Studying the Congregation

The early 2000s saw a burgeoning literature exploring and commending the emergence of ‘new shapes’ or ‘fresh expressions’ of church life (e.g. Bayes and Sledge 2006; Church of England 2004; Croft 2002; Gibbs and Bolger 2006; Moynagh 2001; Ward 2002). These works urge innovatory approaches to the structures and patterns of ecclesial presence and mission in localities and networks. They tend to combine this with relatively conservative expectations about belief, or the content of the faith that undergirds and drives the ecclesiological and missiological patterns being explored. The authors often acknowledge the need for attentiveness to context in order to shape appropriate strategies for mission. However, they rarely extend that attentiveness to the operative beliefs of the practising Christians already in the churches, or the beliefs that may come to be held by new Christians coming in.

To address this deficit in the area of what congregations believe, the advocates of ecclesial renewal and fresh missional thinking would benefit from closer engagement with the discipline of ‘congregational studies’ (see for example Ammerman 1998; Cameron et al. 2005; Guest, Tusting, and Woodhead 2004). Congregational studies not only yield valuable evidence for determining how local churches can more effectively engage missionally with their community context, but also raise important issues about congregational patterns of belief that are often masked by unquestioned assumptions about shared orthodoxy.

Methodologies

Congregational studies have their roots in the emergence during the twentieth century of detailed ethnographic studies of communities, often involving long term participant observation (for a pioneering case study see Lynd and Lynd 1929). While originally developed in America, British contributions to the field began to appear from the 1950s onwards (for example see Stacey 1960; Tunstall 1962). By contrast with classic sociology, as established on the work of such founding fathers as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, these studies were less concerned to advance general theories about the meanings of social institutions and patterns of social development over time at the ‘macro’ level. They were more interested in the customs, interactions, shared value systems and processes of socialization governing the ‘micro’ level of everyday life in very specific communities. Although many such studies were undertaken from a secular perspective, some paid close attention to the role of religious practices, institutions, beliefs and congregations in the communities under scrutiny and some focused particularly upon these (Clark 1982; Moore 1974; Ward 1961; Wickham 1957).

This field of work employs the technique the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has termed ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973). This method prioritizes the recognition of complexity over the drive to produce overarching theories that simplify the analysis, but distance the theorist from the reality of the situation ‘on the ground’ (for a summary of the technique see West, Noble, and Todd 1999, pp. 37ff). A ‘thick description’ requires immersion in the context and much listening, in the attempt to experience the internal movements and patterns of behaviours and relationships ‘from the inside’. This means, as Frances Ward has observed, ‘living with messiness’ (Guest, Tusting, and Woodhead 2004, pp. 125ff). The methods employed might include the examination of artefacts and documents of the community, mapping its history and key moments in it, interviews with individuals and with groups, statistical and attitudinal surveys, neighbourhood walking, keeping a journal, and practical reflection (see Cameron et al. 2005, pp. 26–35).

Practitioners have distinguished between ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ studies (Guest, Tusting, and Woodhead 2004, pp. 2ff). An ‘extrinsic study’ is undertaken with the aims that the research should contribute to some wider benefit. For example, the study of a church congregation may be intended to contribute to the design of a mission strategy. This is common in the USA, where research is often funded by organisations motivated by the desire to promote particular social or religious ends. ‘Intrinsic studies’ are aimed solely at fostering understanding of the community being studied, more or less for its own sake. In Britain the tendency has been towards intrinsic studies, which is one reason why the relevance of congregational studies to mission has been neglected, as the existing body of work has not been seen as ‘useful’ to the churches. This is now beginning to change.

Telling the Church Story

Until comparatively recently, relatively little detailed study was done of ordinary church congregations, as sociologists of religion tended to focus research on more outlandish cults and sects. Pioneering work has included that of Timothy Jenkins (1999), which includes an extremely detailed participant observation of a ‘Whit walk’ in a working class community in Bristol, and analyses the complex threads of belief this major annual event interweaves between church and community.

