Faith-Based Organizations

A faith-based organization is an organization, the main purpose of which is not religion, but which is related in some way to a religious organization or tradition. Faith-based organizations thus lie between religious organizations and secular organizations. This means that much which has been said about religious organizations will be applicable to faith-based organizations, and that much which has been said about voluntary organizations, commercial organizations and public agencies will also be of relevance. The term ‘faith-based organization’ covers an enormously varied field: tiny

community development and youth projects run by volunteers from a congregation with the help of a single paid worker; church schools; denomination-founded housing associations; large non-governmental organizations such as Christian Aid, CAFOD, the Red Cross, and the Red Crescent; Jewish elderly care homes; the Children’s Society and NCH (founded by the Church of England and the Methodist Church respectively) – and thousands more. They were all differently founded (often by a group of individuals who were members of a particular denomination, more rarely by representative structures of the denomination itself); they have diverse purposes; they relate in different ways to religious traditions and to religious organizations; some are membership organizations, some are service organizations, and some are selfhelp groups (Blau et al. 1996; Davidson and Koch 1998); and they all relate to different secular organizations. Recent research in the USA has shown just how broad the spectrum of faith-

based organizations is. Sider and Unruh (2004) suggest that there are five types of faith-based organization (though they recognize that the categories are points along a spectrum and that many organizations fall between the categories):

1 Faith-permeated 2 Faith-centred 3 Faith-affiliated 4 Faith-background 5 Faith-secular partnership.