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Research and the Local Church: Why? Where? and Who?

Herb Swanson

Introduction

"Research" is not a word many Christians associate with their local churches. Researchers, they might observe, work in labs and libraries, not in churches. Their research delves into arcane subjects distant from the life of a local congregation. Given the global situation in which churches find themselves today, however, such attitudes about research and local churches require rethinking.

Three aspects of the global landscape, in fact, indicate the importance of rethinking the relationship of research to local churches. First, the Christian faith is currently undergoing a dramatic demographic shift from West to East, from North to South. Christianity is no longer a European religion writ large but a truly global faith centered on Africa, Asia, and South America rather than Europe and North America. This global shift confronts local churches throughout the world with difficult issues and challenges having to do with the rapid growth of the church in some nations and regions and the parallel decline of the church in other nations and regions.

Second, at the same time, the place of religion in social life is apparently changing in much of the world, especially in the West. The church, in nations such as Australia and Britain for example, no longer stands at the center of community life even as mass communications and the Internet are changing the very nature of community itself. Church membership and attendance at worship are declining. Young people are opting out at an alarming rate, even though there are clear indications in Australia and elsewhere that the younger generation retains a high interest in religion as such. It seems that more and more Westerners are taking a "buffet" approach to religion, selecting a variety of values, beliefs, forms, and meaningful texts from several different religious traditions and then assembling these into a meaningful personal faith. Changes in communal life and in the place of

religion in that life, again, confront local churches with serious problems and challenges.

Third, the entire planet has now entered the Information Age. Knowledge is power and wealth. Research, in a multitude of guises and forms, is the key to knowledge. Medical research regularly captures headlines and has lead to a steady lengthening of human life. Agricultural research has played an important role in coping with population growth. Scientific research in an amazing variety of fields reshapes our lives every few years. Marketing research influences the foods we eat, the clothes we purchase, and the style of cars we drive. Professional sports thrive on research into the mass of statistics kept on each team and player. Environmental research is unfolding the magnitude of the global warming crisis now facing the globe. Politicians invest grand sums of money and worry in public opinion polls. Knowledge drives success in all of these and many other fields.

At the nexus of these three global trends is an insight waiting to be discovered and pounced upon, namely that local churches and their denominations have a pressing need to conduct their own research into their current situation and possible futures—whether they be churches in Asia and Africa or in Victoria, Sussex, and Massachusetts. The purpose of this essay is to reflect upon three fundamental questions regarding church based research: Why is it needed? Where should it be done? Who should do it?

Why?

Research, if well done, provides information and insights that offer the prospect of solutions to those challenges now confronting local churches throughout the world. The process is not magical, of course, and researchers do not wield magic wands with which they can wave away every demon. What they do offer is a variety of problem-solving methodologies to address real-life problems in concrete local situations. As is the case with other contemporary social institutions, research offers the church a key way for achieving its ends and strengthening its internal life. The church needs research. It needs researchers to carry out that research.

In actual fact, churches and church agencies already conduct a great deal of research, whether they consider it as such or not. Many churches have, for example,

an amateur historian who collects material on the church's past. Most churches and all organized denominations keep membership records, and not a few churches keep track of attendance statistics. A small but growing number of pastors are conducting local church research projects related to D.Min. studies or other academic programs. In many denominations, churches calling a new pastor must go through a search process that requires self-study on the part of the congregation. Even where local congregations and their pastors engage in research, however, individual research activities are not integrated into a larger, ongoing process. Churches lack intentionality and perseverance in their conduct of research projects, and in many cases do not even realize that they are carrying out research.

Why should local churches throughout the world become more intentional in developing research skills and using those skills for the life of the church? The answer to this question will vary according to local needs and resources, but in general the most basic goal of congregational research is self-understanding leading to a deeper congregational life and more effective congregational ministries. Evaluation. Planning. Action. Reevaluation. The goal is a healthy church, one that is just, loving, and walks in humble companionship with God. A careful study of a congregation's past or the judicious use of a questionnaire gathering member's opinions and attitudes can provide knowledge that contributes to resolving congregational issues and strengthening congregational life.

For example, over the last ten years members of a church in northern Thailand have been seriously split over whether or not to build a new church building. One faction wanted to tear down the old building and put up a new one. The other faction wanted to repair and preserve the current structure. The pastor was not willing to have the matter discussed openly as he feared a damaging split would inevitably take place. Finally, he decided to distribute a questionnaire on the matter. In this way, he reasoned, he could raise the issue and seek to resolve it while avoiding a public confrontation. Working with a committee composed of both factions, he produced a questionnaire, distributed it, and collated the results. It became clear that opposition to tearing down the church did not prohibit a major renovation of the current building, a renovation that would mollify those who wanted to build a new building. This

pastor and church used a rather simple research process, thus, to resolve a difficult, potentially divisive real-life issue facing the congregation.

