ABSTRACT
Lots of organizations have memberships. A fishing club will have members who pay a subscription and who have the right to elect the committee which manages the club’s affairs. The Automobile Association has members who pay differing amounts for differing levels of service. The board of trustees of a charity has members who manage the charity’s affairs and elect new trustees. In all of these cases membership is clearly defined both in the sense that it carries defined rights and responsibilities and in the sense that it is clear who is a member and who is not. But in religious organizations things are rarely so clear, and in order to discover what membership might mean in a religious organization I shall ask some questions of the research literature and then study two particular organizations: again, the South London Industrial Mission and the Church of England. In relation to the literature, I shall ask what the concept of membership
means when related to congregations, what membership’s characteristics are, what members’ motives for membership might be, and finally whether there is any difference between members and volunteers in religious organizations. First of all: the definition of congregational membership: Bruce (1995: 44)
discusses the way in which different methods of gathering statistics reveal different definitions of membership. Church membership is here defined in terms of church attendance. Ammerman et al. (1997) discusses ‘membership growth’ amongst religious organizations in a context in which it appears that there is some clarity about whether someone is a member – though as the issue is not explicitly addressed it is not clear who is being counted as members of the congregations she is studying and who is not. Penny Edgell Becker posits a variety of congregation types (1999: 195) and offers us material on how congregations behave, but the congregation is understood as a relatively stable body of people which satisfies its members’ needs; there is no discussion of either explicit or implicit criteria for membership. Similarly, Hopewell (1987: 12) defines a congregation as ‘a group that possesses a special name and recognized members who assemble regularly to celebrate a more universally practised worship but who communicate with each other sufficiently to develop intrinsic patterns of conduct, outlook, and story’. Again, there is no discussion of the definition of ‘member’. The most thorough definition of membership I have found is in Cnaan (2002). The dilemma is well presented, for example: Should children of members be counted as members? Should attenders or just communicants be counted? These options are then offered:
1 all on official rolls 2 active members (attending once a month) 3 active non-members (that is, those who don’t fulfil religious membership
criteria but who attend), and 4 average attendance at non-holiday services.
