The University of Chicago Martin Marty Center

Sightings

March 19, 2001

New Data on the Old Line

-- Martin E. Marty

Today Sightings has it easy. In a time of free-floating spiritualities,we call your attention to a survey that should be useful to everyone relatedto "organized religion" or "the institutional church." Let the surveyorsdo the sighting, which they do well.

Simply go to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research and you willfind an astonishing assortment of documents. I printed out the major partof the report (it came to 66 pages), but an executive summary is availablefor you busier or less-interested folk.

What's it all about? Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, blessed withsome Lilly Endowment funding, has undertaken "the most inclusive, denominationallysanctioned program of interfaith cooperation" in research. All groups wereinvited; only a few-Jehovah's Witnesses, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod,the Church of God, etc.-chose to sit it out. Otherwise, the call "Y'allcome" was answered by all kinds who came. Over 14,000 local churches respondedto survey questionnaires, and Carl S. Dudley and David A. Roozen, old prosat this, prepared the materials for wide use, use that I hope will be widerafter you've read this.

Much of what the researchers found was unsurprising. If you want a bigcongregation, be sure to be in the suburbs. Though little-bitty churchesdo well on intimate levels, governments had better think again if theyare counting on congregations to take over welfare duties and other socialservices: half the congregations in America have fewer than 100 "regularlyparticipating adults." Over half are in town and country, not city, settings.Everyone worries about attracting the young. Religious institutions aremoving from South to West. "Contemporary worship"-when will someone figureout a better name for it?-pulls in more of the young and new. There's somedumbing down at work: highly educated seminarians in denominations withcreedal heritages attract fewer than do the experimenters and folksy types.

One of the surprises, say Dudley and Roozen: though many social criticsand advisers urge congregations not to try to change the world or to serveup calls to justice and then to act, "congregations with a strong commitmentto social justice and with direct participation in community outreach ministriesare more likely to be growing than other congregations."

The downside of these reports: they can make "growing" seem like thewhole show. Hartford folk don't believe that themselves; they know of manyother dimensions of religious life and are ready to account for them andnudge toward them. But if you ask demographic questions you get demographicanswers, and this new study is very good at what it does.