Introduction: The Study of Religious and Faith-Based Organizations and their Management

In 1995 a conversation took place at the London School of Economics between myself and Dr Margaret Harris, with whom I was studying for the MSc degree in Social Policy. Why were Archdeacons in the Church of England going to Business School to take MBAs? – for religious organizations are not commercial organizations. So where could those managing religious and faith-based organizations go for guidance on how better to manage them? Where could Rabbis and Ministers go to gain a better understanding of their organizations and thus be able to contribute better to their development? For religious organizations are not commercial or public organizations, and even if they are voluntary organizations they are not like most other voluntary organizations. Whether you look at their memberships, their paid servants, their structures, or their values, they are different: they are a category of their own, and a most interesting category because every member of it is unique – there appears to be no religious organization the same as any other. And then there are those organizations which lie between religious organizations and secular organizations (church schools, housing associations founded by churches, homes for the elderly run by Jewish charities, and so on); and these too seem to have characteristics of their own, and some of those characteristics are recognizable as the characteristics of religious organizations. So it did appear to be rather important that people managing religious organizations should be able to study religious organizations, and not some other sort. The Bishop of Woolwich granted me a month’s study-leave, which I used to

survey the research literature available on the nature and management of religious and faith-based organizations. Dr Harris supervised the project. During that month and subsequently I read several hundred books and articles, and the result was a fairly slim volume, Managing Religious and FaithBased Organisations: A Guide to the Literature, published in 2000 by the University of Aston, at which Dr Harris had by then become Professor of Voluntary Sector Organisation. The volume was slim because, although there is a growing literature on religious organizations, there is relatively little research-based literature directly relevant to the management of religious and faith-based organizations. Following the publication of the bibliography, Colin Rochester, at the

University of Surrey’s Centre for Nonprofit and Voluntary SectorManagement,

invited me to work as an honorary research fellow with the Centre. The aim is a programme of teaching and research on the management of religious and faithbased organizations, and this book is the first product of our collaboration. It is work in progress, and will, we hope, stimulate further research and reflection. It will also form the basis for a course to be taught at the Centre. And it will delineate an emerging new field: the study of religious and faith-based organizations, and their management. (I use the word ‘field’ loosely here, to mean a category of organizations to be

studied, in this case religious and faith-based organizations. Strictly speaking it should be called a subfield, for it is a category within the category of voluntary organizations – which is itself a subfield of the field of organizations. By the end of the book the reader might decide that religious organizations possess a sufficient number of distinctive characteristics for them to count as a field in its own right, and similarly with faith-based organizations.)

The History of Religious Organizations

In prehistory society was simply religious, and the whole community would normally be a religious association. As societies developed more structure the community remained religious: thus in the Hebrew Scriptures Moses’ organization of Israel during their desert wanderings is the organization of a religious organization – but we begin already to see the development of distinctively religious organizations within a wider community in the building of the tabernacle and the establishment of its priesthood. (I here make no judgment on the historical accuracy of the accounts in the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, or on the date of their composition.) This situation persisted right up to the Enlightenment (1650-1750), with the

whole of society normally being regarded as religious, but with specifically religious organizations (particularly the religious orders in the West) representing the religious aspect of society. It was the Enlightenment which changed all that. With the development of

explicitly secular disciplines with no positive relationship with the Church (a process given early momentum by Reformation religious breakaways from the Catholic Church in Europe), and subsequently with the emergence of secular states in France and North America, the sacred and the secular evolved different discourses – and different organizations. Thus churches, synagogues and mosques came to be understood as religious organizations within an essentially secular society, suggesting that there are clear boundaries between the organization and wider society – though, as we shall see when we study the concept of membership in relation to religious organizations, boundaries are frequently by no means clear, suggesting that either the organization is secular as well as religious, that society is religious as well as secular, or both. The

absence of a clear boundary between the sacred and the secular is also suggested by the existence of ‘faith-based organizations’: organizations firmly related to a religious tradition but which do not have religious activity as their primary aim. Such organizations occupy a social space between religious organizations and secular organizations, and deserve a treatment of their own. We are thus left with a complex situation: religious, secular and faith-based

organizations existing in a society more or less secular, with faith-based organizations sharing some of the characteristics of religious organizations and some of the characteristics of secular organizations. The historical process that gave rise to this is depicted in Figure I.1.