin Aune
• 14 Putting Congregational Studies to Work: Ethnography, Consultancy and Change
• Index