Despite ongoing interest in religious group involvement in community development, only limited research has considered whether the mere existence of a place of worship can be linked to neighborhood well-being. This exploratory study uses a cross-sectional design to examine the relationships between the presence of churches in high-poverty neighborhoods and specific measures of neighborhood stability. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and geographic information system (GIS) software were employed to compare measures of structural permanence, residential tenure, and property valuation from a sample of two types of church (freestanding and storefront) and non-church areas or "clusters." The findings provide limited support for the conclusion that storefront churches, while modest and often regarded as less architecturally significant, may be overlooked contributors to the sort of stable urban space where residential population is preserved and investment maintained.

Economic and social forces have altered the landscape for religious institutions in many postindustrial cities, with potentially serious implications for communities that ostensibly stand to benefit from their presence. In recent decades, changes in neighborhood racial composition and out-migration to distant suburbs have divested many urban communities of once-vibrant social institutions, among them places of worship. This article undertakes an empirical approach to examine the socioeconomic correlates of church closures in neighborhoods in a Midwestern U.S. metropolitan area. Utilizing an index of nine measures of social and economic viability, the study found that the type of congregational closure is significantly related to viability outcomes. In particular, the closure of geographically based congregations and those characterized by bridging social capital were significantly related to declines in neighborhood viability. Theoretical concepts from religious ecology, place attachment, and social capital/civic engagement structure the analysis.

Through interviews with coordinators of faith-based mentoring programs, a statewide study examined publicly funded efforts to widen the involvement of religious groups in welfare service provision. Analysis focused on front-line implementers' ability to function as boundary spanners in a complex, unsettled environment. The study identified three salient factors affecting implementation in this new faith-friendly arena: the employment background of the programcoordinators, the rural or urban setting of the program, and the limitations of a constrained state welfare apparatus. The experiences of these so-called early adopters of charitable choice indicate the scope, strength, and surmountability of institutional barriers confronting implementers.

A growing body of research has begun to describe the variety and pervasiveness of community services offered by religious congregations across the United States. This study investigated the process whereby a congregation forms a new community service entity by tracing patterns in its development from formation through emancipation. Based on a sample of twenty-three spin-off organizations engaged in housing services in three cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis), this exploratory study found that religious congregations provided very limited forms of incubation for new entities. Although the congregations exhibited considerable involvement in governance, their inability to undertake management of daily spin-off operations notably contributed to the eventual separation between parent and organizational offspring.

Attempts to explain the emergence of policy innovation are regularly constrained by the complexities of political processes and the vagaries of social circumstance. Content analysis of media reports has been used routinely to provide an outline of policy change. However, the results of content analysis can be simplistic and lacking in depth of meaning. This study added the use of principal components analysis (PCA) of media text content to more substantively examine the evolution of a policy “sea-change.â€\x9D Both the manifest and latent content of newspaper accounts were analyzed to measure the salience of a public policy innovation that expanded religious group utilization with the 1996 welfare reform act. In addition to tracing variations in the flow of policy deliberation, the analysis more fully captured the character of public discourse that surrounded the adoption of this controversial policy. Unexpected findings from analysis of the accounts included limited concern for Constitutional infringement and no evidence of a regional bias toward increased religious group utilization. Furthermore, principal components analysis of textual structure exhibited patterns of discourse indicative of privatistic (rather than communal) religious response, limited concern with diverse social groups and pronounced reliance on “praise and blameâ€\x9D persuasive strategies. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005