The lay moderator of another northern Thai church addressed low worship attendance in his congregation by collecting statistics on worship attendance, tracking over a period of months those who attended and did not attend worship. He shared the results of his research with the church council, which decided that it would visit every low attending member to see why they weren't attending worship. The result was increased attendance and giving.

Church-based research, in sum, offers one means for strengthening local church life and ministry.

Where?

On first blush, it seems unnecessary to discuss the locus of church research. It appears obvious that the locus of church research is "the church." Further reflection, however, suggests that this obvious answer is also the wrong answer and that church based research must begin, in fact, by dispensing with the very concept of "the church" as being an abstraction that exists only in our thinking. What exists in reality is vast number of local worshipping communities plus the infrastructure of agencies and polities these communities maintain to serve various local ends and needs. It is not "the church," which faces the issues and challenges of the early 21 century world but, rather, this multitude of individual churches in their particular settings.

The individuality of each Christian congregation throughout the world must be emphasized. The author, in the 1970s, pastored a small Presbyterian church in a quiet little community in central Pennsylvania, USA. A Lutheran church stood next door, the properties of the two churches separated only by an old cemetery. In spite of this close geographical proximity in a single community, the two congregations are very different in terms of resources, strengths and weaknesses, styles of worship and ministry, and constituency. They each face a distinct, though at points similar, set of challenges and problems. The author, today, is a member of a small rural congregation in northern Thailand, which belongs to the First District of the Church of Christ in Thailand. Less than two kilometers away is another church belonging to the same district of the same denomination. The two churches were one congregation

from 1880 until 1948. Yet, one is large, the other small. One is situated in an entirely Christian village while the other finds itself in a mixed Buddhist and Christian community. One has several theologically trained members but no pastor. The other has a pastor but no other members with theological training. These two churches face the world with different needs and resources. They live in quite distinct contexts in spite of their geographical and denominational proximity.

It is not "the church," then, that faces a variety of challenges and problems, and it is not "the church" that needs research and researchers. The locus of church research is the hundreds of thousands of churches scattered across the world each located in its unique local context. If correct, the claim that the locus of church research is the churches has far-reaching implications for every aspect of the research process, including the topics researched and the methods used. As we will see below, it has a specific impact on what constitutes effective research and who does such research.

Churches, on the other hand, also share similar situations and contexts. The Anglican Church in Britain is dwindling in numbers, a matter of serious concern to the whole denomination because the majority of its local congregations are, in fact, smaller and more aged than they were decades ago. Research, at the same time, also indicates that a minority of Anglican congregations are growing and have unusually active youth programs. Anglican Church research in Britain, then, must address a problem experienced by many but not all Anglican churches in the UK. Indeed, there are some geographical areas in Britain where most Anglican churches are growing rather than dwindling, so that even the general picture is a complicated one. Groups of churches share certain traits and needs, but, at the end of the day, each church is a unique entity.

It helps to think of each congregation as the center point of a set of concentric circles located in space and time. Each center point stands as its own unique locus. Beyond the individual congregational center, however, lay a number of concentric circles, which overlap with the concentric circles of other churches and, perhaps, local synagogues, mosques, and temples. Take the case of the Wangaratta Baptist Church, Wangaratta, Victoria. It is a unique congregation. Yet, it is also one of several churches located in Wangaratta. It is a member of the Baptist Union of Victoria. It is

an Australian church. It is a Baptist church. It is a lower middle class congregation. Each of these "localities" represents one of the congregation's outer rings, which overlap with those of other churches in Wangaratta, other Baptist churches in Victoria, and other lower middle class congregations in Australia.

The Wangaratta Baptist Church, then, requires research at the levels of its outer concentric rings and at its local, particular level, what we might call "global" and "local" research for convenience. The focus remains on the local church, so that the effectiveness of global church research in the outer rings is measured by the degree to which it is relevant to particular local churches. The Church of Scotland may conduct research into the changing nature of the local parish in contemporary Scotland, for example, but the parish at Nethy Bridge must still decide how immediately the conclusions of that research apply to its particular situation. A Swedish Lutheran bishop who reads the final report of this Church of Scotland project, in fact, may find some enlightening points of similarity with the Swedish Lutheran Church while a Baptist pastor from Edinburgh does not even bother to look at it. An American Presbyterian of Scottish decent will find the whole issue of the research irrelevant to her ecclesiastical experience.

