Congregations and Social Services: An Update from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study

Abstract

Congregations and other religious organizations are an important part of the social welfare system in the United States. This article uses data from the 2012 National Congregations Study to describe key features of congregational involvement in social service programs and projects. Most congregations (83%), containing 92% of religious service attendees, engage in some social or human service activities intended to help people outside of their congregation. These programs are primarily oriented to food, health, clothing, and housing provision, with less involvement in some of the more intense and long-term interventions such as drug abuse recovery, prison programs, or immigrant services. The median congregation involved in social services spent $1500 per year directly on these programs, and 17% had a staff member who worked on them at least a quarter of the time. Fewer than 2% of congregations received any government financial support of their social service programs and projects within the past year; only 5% had applied for such funding. The typical, and probably most important, way in which congregations pursue social service activity is by providing small groups of volunteers to engage in well-defined and bounded tasks on a periodic basis, most often in collaboration with other congregations and community organizations.

Trends in Addressing Social Needs: A Longitudinal Study of Congregation-Based Service Provision and Political Participation

“…Future research could collect sufficiently large samples of congregations within these less prevalent traditions and conduct similar longitudinal analyses going forward. In contrast, the NCS does contain a sufficiently large number of ethnoracially diverse congregations; however, these congregations were not included in the analysis for important methodological reasons 9 . Within the subset of ethnoracially diverse congregations, there is substantial variation in ethnoracial composition.…”

“…The survey gathered data on the congregations from key informants and its three waves of data collection occurred in 1998 (n = 1234), 2006-2007 (n = 1506), and 2012 (n = 1331). See Mark Chaves and Alison Eagle's [9] article in this volume for a more detailed description of the NCS data.…”

“…Over the past three decades scholars have conducted extensive research on congregation-based service provision [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. These studies indicate that most congregations participate in some type of service-related activity, and the most common activities involve meeting people's immediate needs for food, healthcare, clothing, and shelter.…”

“…These studies indicate that most congregations participate in some type of service-related activity, and the most common activities involve meeting people's immediate needs for food, healthcare, clothing, and shelter. A small percentage of congregations have paid staff members who devote a portion of their work time to service provision; however, most congregations rely solely on volunteers to provide services [9,10]. Because the resource requirements associated with offering social services often exceed a congregation's capacity, many congregations provide services in collaboration with other organizations [7,[11][12][13].…”

“…Because the resource requirements associated with offering social services often exceed a congregation's capacity, many congregations provide services in collaboration with other organizations [7,[11][12][13]. A few congregations receive external funding to support their service provision and a very small percentage receive government funding [1,9]. As part of providing services, some congregations participate in activities such as assessing the needs of their community, promoting opportunities to provide volunteer service, and hosting representatives from social service agencies as guest speakers [10,[14][15][16].…”