Abstract
Congregations and other religious organizations are an important part of the social welfare system in the United States. This article uses data from the 2012 National Congregations Study to describe key features of congregational involvement in social service programs and projects. Most congregations (83%), containing 92% of religious service attendees, engage in some social or human service activities intended to help people outside of their congregation. These programs are primarily oriented to food, health, clothing, and housing provision, with less involvement in some of the more intense and long-term interventions such as drug abuse recovery, prison programs, or immigrant services. The median congregation involved in social services spent $1500 per year directly on these programs, and 17% had a staff member who worked on them at least a quarter of the time. Fewer than 2% of congregations received any government financial support of their social service programs and projects within the past year; only 5% had applied for such funding. The typical, and probably most important, way in which congregations pursue social service activity is by providing small groups of volunteers to engage in well-defined and bounded tasks on a periodic basis, most often in collaboration with other congregations and community organizations.
Highlights
The most lasting and important legacy of the second Bush administration’s Faith-Based Initiative is the large body of research it inspired about religious organizations’ place in our social welfare system.The Faith-Based Initiative did not change much on the ground
Americans attendProtestant, religious services services attend awork, congregation that is virtually somehowallactive in this(92%)
The $1500 of direct congregational spending on their social service programs, for example, may not include special offerings congregations often gather for specific charitable purposes, the dollar value of their in-kind contributions to community organizations, or the dollar value of staff time in congregations where staff work on social service projects
Summary
The most lasting and important legacy of the second Bush administration’s Faith-Based Initiative is the large body of research it inspired about religious organizations’ place in our social welfare system.The Faith-Based Initiative did not change much on the ground. The most lasting and important legacy of the second Bush administration’s Faith-Based Initiative is the large body of research it inspired about religious organizations’ place in our social welfare system. Religious organizations, including congregations, were an important part of our social welfare system long before the initiative, and they still are. Religious organizations, including congregations, received public funding to support social service activities long before the initiative, and they still do. Religion’s contributions to our social welfare system have not changed much since before the Faith-Based Initiative but, thanks to the research inspired by the initiative, we know much more about these contributions than we did before [1,2,3]. With the fading of the Faith-Based Initiative, it now is clear that the policy debate obscured a fair degree of consensus concerning the basic facts about the extent and limits of congregations’ social service work. We use data from the 2012 National Congregations Study to describe several key features of congregations’ contemporary social service activity
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