The final test of relevant research into the life of "the church" then is its relevancy to individual congregations. The global must address the local. One can argue that even in such apparently locally remote fields of study as biblical research effective research must address in one way or another the needs of local churches. Eventually, the word studies and detailed form and content analyses of particular passages must be distilled into an understanding of Scripture that provides insights and meaning for pastors, Christian educators, and church members. A Barclay or a Bruggeman must stand at the point of interface between the "global" research of the academics and the needs of local people in their particular situations, mediating the meaning of biblical research to the local churches and individual Christians. In earlier days, Presbyterian denominations throughout the world consciously trained their pastors to be the bridge between academic fields of study and the local church. The pastor's place was in the study, preparing carefully researched sermons for Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.

Ultimately, then, what needs to take place is a great deal of research conducted at the local congregational level and augmented by "global" research located in a variety of the outer concentric circles of local churches.

Who?

The argument that the locus of church based research is the local church raises yet another serious issue regarding who conducts the research. It is clear from the preceding arguments that the goal of church based research is not simply to produce knowledge for the sake of having knowledge. A central motivation, indeed the central motivation, for conducting such research is to assist churches in strengthening their inner lives and their ability to serve God in the world. Effective church based research, then, must be relevant to the actual situations of local churches. Equally to the point, local congregations must also see the relevance of that research to their own situations. This last point needs to be emphasized with particular force. Churches will use research findings to strengthen their inner life and outer witness only as they themselves perceive the usefulness of those findings.

Over the last forty years or so, social scientists have become increasingly aware of the irrelevance of much of their research to the people they research. There almost invariably exists a substantial gap between the researcher and the researched, which frustrates attempts to use social research to solve social problems. This has been the author's own experience as a church based historian who wants to use the study of the churches' pasts to help churches understand and address contemporary problems. The Office of History, Church of Christ in Thailand (founded in 1988) has conducted research into the histories of dozens of local congregations, sometimes devoting as much as three years' to the study of one church. It has produced an extensive literature on local church history in Thailand, led numerous seminars on the subject, and regularly taught courses on Thai church history in two seminaries. All of this activity has not led to direct, effective change in local church life, the reason being that members of the congregations themselves have not participated in the total research process. They did not gain the insights and understanding offered by the study of their own church's history first hand. The Office of History, in short, has failed to translate the considerable knowledge generated by its research into local wisdom.

Social researchers have produced a large literature documenting both this failure to translate social and other forms of research into useable local knowledge and the many attempts to build a bridge between social research and local wisdom. In the course of things, they have invented a new form of social (and historical) research called "participatory action research," or PAR for short. Although described in a variety of ways by different authors, the basic goal of all PAR is to involve local people in the research process to the end that their communities may experience needed changes. A great deal of attention has been given to the use of PAR among minorities and socially disadvantaged groups or communities.

The lesson for church based research from both the academic literature on PAR and the particular experience of the Office of History is that effective church based research cannot simply be focused on local churches. Local people, rather, must have a role in the actual conduct of the research, the rule of thumb (generally but not always applicable) being that the greater the level of participation the more effective the research is likely to be. The ideal situation is one in which a congregation conducts its own research from start to finish. It frames a project based on perceived problems or needs. It prepares the project proposal, decides on the research method(s) to be used, implements the project, interprets the resulting data, and uses the data to address particular needs and problems.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that a segment of the PAR literature gives considerable question to the issue of research and power. When professional researchers conduct their studies in local settings, they exercise power over local people—in the choice of topic, methodology, and use of data. PAR seeks to transfer research power to the local people, to give them "ownership" of the research process so that it will be relevant to them and, to make the point again, seen by them as being relevant to them.

In the context of local church life, the question of the exercise of power plays out in at least two different ways. First, churches are human societies and, like all human societies, political in nature. The questions of the relationship between research and power are just as real in the church as elsewhere. Involving local church members as fully as possible in their own research enhances their ability to take effective control of and responsibility for their own congregational life. Second,

ecclesiastical power also has to do with servanthood, what is theologically known as "equipping the saints" for ministry. The research process can be seen, that is, as a process for empowering local church members for ministry.

The transfer of the research process into the hands of local church members does not mean that professional researchers no longer have a role to play; indeed, that transfer expands and, to an extent, redefines their role. Each church is not an isolated point in space and time. Its outer rings overlap with other churches, as we saw above. Therefore, there continues to be a need for broader, "global" studies and a body of research literature available to local churches relevant to their denominations, nations, and cultures. If local congregations in any numbers, furthermore, do seek to conduct their own research based on local issues and resources, there will be an increased need for professional support in terms of training workshops, manuals, and newsletters or websites.

