The Danish Folk Church has a special constitutional status as the national church of Denmark. The domestic church activities are largely financed through a special income-dependent church tax (levy) paid by the members of the Danish Folk Church. By 1 January 2017 about 76 per cent of the Danish population were members (StatBank Denmark). It is, therefore, unfamiliar to most Danes to finance church life by direct contributions from the congregation. However, this becomes an issue for Danish emigrants when they seek religious services in one of the about 50 Danish churches and congregations abroad (Warburg 2012). The emigrants are here encountered with the fact that the Danish churches abroad by and large must operate on market conditions. However, as will be shown in this article, important limitations to the market thinking are also prevailing among the expatriates participating in fund-raising activities for the church.
The legal and organisational position of the Danish churches abroad
A Danish church abroad is an independent legal entity in the host country managed by a board of trustees, usually called the church committee. The church committee is responsible for all practical affairs of the church, except when it comes to the position of the pastor. The decision to fill a vacant position is taken – in conjunction with the church committee – by the umbrella organisation of the church, the Danish Church Abroad/Danish Seamen’s Church. In theological matters, the pastor is supervised by one of the bishops of the Danish Folk Church (Warburg 2012). The Danish state is also more directly involved in many of the Danish churches abroad; for example, in the Danish churches in Berlin, Brussels, London, New York, Paris and Singapore, the local Danish embassy or consulate is or has been represented in the church committee (Warburg 2012). Conversely, a pastor in the Danish churches abroad sometimes serves as social attaché at the embassy and enjoys diplomatic status.
The Danish churches abroad are also in other contexts more than providers of Evangelical-Lutheran Sunday services and pastoral care for the religiously active expatriate Danes who are members of the church. My studies of the Danish churches abroad have demonstrated that they resemble other immigrant religious institutions by playing a much wider role as social and cultural centres for the local Danish immigrant communities (Warburg 2013). Not the least because of its tight connection with the Danish state, a Danish church abroad offers a professional, blue-stamped organisational frame for the expatriate Danish community life.
The number-one resource mobilisation event: the Christmas fair
Although the Danish churches abroad receive some state support in varying degree, a substantial part of their expenses must be covered by private means. This exposes the churches to market conditions to a degree unparalleled to the conditions facing any ordinary parish church in Denmark. Such a challenge forces the Danish churches abroad to engage in systematic resource mobilisation activities in order to acquire the means for upholding congregational life.
Among the most important income-generating activities are the traditional Christmas fairs arranged by many of the Danish churches abroad (Jacobsen and Warburg 2013). The Christmas fairs mobilise and attract a wider circle of Danish expatriates than any other church activity. In fact, in most Danish churches abroad the Christmas fair is advertised as the highlight of the year and the most important yearly event in the church:
The Christmas fair is the biggest event in Frederikskirken [The Danish church in Paris]. With stalls abounding with pork roast [flæskesteg], pixies [nisser] and doughnuts [æbleskiver] there is a genuine Danish Yuletide spirit for every penny. (www.frederikskirkenparis.dk. Accessed 10 October 2014. Translated from the Danish)
The Christmas fair is the biggest event in the church [in Rotterdam], and it is the only thing that people talk about all the year round. It has great social significance for all the volunteers, but for the church it also contributes to secure the economy. (Nyt fra danske sømands- og udlandskirker, no. 4: 15 November 2013. Translated from the Danish)
The Christmas fairs in Danish churches abroad are shaped over the same traditional mould wherever they are held, and in many big cities, the Danish congregations have successfully organised profitable Christmas fairs for decades. The second quotation above indicates that arranging a Christmas fair is not just a way of providing important income to the church – apparently, this form of resource mobilisation has a sustainable resonance among the volunteers, and it has positive social implications for the congregation and for the local expatriate community. To investigate this assumption, the present paper analyses in more detail the mobilisation of resources at a number of Christmas fairs in Danish churches abroad.
An intriguing aspect which arose from my field trips to Christmas fairs in Danish churches abroad was that many of the volunteers whom I interviewed definitely declared that they were not interested in the Sunday services and never attended them. This leads to the question: Why is it possible for the church to mobilise these non-users to support the church by volunteering at the Christmas fair?
Sources
The present work is part of my study of the Danish churches abroad (Warburg 2012, 2013). The sources were acquired through my field trips to Christmas fairs at three Danish churches in the late autumn 2013 (Berlin) and 2014 (South France and Paris). In addition, the paper draws upon my pilot study of the Christmas fair in Rotterdam in 2010 and from field trips to the Danish churches in Hong Kong, Sydney and Zürich in 2015.