Perhaps the most influential pioneering study, in what has come to be known as ‘ecclesial ethnography’, was James Hopewell’s Congregation (Hopewell 1987). He starts with an important observation made by the theologian Wade Clark Roof:

Theological doctrines are always filtered through people’s social and cultural experiences. What emerges in a given situation as ‘operant religion’ will differ considerably from the ‘formal religion’ of the historic creeds, and more concern with the former is essential to understanding how belief systems function in people’s daily lives (cited in Hopewell 1987, p. 18, note 3).

What we need to do is to find out what people’s ‘operant religion’ actually is, and this is the subject of Hopewell’s researches documented in Congregation.

Hopewell’s approach is to treat the entire life of a local church as an unfolding story with its setting, characterization and plot. Through participant observation, intensive interviewing and questionnaire testing, he aims to discover how a congregation understands its history and current role. This process is called ‘congregational narrative analysis’. It asks questions of a congregation, such as ‘what is its most characteristic worldview?’, ‘who have been the key players in its story and how they have influenced the congregation’s view of itself?’ and ‘what kind of an outcome is the congregational story expected to have?’

Aspects of formal church doctrine are illuminated as discoveries are made about how people’s telling of their church story reveals what they actually believe, and why. Hopewell found that the story-telling approach was needed after he initially tried to find out people’s fundamental beliefs by direct questioning. He discovered that he was not speaking the language of people’s operational faith, but of religious officialese, the language of the experts. As a result, people tended to give him the answers they thought he was wanting to hear:

When I would ask respondents to describe some theological topic in their working picture of reality, I translated their ongoing portrayal of life into abstract categories … it was a game that I, their theologically trained interviewer, was by reputation better equipped to play than they. They usually answered questions about the nature of God and redemption in an embarrassed, defensive or ingratiating way … In a local church, members participate in religion more readily than they explain it (Hopewell 1987, pp. 68-9, emphasis mine).

Precisely because people are primarily ‘participating in religion’, rather than ‘explaining it’, the relationship to organized doctrine comes out slanted or at an angle rather than directly. It is important to get an understanding of the factors that produce the particular slant on the doctrine which mere credal recitation does not reveal. Everyone recites the same creed, but this doesn’t mean that everyone believes the same things. There is a layer-upon-layer building of a faith identity and the convictions that ground it, from the individual through the relational to the communal. In this way, groups of religious believers engage both with ‘official’ teachings and with their own stories. Through this process, congregations produce the ‘redaction’ of Christian teaching they can then recognise and own as theirs if it is reflected back to them. Hopewell’s work is all about enabling congregations to undertake this voyage of discovery.

A similar approach is found in the work of Edward Farley, who designs a process of ‘ecclesial reflection’: ‘theological judgments are made from a historical faith-community which has a determinate corporate memory carried in a determinate network of symbols’ (Farley 1982). The faith community in question works out its role and identity over time. It does this not simply by adopting a given authoritative package but through the evolving process of its own common life.

Doing Theology Together

It follows from this approach that the development of mission strategies for local churches entails proper attentiveness to the context and to the local church story that yields understanding of the ‘local theology’. It is this which undergirds and interprets the contextual understanding of mission. As Robert Schreiter writes in an influential work, ‘only through trying to catch the sense of a culture holistically and with all its complexity will we be in the position to develop a truly responsive local theology’ (Schreiter 1985, p. 28).

Schreiter suggests that approaches to a church culture must address three key issues. First, how does the culture hang together across all its manifestations, how may it be seen as a whole? (hence, for example, elements of ‘folk religion’ cannot be excluded). Next, what are the forces shaping identity, that which makes ‘us’ who we are? And finally, how does the culture cope with change? In Schreiter’s words, ‘these three are of key importance to local theology because of the very tasks that local theology has most often to undertake in its service to the local community: integration, maintenance of stability, and transformation’ (p. 45).

