are religious congregations permanently failing organizations?
The short answer…yes. In a research note published in the latest issue of The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Anderson et al use data from the 2005 longitudinal follow up to the 1998 National Congregations Study (a random sample of religious congregations in the U.S. obtained using the same hypernetwork sampling approach used in the National Organizations Study). They show that out for the original set of congregations in the 1998 NCS, the annual rate of failure is a whopping 1%. This, according to the authors “is among the lowest annual mortality rates ever observed for any type of organization.” To explain this result, they propose that religious congregations may partake of both the characteristics of “minimalist organizations” allowing them to survive on a dime even in turbulent environments. They also note that religious congregations may also be “permanently failing organizations” in Meyer and Zucker’s terms, and “limp along” even under conditions that would make any other type of organization close up shop. Pretty interesting!
I wonder how many of these religious organizations are basically preachers’ living rooms occasionally converted into a church for services? A church has great survival chances if it doesn’t need its own building, employees, etc.
brayden
May 28, 2008 at 5:36 pm
They do have data on number of staff and whether the church owns their own building. Accordingly, the few ones that fail are less likely to own their own space and are less likely to have a large number of staff. However, what really appears to differentiate the failures from the drag along is simply discord: the ones that failed are almost twice as likely to have had a recent meeting which ended in disagreement.
Omar
May 28, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Why then can survive (low overhead) is different from why they do survive. There are zillions of small low-overhead associations that simply disappear because people lose interest in whatever motivated the group to form in the first place. I note that social movement organizations had the highest annual rates of disbanding. It is small churches that mostly disband; there is huge organizational inertia in a large church, especially if it is part of a denominational structure. I suspect that a lot of the persistence is that a congregation (especially a smaller one) entails the creation of primary ties that cross-cut one’s whole life, as opposed to more narrow-purpose secondary associations. Churches collect money and do something with it — either support the minister or give it to the poor — and have a diffuse reason for existence, while the purposes of other organizations are much narrower.
I think there is also a persistence bias built in to the initial sample selection. Churches that fail are more likely to be newly-established ones. A lot of the churches that failed by 2005 did not exist in 1998. And the more recently-established ones were less likely to be in the sample than the longer-established churches. The table says that the median age of the disbanded churches is 70 (vs 76 for non-disbanded). That seems incredibly high to me. I wonder if the 1998 sample is biased by the exclusion of all the churches they could not find in 1998?
“If congregations’ physical structures were located and occupied, we took this as
confirmation of activity.” They don’t say that the same congregation name was on the building; should we assume that? I guess probably yes? The Dutch Reform church in my neighborhood disbanded and the building is now occupied by the Korean Presbyterian Church.
olderwoman
May 28, 2008 at 8:18 pm
The heading of this blog entry is a bit misleading, don’t you think? The main point of the article is that religious organizations have a low rate of failure relative to other organizations. Its odd that you answer the heading question in the affirmative when the the “permanently failing” idea was offered as only one possibility.
Jacob F
May 30, 2008 at 4:33 pm
“To explain this result, they propose that religious congregations may partake of both the characteristics of “minimalist organizations” allowing them to survive on a dime even in turbulent environments. They also note that religious congregations may also be “permanently failing organizations” in Meyer and Zucker’s terms, and “limp along” even under conditions that would make any other type of organization close up shop.”
Is this thing on?
Omar
May 30, 2008 at 6:10 pm