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Just Faith? A National Survey Connecting Faith and Justice Within the Christian Reformed Church

  • Original Paper
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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Does the call to pursue justice live in the hearts and minds of contemporary Christians? If so, to what extent? In order to address these questions, our research team used a community-based research approach to investigate how Christians in a specific denomination (the Christian Reformed Church in North America) conceptualize the relationship between justice and faith, what priority justice holds in their lives, and the barriers and enablers they identify to pursuing justice. This article reports on the findings of a survey that was distributed to a representative sample of 264 congregational members across Canada. Findings show that understandings of justice from “the pew” are multifaceted even if conceptually vague. Yet justice is clearly understood as being connected to faith even if there is ambiguity as to how it fits into the spectrum of Christian life. There is subsequently a need to assist congregants in translating their awareness of injustice and desire for justice into action. In particular, survey results emphasize the importance of pairing a Christian vision for justice with opportunities to experience exemplars of justice work. Further research could explore the extent to which these on-the-ground perspectives are shared across Christian and other faith traditions, and across world regions.

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Notes

  1. χ2(4, N = 245) = 13.651, p = 0.008.

  2. χ2(4, N = 231) = 11.324, p = 0.023.

  3. χ2(4, N = 232) = 15.940, p = 0.003.

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Acknowledgments

The survey reported in this article was part of a larger study entitled Justice and Faith: Individual Spirituality and Social Responsibility in the Christian Reformed Church in Canada. The project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a two-year Partnership Development Grant and by grants from the following ministries of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA): The Office of Social Justice, World Renew, and Canadian Ministries. The project was led by the Centre for Philosophy, Religion and Social Ethics (CPRSE) at the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), in partnership with the CRCNA and the Centre for Community Based Research (CCBR). The authors would like to thank the project steering committee members for their contributions to the survey design, implementation and analysis (see: www.crcna.org/CanadianMinistries/justice-and-faith-project/about-project for a list of steering committee members and for more details of the project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Community Based Research, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Rich Janzen & Alethea Stobbe

  2. Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Rich Janzen

  3. Christian Reformed Church, Burlington, ON, Canada

    Steve van de Hoef

  4. Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Allyson Carr, Joshua Harris, Ronald A. Kuipers & Hector Acero Ferrer

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  1. Rich Janzen
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  2. Steve van de Hoef
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  3. Alethea Stobbe
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  4. Allyson Carr
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  5. Joshua Harris
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Correspondence to Rich Janzen.

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Janzen, R., van de Hoef, S., Stobbe, A. et al. Just Faith? A National Survey Connecting Faith and Justice Within the Christian Reformed Church. Rev Relig Res 58, 229–247 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-015-0245-y

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