NCJ Number
191626
Date Published
December 2000
Length
44 pages
Annotation
This paper examines religious congregations' social service activities.
Abstract
The paper used data from the National Congregations Study, a 1998 survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,236 religious congregations, to create a portrait of congregations' social service activities. In particular, the paper assesses two claims often made about religion-based social services: religious organizations specialize in holistic service delivery that provides long-term solutions to individuals' problems, and collaborations with secular, especially government, organizations threaten to undermine that distinctively religious approach to social services. The paper observes that congregations are much more likely to participate in or support programs directed at short-term, emergency needs than programs which involve personal and intensive face-to-face interaction or holistic attention to cross-cutting problems. Moreover, collaborating with secular organizations in general, or with government agencies in particular, does not make congregations less likely to engage in more personal and longer-term social service activities. Such collaborations may even encourage the more intensive types of activities some consider to be the distinctive province of religious organizations. Notes, references, tables