Saturday, November 23, 2002
Worship, fellowship and contributing to the community are primary areas of activity for religious groups.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
What accounts for success in organized religion?
Why do some places of worship grow while others fail? What makes a congregation strong? The answers aren't found in any Torah, Bible or Koran.
Perhaps it's an energetic pastor's sermons or a new church's programs, drawing on a booming suburb of young families. Maybe it's a congregation's evangelistic intensity or ties to cultural and ethnic traditions. Healthy places of worship typically have such traits.
Ministers and lay leaders, religion scholars and church consultants say head counts, budgets and building sizes can make a difference but aren't the bottom line.
"Our business is bringing people to an understanding and relationship to God," says the Rev. Jim Jake Templin, pastor of Valdasta Baptist Church in Collin County, Texas, where the Sunday service draws "five to 10, depending on everybody's mood. If we have helped or strengthened them, we've done our job."
Primary activities
Some religion scholars break the work and life of a congregation or faith group into three sometimes-overlapping activities: worship, in meeting individual spiritual needs; fellowship, in providing opportunities to contribute, nurture and belong; and mission, in helping society, spreading the word and expanding the flock.
Each group should "determine what constitutes a good religious life," says Nancy Ammerman, a sociology professor at the Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn. And "if a congregation is doing what its own religious commitment calls for it to do, it's successful."
For some, that commitment is mostly about worship, enriching faith, touching individual hearts and souls.
The Islamic Association of Collin County is "working on becoming successful," starting with "enhancement of the spiritual self," says Abdul Hadi Khan, a leader of the 500-member Plano, Texas-based group.
Other goals include preserving local Muslims' cultural identity and reaching out to other faiths and community needs.
"If we achieve all of these, I would say we are successful," he says. "We still have a lot of work to do."
Reaching out
For Baptists and others, one measure of success is the growth in worship attendance and church participation, and reaching out to the "unchurched."
The Bah & aacute;' & iacute; faithful in Dallas are expanding religious study circles and trying to build membership in a community that stresses "unity through diversity," says Kambiz Rafraf, a leader of the 350-member group.
"Success in my eyes is getting more people involved. It's about bringing people closer to the word of God," he says. And for his group, it's coming in small steps. "We are retaining our youth. I'm happy to say that."
The Episcopal Diocese of Texas in the mid-1990s set a goal of more than doubling its numbers in a decade. Average weekly worship attendance increased 16 percent from 1994 to 2001.
Aiding the community
"A church is successful when it has made itself relevant to the community and society," the Right Rev. Claude Payne, bishop of the Houston-based Diocese of Texas, said in an e-mail. That means "looking outward to the community's needs rather than inwardly on maintaining its system," he said.
At Cathedral of Hope Metropolitan Community Church, an almost tenfold growth in attendance during the last 15 years is one sign of success. Yet "the thing I'm most proud of is our generosity and compassion," both within and beyond the congregation, says the Rev. Michael Piazza, senior pastor of the nation's largest predominantly gay and lesbian church.
Its successes, he says, include the more than $1.3 million contributed to local schools, orphanages and the homeless. "Our religion becomes real when you do something for others."
For the Rev. Eduardo Gonzalez, every smile and hug, every act of sympathy and support for others is a sign of success at St. Edward's Catholic Church in Dallas. "We're creating an environment of kindness," he says.
For Hank Hanegraaf, president of the California-based Christian Research Institute, success is "transforming minds" to accept Christian faith as truth.
For John Vaughan, a former Southern Baptist minister and founder of the report Church Growth Today, a successful church is a place where "God can do what he wants to do." And success, he said, is defined in part by "how each congregation uses its limited time, space and resources."
The Rev. Lyle Schaller, a church consultant and retired United Methodist pastor, says some congregations define success at least partly in terms of contentment -- "with each other and the minister."
For Christians, he says, the criteria for success should be biblically based, on such foundations as evangelism, mission work and worship attendance. "We have a substantial and growing number of Protestant churches in the United States that by any number of criteria are successful."
Struggles and closings
But congregations struggle and fail, as they have, for example, in the United Methodist Church, which suffered a net loss of more than 5,000 churches and almost 2.5 million members between 1970 and 2000.
Craig This, the denomination's director of research, says any number of factors are partially to blame for church closings. Almost three-fourths of Methodist churches were built before 1900 and operate in small towns or rural areas. Debt for upkeep on aging buildings is strangling some churches, he says. The pool of potential new members in rural settings is limited.
And some congregations are unwilling to adapt, to welcome new activities and opportunities and the newcomers such offerings might attract.
"Most of the churches that are closing do not want to change," This says. "They want the secure church they knew from years ago."
Half of U.S. congregations typically have 75 or fewer weekly participants, and half of U.S. worshipers attend services at 10 percent of America's churches, according to the 1998 National Congregations Study.
For some faith groups, "growth's not the point," says Dr. David Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
Perhaps their driving force is worship, spiritual growth or letting God work with individual lives. Maybe the mission is first about fellowship or introducing people to Christ or helping the needy. A church may work in several realms or simply offer a shelter from life's storms. It may be content with the status quo. For some, survival is success.
Deciding on purpose
And for any congregation, success can be measured in part by the degree to which it fulfills a self-defined purpose, some religion scholars and church leaders say.
The congregation at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas two years ago reaffirmed a set of core values -- from maintaining a relationship with God to commitments to prayer, religious study and social justice.
The goal, says Rabbi David Stern, was to create a "warm and welcoming community. We try to measure ourselves on whether we are making progress on those values. I wish we were great at it all the time. We're not."
Those values guide programs, planning and budget decisions for the congregation of 2,700 households. But success, Stern says, in the end is singular.
"Religious transformation is helping one heart, one soul, one spirit at a time. ... Connect the members to God, and the other things [attendance, commitment, resources] will flow from that," Roozen says.