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Chapter 3 The Organizational Behavior of the Congregations in Our Study Congregations come in every shape and size. As we discussed in Chapter 1, there is a wide variability in their theological, organizational, ecological , liturgical, and membership characteristics. In that chapter we struggled to find a working definition for the social organization called ‘‘local religious congregation.’’ Here we identify the key organizational characteristics of Philadelphia congregations. The Philadelphia Census of Congregations (PCC) allows us to provide a detailed picture of one city’s congregations. Because our data come from two-thirds of the city’s congregations , they are remarkably representative of those of the entire city. Thus, we can provide a glimpse at how congregations in Philadelphia are structured and compare our findings with some national large-scale samples. This chapter provides an overview of the key characteristics of the congregations in Philadelphia, focusing on the following issues: theological affiliation and religious strictness, frequency of worship and other meetings , years in existence; membership size, member characteristics, annual budget, sources of income, organizational structure, staff, leadership , and relationships with the wider community. In each category, a full review of the data is compared with various sources. Major sources of comparison are two large-scale national studies: (1) a survey of local churches, mosques, and synagogues representing 41 denominations that participated in the coalition known as Faith Communities Today (FACT), which yielded data on more than 14,000 congregations (Dudley and Roozen 2001); and (2) data obtained from Cynthia Woolever, director of the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (CLS), which surveyed 300,000 worshippers in more than 2,000 congregations (see Bruce 2002). We also use a few other sources with lower levels of coverage to assess how the Philadelphia congregations can be compared to congregations elsewhere. Note that each of these studies relied on denominational lists and did not attempt to provide a census of one metropolitan area. The PCC, however, was designed to access all congregations in The Congregations in Our Study 39 Philadelphia. Its findings portray congregations’ organizational behavior in one large American city and beg for a replication other cities to allow us better extrapolation power. Before we turn to the actual findings and their implications, a word of caution is required. We do not presume that one can treat all congregations alike. We provide this overview of Philadelphia’s congregations mostly to show how diverse they are and to emphasize that one cannot approach them collectively and uniformly. Their differences invite us to appreciate their uniqueness and treat them individually and particularly . Theological and Religious Strictness Dudley and Roozen (2001: 18) aptly note that ‘‘With a survey’s aura of scientific objectivity, we may forget that congregations are religious associations and their ultimate source of unity and purpose emanates from their relationship to the transcendent.’’ In the previous chapter we analyzed the denominational affiliation of the congregations in Philadelphia . In this chapter we focus on theological strictness, which we measure, along with the importance of the transcendent, in two key ways. We asked our interviewees to assess first whether their congregation was theologically fundamentalist, conservative, moderate, or liberal, and then whether the majority of members would agree with the statement that the scripture used by their group is the literal and inspired word of God. The emphasis in the second question was on the word literal , as implying greater strictness. More congregations were on the fundamentalist (15.7 percent) and conservative end (39.7 percent) than on the moderate (34.1 percent) and liberal (10.5 percent) end. This finding correlates with the CLS result that 59 percent of congregations were on the conservative side, 29 percent were in the middle, and 11 percent were on the liberal side. Most significant from the PCC data was the fact that the older the congregation , the less likely it was to be theologically fundamentalist. The average year of incorporation of fundamentalist congregations (1958) was more recent, or those congregations were ‘‘younger,’’ than conservative congregations (1943), which in turn were significantly younger than moderate (1928) and liberal congregations (1926). Our data do not allow us to determine if the institutional life course of most congregations follows a pattern from a fundamentalist youth to a more moderate -liberal old age, or whether there is a cohort effect in the first part of the twenty-first century that suggests that people are currently seeking modes of worship which are more fundamentalist. Dudley and Roozen found a...

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