How?

Let us suppose that the district or presbytery, synod, or diocese of a particular denomination decides that it wants to encourage its churches to conduct their own research into local church issues and challenges. How should it proceed? While the answer to this question depends on a variety of particular factors, and ideal situation might be something like the following scenario:

The synod (to choose one ecclesiastical body) should consider how it can both encourage local projects and provide support for those projects. It would consult with professional researchers regarding methods and skills. It would conduct specific pilot projects in selected churches. It would begin to conduct its own synod-level projects to provide data for local churches, an example for the churches, and experience for its own staff. The synod would want to work with pastors on research methods and the need for research. Pastors, however, should not be encouraged to carry out local projects on their own but, rather, should be taught how to support and encourage congregational research committees. If the synod has its own seminary, it would want to involve seminarians in real-life local projects and teach them relevant research skills. It would also want to conduct workshops, seminars, and consultations on research training, methods, and topics. Ultimately, the synod might want to develop a newsletter or website containing articles and news about research in the various

churches. It would want to encourage an exchange of research experiences and data between congregations. The ultimate goal of the synod would be to encourage each church in the synod to create a local research committee and provide the necessary training for those committees.

While this scenario sounds like "pie in the sky bye and bye," the experience of the Office of History suggests that it is not. As this essay is being written in January 2003, the Office is conducting two local church research projects and about to embark on a third, all of which are aimed at transferring the research process and research skills to local churches. In the two churches where research is underway, the individual projects have taken quite different turns because of local concerns.

The Mae Wae Church, one of the three congregations, is a Karen hill tribe church belonging to District Nineteen of the Church of Christ in Thailand and located in an entirely Christian village, Ban Mae Wae. A congregational research committee, composed of nine members (6 women, 3 men), is carrying out a three-stage study of its own congregational health. In the first stage, the committee conducts research into what constitutes a healthy church in its own context. In the second stage, it studies the actual health of the church in light of stage one. In the final stage, the committee and church governing body jointly select and lead the church in addressing one issue arising from the research. A Karen member of the Office staff is living, off and on, in the community and devoting her time to supporting the committee's research and teaching it the skills it needs to carry out its work. By the end of the first stage, the Mae Wae Church research committee proved itself to be quite competent and even adept in carrying out this process despite the fact that only one committee member has completed a high school education. Committee members are also enthusiastic about the research they are doing and deeply committed to it. The hope is that they will continue to work on relevant projects after the Office of History staff person moves on.

Another member of the Office of History staff, meanwhile, teaches research methods to M.Div. students in one seminary, putting those methods into the context of studying local church ministries—this at the request of the seminary. The Office also conducts annual hot season projects (February to April) utilizing teams of seminary and Bible school students from several institutions to do intensive studies of

local church history and local congregational health. The seminaries and Bible schools strongly support these projects, and most of the students show a serious level of commitment to them. They enjoy the freedom of being their own knowledge producers.

Meanwhile, the Pastoral Care Unit of the C.C.T. approached the Office some three years ago to do a pilot project with pastors on using basic research methods as a tool for pastoral ministry. The Office carried out that project during 2001 and 2002, involving over 30 pastors in a series of training sessions and consultations. The results were mixed but concluded with a long list of suggestions from the pastors themselves on how to better approach such training. It also ended with strong support for conducting more research training workshops for pastors. Meanwhile, the Office of History has been "commissioned" by other C.C.T. agencies to carry out a number of particular research projects including, most recently (2002-2003), a study of the effectiveness of leadership training programs from an historical perspective.

When viewed together, these various research-training activities reveal the potential for a research system operating at the denominational as well as local level. They also reveal something of the commitment of various agencies of the C.C.T. to conduct research focused on local church life and reinforce the idea, stated above, that effective local church research requires more than simply research at the local level, as important as that research is in and of itself. Local research will be most effective when conducted within a larger system of research agencies and approaches.

It should be noted, in closing, that no one research methodology stands as "the best" or the "right" method for conducting church based research. Evaluation research of the type suggested here may well use historical studies, questionnaires, surveys, statistical surveys, small group encounters, and other forms of research—and may well use these forms in various combinations.

Conclusion

Global trends and local realities foster a serious need for local church research. That research will be most effective when it is done by local church members and supported by denominational bodies and professional church based researchers.

While not a cure all, church based research offers local churches an invaluable tool for addressing local issues and strengthening congregational life.