Congregations: How They Work and How They Change

In order to understand how religious organizations should be managed, we need to understand what they are like. The archetypal religious organization is the congregation, so that is where we shall start. The fundamental fact about any congregation is that it exists to worship

God. This poses a difficulty. This book is not a theology book, and it is not about the faith commitments of any particular group. This means that we must take care not to stray into a discussion of the theological presuppositions underlying a congregation’s worship. However, we cannot avoid the fact that a congregation’s purpose is worship, so we shall have to discuss that fact. We shall also discuss other important characteristics of congregations:

their voluntary membership, their diversity, their cultures, their size, their subgroups, their relative autonomy, the ways in which they change as their environment changes, their leadership, the diversity of roles within them, and the conflict which they experience. We shall conclude by asking how the fact that a congregation’s purpose is

worship relates to its other characteristics, and by summing up what we have discovered about how congregations work and how they change.