Local theology requires both ‘inner’ descriptions, the narratives recounted by the people within the cultural setting, also referred to as ‘speaker-oriented’ (i.e. the speakers are the members of the congregation being researched), and ‘outer’ descriptions, offered by the observer from outside, also referred to as ‘hearer-oriented’ (i.e. the researcher is the hearer, or listener):

Inner descriptions provide the sign systems that make up the identity of a people; outer descriptions help with social change and with linkage to the larger reality of the Christian church. Inner descriptions help a community to find its authentic voice. Outer descriptions help it to deal with change and with cross-cultural communications. Speaker-oriented descriptions help it to preserve the integrity of its traditions; hearer-oriented descriptions are necessary to ensure continued intelligibility and liveliness of those traditions (Schreiter, p. 61).

Schreiter’s model offers an approach to missional thinking that draws on both the riches of contextually rooted local church experience and the insights and challenges of the ‘outsider’ perspective. To put it more plainly and concretely, the vision for mission doesn’t just come from the vicar who comes in, nor is it held only by the people who have always been there, but it emerges in the interplay between them. To facilitate this, learning strategies tailored to the needs, aptitudes and cultural styles of local church communities are required. Nicholas Healy offers the approach of ‘ecclesiological ethnography’, which means, simply, ‘writing the church story’ (Healy 2000). It is about church communities learning theology by telling their story and identifying their culture.

Healy borrows the term theodrama from Hans Urs von Balthasar to develop an approach in which every individual and communal Christian story is likened to an ongoing, unfolding play, with God in the role of Director. When groups of Christians are helped to write up their own and their church’s part in the theodrama, learning takes place in a way far removed from the one-way traffic of traditional teaching methods. Within a ‘theodramatic horizon’, as Healy puts it, ‘we receive truth by two means … by the activity of the Spirit, and through our active engagement with views different from our own’. Thus the church cannot simply be thought of as ‘the repository of truth’, where ‘proclamation is limited to instruction, as though there were no real need to move beyond simple telling to engagement and debate’ (pp. 105, 108). In this process the church community comes to an explicit appropriation of truths about its core beliefs, values and cultural styles which have been arrived at over time in a less conscious fashion.

Healy quotes Alasdair MacIntyre to develop this point: over time, ‘the community develops sets of practices and institutions, rules and dispositions, by which its members live out their commitments’. The identity that develops ‘provides the kind of normal everydayness, the taken-for-granted set of ways of thinking and acting that those who are new to the tradition must learn in order to be competent members of its community’ (cited Healy 2000, p.118). The educative process is designed to make the implicit explicit, and so opens the way to critical reflectiveness about it.

At some point in the process, there comes a moment when ‘the penny drops’ or ‘the light dawns’, when people can say, ‘so that’s what’s going on … that’s why we do that … that’s what that bit of our church life means … that’s why this works, and that doesn’t’, and then begin to draw conclusions from this learning. Healy coins the term ‘ecclesial bricolage’ to describe this relationship over time of the local church to its traditions: ‘The practices and institutions, and the beliefs and valuations that together constitute the church’s present identity are the product of past ecclesial bricolage’ (p. 110). The idea of bricolage suggests the assembling of assorted bits and pieces in a creative way.

