ABSTRACT
The fundamental religious organization is the congregation, for that is the body of people which gathers for worship, for other religious activities, for mission, and for education in the religious tradition. But ever since Jews, Moslems, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, or adherents of any other religious tradition have travelled from place to place, there have been connections between different congregations within the same religious tradition. The theory has often been that it is the larger unit, made up of several congregations, which is the basic unit: the Diocese, the district, the Church of England, Reform Judaism and so on. But it is not so. Without the Diocese of Southwark and without a Bishop of Southwark there would still be congregations; but without congregations there would be no Diocese and no Bishop (Moore et al. 1986). This is not to say that the larger group is not real in some way: it is. But it is
to say that the larger grouping is a federation of congregations with accompanying umbrella organizations to fulfil functions which it is useful to the congregations to have carried out centrally. Different voluntary organizations have different structures: the corporate, where the local group is a local branch of a national organization, and reliant upon it – as local Scout groups are (they have a certain amount of autonomy, but rules are set nationally); the ‘trade association’, which provides services centrally in a manner more efficiently than could be achieved by each local organization doing it separately; and the indeterminate, where different people have different perceptions of the situation and leadership can only be by persuasion. Similarly, different structures relate to different religious organizations: in the Salvation Army and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the local group is clearly a local branch of a national organization; the Evangelical Alliance is more like a ‘trade association’, as each Evangelical Free Church manages its own affairs entirely; and the Church of England is of a rather ‘indeterminate’ structure, and different people have different perceptions of the situation, Archdeacons sometimes regarding congregations as local branches of a national organization and subject to its commands (I once heard an Archdeacon tell a group of priests to tell the members of their congregations to pay more), and congregations and parochial clergy often regarding the congregation as constituting the Church of England in their parish with the Diocesan office
acting rather like a trade association and providing useful services. To take an example: the liturgy in a parish church on a Sunday morning is created out of an authorized liturgical text (or not), but in every place the way it is done is different. And over appointments, the care of church buildings, and much else, there is a mixture of the national, the Diocesan, and the local. What clergy, churchwardens and congregations are managing are congregations, so to them the Church of England appears as a federation of congregations. What Bishops and Archdeacons are managing are the Diocesan aspects of appointments, changes to buildings, and so on – so to them the organization can appear to be a Diocesan one with local branches. For the purposes of this study, the congregation is the centre of attention;
but this isn’t to say that this is the only way of organizing the study of religious organizations. And, of course, none of this discussion of federations of congregations and
of congregations as the basic religious organization is to deny the pastoral importance of Bishops and the like, or the importance of the theological rationales offered for the larger groupings and their authority-figures. Federations matter, whatever sort they are. One of the problems with categorizing the federations of congregations is
that scholars have not always been careful to distinguish between federations and the congregations which constitute them. Thus Troeltsch distinguished between sects and churches (Troeltsch 1911; Gill 1996) – the former having relatively closed boundaries, firm membership criteria, firm theological beliefs, and high personal commitment amongst those who attend; the latter having more open boundaries, vague membership criteria (as everyone in principle belongs), less firm theological beliefs, and lower personal commitment amongst those who attend (Moberg 1970). (Stanley (1967) describes the difference between sect and church as the difference between ‘involuted’ and ‘involved’ organizations); but Troeltsch doesn’t make it very clear whether the congregation or the federation is in view. If all of the congregations in any federation were similar, this would not matter: but they aren’t. A church (federation) can contain congregations which are sects and congregations which are churches. I shall leave this issue somewhat unresolved, and the reader should assume
that the congregations in church-federations are churches and that the congregations in sect-federations are sects unless the contrary is stated. The issue is somewhat clearer when it comes to Richard Niebuhr’s discussion
of the ‘denomination’ (Niebuhr 1929): a bureaucratic form with some sectarian characteristics and some church characteristics. ‘Denomination’ always refers to the federation and its umbrella functions. Congregations of denominations generally share most of a particular set of characteristics (bureaucratic and democratic decision-making processes, relatively clear membership criteria, rather liberal theological views, and boundaries relatively open to the world),
but some denominational congregations can have church-like characteristics and others can have sect-like characteristics. There are, of course, characteristics which the church, the denomination and
the sect all share: they all have cultural, social and organizational aspects to study (Beckford 1973), but within this generality we find differences: for instance, we find that higher social classes tend to relate to churches (but not necessarily attend them very often), that the middle classes and aspiring working classes gravitate towards denominations (and to churches which are taking on denominational characteristics), and that lower socio-economic classes tend to belong to sects (Cameron 2001); though the larger sect-like congregations of churches and denominations attract the middle classes in considerable numbers. Similarly, in Hinduism, we find higher-caste Hindus belonging to church-like organizations and lower-caste Hindus belonging to sect-like organizations (Hertel 1977). In all three types we find both associational and bureaucratic structures, but with different balances for each: so the sect is predominantly associational, the denomination bureaucratic, and the church an unusual sort of open-boundaried association. Once we have discussed sects, churches and denominations and the ways in
which they behave, we shall briefly mention cults (which allow individual belief-systems at the same time as demanding commitment to the group until a charismatic prophet turns up to demand adherence to an orthodoxy), ‘market’ religious organizations, established sects, and church movements. Bruce (1995) offers a categorization to aid our understanding of the four
major categories. He distinguishes between those religious organizations in which members recognize only their own organization as legitimate (‘uniquely legitimate’) and those in which they recognize other organizations as legitimate (‘pluralistically legitimate’). The outside world will regard a religious organization as either ‘respectable’ or ‘deviant’. He characterizes a ‘church’ as respectable and uniquely legitimate, a denomination as respectable and pluralistically legitimate, a sect as deviant and uniquely legitimate, and a cult as deviant and pluralistically legitimate. This set of characterizations is useful provided we recognize that cults and
sects often seek respectability, that churches and denominations can be temporarily deviant, that churches and sects can legitimize themselves pluralistically, and that denominations and cults can regard themselves as uniquely legitimate (as some black-led, highly bureaucratized Pentecostal federations do).
