Abstract
While sociologists have had a longstanding interest in religious leadership and congregational authority structures, most of the research in this area ignores the fact that many congregational leaders started the congregations they lead. Being in this unique position, founding pastor, likely gives them unusual authority to shape church policy and practice in, as yet, unexamined ways. Using three waves of the National Congregational Study, we examine differences between congregations led by their first (i.e., founding) pastor and congregations led by subsequent pastors hired by or assigned to those congregations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these differences.
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Notes
Certainly, some new congregations are also planted either by denominations or larger, more established, congregations. For example, mainline denominations (e.g., the United Methodist Church) that operate an itinerant system of clerical appointments, may place a new pastor in a congregation the denomination plants. In these cases, broader institutional culture and priorities may shape the kinds of characteristics described here. But given the degree of autonomy enabled by both non-denominational foundings and foundings in those denominations with weak top-down authority structures (e.g., the Assemblies of God, Church of God in Christ, Southern and National Baptists), the possibility, nay likelihood, that a new congregation will be established by an individual with a unique and essentially sovereign vision for what the congregation should be in terms of culture and priorities is high. While we can’t prove with certainty that every founding pastor represented in this analysis is this kind of religion entrepreneur, these dynamics are certainly suggestive that this is the case for most of them.
The only other characteristic studied as consistently as these three (using the NCS) is political engagement (Audette and Weaver 2016; Beyerlein and Chaves 2003; Brown 2006; and Todd and Houston 2012). We chose not to examine the relationship between founder-leadership and this characteristic because, unlike the three we used, the nine variables that might make up a scale are difficult to scale together (e.g., like informal worship) or add up as a continuous variable (e.g., like social service offerings). An analysis of each of the nine variables revealed that founder-led congregations predicted some political engagement (e.g., invitations for government officials to speak) and not others (e.g., invitations for election candidates to speak).
We did an analysis that included all 2500 Protestant congregations. As expected, the findings remained the same (i.e., founders were significant and positive in all three models), but having nearly 1100 congregations in the model who could not possibly fit the primary scope condition (i.e., being led by their founding pastor) skewed the findings towards the “0” on the founders variable. As a result, cultural characteristic such as nondenominational and pentecostal that were relatively rare prior to 1935 (e.g., 95% of pentecostal congregations were founded after the Assemblies of God denomination began in 1914) take on significance disproportionate to their actual presence in the congregational ecology measured by the NCS. We believe a constrained sample comparing only “possibly founded” congregations produces the cleanest analysis of this particular phenomena.
The nineteen possible social services identified in the NCS are: rape and domestic violence, cleaning highways and parks, clothing drives, non-religious education, senior citizens, feeding the hungry, non-specific gender-focused, physical health needs, homelessness, home repair/maintenance, immigration and refugees, jobs, children and youth, incarceration, crime prevention, substance abuse, and housing/utility financial support, and young adults.
These age and income cut-offs are based on the categories used in the NCS. Mean incomes and average ages were not available to us.
Forty-nine percent of nondenominational pastors have bachelors’ degrees while 65% of pastors serving within denominations do.
Social scientists consider a congregation to be “segregated” or “predominately one race” if 80% or more of the congregation is one race. Using NCS data, Chaves and Anderson show that the percentage of people attending congregations in which no ethnic group makes up 80% of more of the regular attendees increased by about 4% between 1998 and 2012. Much of this change is a result of non-White parishioners joining White congregations, not the inverse. There has been no increase in diversity in predominantly Black congregations, for example.
The Assemblies of God is governed by a body of national fellowships led by a chairman. While officially “episcopalian” in its polity, in practice, the Church of God in Christ has an unusual mixture of three polities: an episcopalian bishopric, a presbyterian general assembly, and congregational autonomy (Pitt 2012).
When analyses only include Protestant congregations, some of these worship practices—for example, planned times when people greet each other in service—have become less common in services over time. Others—people calling out amen, applauding, or speaking in tongues—have not changed at all.
Not everything in the bivariate analysis remains significant when we constrain the sample by age. Some of these differences are reduced by longevity (e.g., older founder-led churches are now capable of paying their pastors and those pastors are no longer bivocational). While most of the congregational composition characteristics (e.g., race, education, age) remain significant, social class does not.
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Pitt, R.N., Washington, P. Differences Between Founder-Led and Non-Founder-Led Congregations: A Research Note. Rev Relig Res 62, 67–82 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-019-00390-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-019-00390-1