Theory
Resource mobilisation is a traditional and widely applied term among economists who have analysed as diverse issues as improving agriculture in India, why the allied won the Second World War, and devising more effective taxation systems in less-developed countries (Khan 1963; Harrison 1988; Di John 2008). In the study of social movements, the resource mobilisation approach was pioneered by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, and it quickly gained a position in this field as a more satisfactory alternative to earlier theories based on shared discontents among people (McCarthy and Zald 1977; Klandermans 1984; della Porta and Diani 2006, 11–16). The resource mobilisation approach seeks to direct attention to the less conspicuous, but no less significant, economic and organisational aspects of social movements (Gamson 1987; McCarthy and Zald 2001).
The resource mobilisation approach was soon applied in the sociology of religion in order to understand how some new religions were able to accumulate large fortunes through fund-raising among their followers (Bromley and Shupe 1980; Hall 1988). Conversely, resource mobilisation has been applied to argue why other religious movements fail after some time and disintegrate (Balch 2006). In the same vein, the rise and decline of the anti-cult movements in the USA can be linked to their ability of mobilising people and money in a sustainable way (Shupe 2011). It is also commonly proposed that one of the reasons why Muslims in Western Europe has a disproportionate low political influence is that they have not proven the ability to mobilise the resources to effectively promote their causes within the political system. The argument certainly has merit, but it is hardly the sole explanation (Soper and Fetzer 2003; Tatari 2009).
The resource mobilisation approach is pragmatic and seeks to identify and analyse the resources that a group can raise and has at its disposal. These resources are not just pecuniary in nature; apart from the members’ money, a voluntary organisation such as a congregation in a Danish church abroad can also draw upon the members’ willingness to invest their time in congregational life, and when financial resources are scant, paid labour may to a certain extent be substituted with voluntary labour. Not all kind of labour is equally useful, however; inexperienced volunteers working for Christmas fairs cannot, for example, take responsibility for decisions on purchasing goods for sale, for accountancy, or for organising and supervising the preparation of food to be served. In a resource mobilisation analysis, it is, therefore, often necessary to distinguish between the human resources of specialists, including leaders, and the unspecialised supporters (Jenkins 1983). This is well known among the religious organisations themselves; for example, a practical handbook of church fund-raising written by a Baptist pastor from Houston spells this issue out: ‘The number one priority in your church budget should be quality staff’ (Bisagno 2002, 9).
Critics of the resource mobilisation approach have targeted its inherent assumption of rationality, stating that the resource mobilisation approach overdoes the rationality of collective action (della Porta and Diani 2006, 14–16). Factors such as ideology, group solidarity and individual expectations as to the value and effect of participating or not cannot be overlooked (Klandermans 1984; Buechler 1993). However, there is a big step from questioning individual cost–benefit considerations to assuming that religious organisations, including the Danish churches abroad, in general, do not act rationally in their mobilisation and management of resources.
In my earlier study of the Baha’i religion (Warburg 2006), I have found it analytically rewarding to combine a resource mobilisation analysis with the use of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Warburg 2006, 374–376). A few introductory comments are needed though (see also Warburg 2006, 111–118 for a more detailed discussion of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft).
The concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were originally proposed by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1970, 1974). Unfortunately, in much of the literature referring to Tönnies, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft has been seen primarily as an evolutionist historical transformation of human relations from the rural close community to the modern impersonal society, not as the general and time-independent ideal types, which they ultimately were meant to be (Tönnies 1931; Heberle 1973; Schachinger 1991). The evolutionist understanding of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be traced both to ambiguities in Tönnies’ early writings and to Émile Durkheim’s biased reading of Tönnies, and it has been perpetuated in later literature (Tribe 2004).
However, by reading Tönnies carefully it is clear that he goes beyond an idealisation of European societal development and conceives of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as general ideal types (Normalbegriffe, Tönnies 1931; Heberle 1973; Schachinger 1991). The paired concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft must thus be seen as ideal types of structural relations between people within a given social entity (a business, a religious group, a nation, etc.) (Tönnies 1931; Heberle 1973).
Gemeinschaft relations are unspecific and rest on sentiments of kinship, neighbourhood and friendship; Gesellschaft relations are limited and specified and are based on rationality and calculation (Tönnies 1931; Heberle 1973). This, however, should not lead to mistaking Gemeinschaft with informal groups and Gesellschaft with formal groups (Cahnman 1973). Nor is Gemeinschaft the characteristic social order of the village, and Gesellschaft that of the city – a misconception that can be traced to influential American sociologists, in particular, Talcott Parsons (Schachinger 1991). As Tönnies emphasised: ‘the essence of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is found interwoven in all kinds of associations’ (Tönnies 2001, 17–18). The fact that a group of people know each other well and are bound together by sentiments of loyalty does not exclude that formal rules play a role. On the contrary, Gemeinschaft relations are often best served when people in a group also obey formal rules and where the practical needs of the group are managed in a rational way.
Both activities that strengthen Gemeinschaft and activities that strengthen Gesellschaft are important for any kind of group or community – at least all those based on voluntary participation (Warburg 2006, 374–420). There must be activities that fulfil the members’ expectations of Gemeinschaft – otherwise, they may become disinterested in...
