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ix After pioneering research by H. Paul Douglass in the 1920s and 1930s, the questions surrounding what congregations do and how they are related to the larger society faded from view for half a century.1 Social scientists were preoccupied with the notion that religion was a dying force, a story line interrupted only by macro social forces like the civil rights movement, not by the ordinary religious lives carried on in local communities. Local communities of faith were simply not on the radar screen, either of sociologists or of denominational leaders. The religious heroes of the day were theologians (such as the Niebuhrs) and movement leaders (like Martin Luther King, Jr.). If religion changed the world–or was changed by the world–the changes would involve seismic cultural shifts, not alterations in local landscapes. When a small group of sociologists and church leaders met at the Lilly Endowment in the early 1980s, the notion of studying congregations was something of a dare.2 Would anyone pay attention? But an informal group, known as the Congregational Studies Project Team, emerged, and it produced The Handbook for Congregational Studies in 1986.3 The Handbook struck a responsive chord, and attention to congregations began to gather momentum in both seminaries and among social scientists. One of the key analytical moves advocated by the Handbook’s authors was attention to what they called “context.” They spoke of congregations as in a constant state of flux. “The sources of change are primarily environmental, forcing the religious institution to adjust to what is going on around it,” they wrote (p. 48). As the team was steeped in an activist liberal Protestant tradition, the well-being of society was a critical concern, and the embodiment of the gospel in human cultures was taken for granted. By the early 1990s, it was not just liberal Protestants doing the studying or being studied. My own earliest work had focused on American FundamenForeword Nancy T. Ammerman Foreword x talism through the lens of life in a local congregation,4 but Peter Berger had challenged me to devise a plan for studying key social trends affecting American religion. My answer was that we should look at local communities where those trends were especially visible and examine the work of the congregations in those communities. The resulting book, Congregation and Community, was among the first attempts to provide a systematic mapping of the relationships between religious institutions and their geographic locations.5 While the project started with assumptions about how those institutions were shaped by changing local communities, the reality on the ground pushed toward a different, more interactive perspective. As the work on that project moved forward, I joined the Congregational Studies Project Team, and the team as a whole was at work on a revision of the Handbook. Rather than seeing congregations as situated in a “context,” we began to talk about them in an ecological framework, looking for the ways in which congregations competed for resources (such as people, money, space) and established themselves as legitimate, mutually dependent participants in the environment, with the necessary habits for surviving. We also noted the particular symbioses that sometimes created niches in which a particular, specialized way of relating to the population could thrive. Indeed, one of the most important findings of Congregation and Community was that congregations need not be local at all. Some respond to the loss of a symbiotic relationship with their immediate neighborhood by establishing a niche identity sufficiently strong to draw members and resources from a broad geographic area. The Congregation and Community research team, spread out in communities across the country, spawned a rich next generation of work that expanded what we know about the ecological world of congregations. Art Farnsley went on to direct a series of projects in Indianapolis in which the civic contributions and social services of congregations were a special focus.6 Nancy Eiesland widened the urban lens to include the exurbs, writing about the way rural and urban sensibilities intermingled in the congregations of the “particular place” of Dacula, Georgia.7 She drew our attention especially to the way congregations are lodged in shifting networks of people and institutions. Beyond that core group, Omar McRoberts was completing a Harvard dissertation that would become Streets of Glory, and he would insist that we take seriously the theological differences that shape congregational responses to the urban realities of “the street.”8 Each of these (and a growing cadre of others) expanded both...

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