By this process, churches can construct their own local redaction of Christian faith, culture and praxis. This will take its place within the spectrum of expressions of Christianity in virtue of a whole series of family resemblances. What the local church is, and does, and believes, will be recognisable as authentically Christian, but not identical in every particular with every other church. The weighting given to different elements in the tradition will vary, concerning what is judged to be essential and what is viewed as peripheral. For example, some churches have a central place in their faith identity for the transcendent holiness of God. Others form their identity more distinctively around the intimate closeness of the Holy Spirit, or the Kingdom proclamation of Jesus. As Healy explains:

As Christians come together over the years, they experiment with different ways of thinking and acting. They sift through the resources of the various cultures and subcultures in which their members live, rejecting certain possibilities, modifying, privileging or down-playing others so as to make them serve the tasks of witness and discipleship. They do something similar with the various practices and beliefs of Christianity too, though with considerably less freedom if they are to remain a truly Christian community. Building up a parish’s cultural configuration – we could call it the congregation’s ‘character’- is usually accomplished without much explicit reflection; indeed, such congregational decisions are often made implicitly, by something like a communal taste (p. 181).

In the practice of ‘ecclesiological ethnography’ the congregation identifies this culture and learns from it, with consequences for ministry and mission.

Conclusion

Even though a diffuse cultural presence of Christian faith may still be identified within the society at large, its continuation remains dependent upon the intentional congregational communities that continue to ‘name’ that faith and make it explicit. The ways in which this is done will always include inhabiting the gospel narrative through faithful practice, and enfleshing its meaning for the world through steadfast discipleship of Jesus. But all congregations have a context, a history and a cultural identity that need to be taken seriously before any initiative of renewal, mission project or radical change of leadership can be undertaken. Identifying and affirming this is precisely the task that the methods of congregational studies can help the local church to achieve.

Contemporary initiatives such as Mission Shaped Church and Fresh Expressions have tended to focus on the generation of innovative shapes of church life, but they have not always made sufficient effort to understand the patterns of believing, the dispositions, motivations and personal redactions of gospel and discipleship which are held by the people who will, after all, be the ones to breathe life into those innovative shapes and make them into vehicles of mission. The disciplines of congregational studies pay those people the respect of being taken to be interesting and worthy of detailed exploration. This is of crucial importance in the critical task of shaping Christian discipleship, ministry and mission for tomorrow.

REFERENCES

Ammerman, Nancy Tatom (1998) Studying Congregations: A New Handbook. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Bayes, Paul, and Tim Sledge (2006) Mission-Shaped Parish: Traditional Church in a Changing Context. London: Church House.

Cameron, Helen, P. Richter, D. Davies, and F. Ward (2005) Studying Local Churches: A Handbook. London: SCM.

Church of England (2004) Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context. London: Church House.

Clark, David (1982) Between Pulpit and Pew: Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Croft, Steven J. L. (2002) Transforming Communities: Re-Imagining the Church for the 21st Century. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.

Farley, Edward (1982) Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method. New York: Fortress Press.

Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York,: Basic Books.

Gibbs, Eddie, and R. Bolger (2006) Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. London: SPCK.

Guest, Mathew, Karin Tusting, and Linda Woodhead (2004) Congregational Studies in the Uk: Christianity in a Post-Christian Context. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Healy, Nicholas M. (2000) Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hopewell, James F. (1987) Congregation: Stories and Structures. London: SCM Press.

Jenkins, Timothy (1999) Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Lynd, Robert Staughton, and Helen Merrell Lynd (1929) Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Moore, Robert (1974) Pitmen, Preachers & Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham Mining Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moynagh, Michael (2001) Changing World, Changing Church London: Monarch Books.

Schreiter, Robert J. (1985) Constructing Local Theologies. London: SCM.

Stacey, Margaret (1960) Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury. London: Oxford University Press.

Tunstall, Jeremy. (1962). The Fishermen. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

Ward, Conor Kieran (1961) Priests and People: A Study in the Sociology of Religion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Ward, Pete (2002) Liquid Church. Carlisle: Paternoster Press.

West, Michael, Graham Noble, and Andrew Todd (1999) Living Theology. London: Darton Longman & Todd.

Wickham, Edward Ralph (1957) Church and People in an Industrial City. London: Lutterworth Press.

Note. This is a shorter, revised version of an article previously published in 2009 as ‘Congregational Studies as Resource and Critique for a Mission Shaped Church’, in Anvil, Vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 243–254.