Leading congregations, discovering congregational cultures - Cover Story

To speak of "discovering congregational culture may sound a bit presumptuous. After all, religious leaders have been confronting distinctive congregational cultures for centuries. Think of how immigrant congregations fought over changing the liturgy to English, or of the battles that took place when Irish clergy were sent to serve Polish parishes. And we are familiar at another level with the skirmishes that have taken place over church dinners-do we use fine china or paper plates?--and building designs--Gothic or modern? Such clashes are not trivial. Ways of life and basic self-understandings are at stake in such controversies. Clearly, cultural differences have been facts of life in our congregations for as long as we can remember.

In the 1970s, however, a handful of anthropologists and ethnographers began to study local congregations in the way that their colleagues would study remote tribes in Africa or South America. Careful field work, shelves of field notes, and long-term people-watching from close proximity are the hallmarks of this kind of study. The work of these congregational ethnographers has helped undermine a longstanding interpretation of congregational life.

At the heart of the old paradigm, say sociologists of religion like R. Stephen Warner, was a preoccupation with religion's role as a tottering sacred canopy over the whole of American culture. This way of thinking obscured the generative and nurturing role that congregations played at the local or subcultural level. Sociologists and theologians of the stature of Peter Berger, Gibson Winter, Langdon Gilkey and George Webber generalized in the '60s about the bland sameness of American congregations, warning that they had become places of structured irrelevance to social, economic and public life. A massive suburban captivity was homogenizing churches, parishes and synagogues, they said, and these religious institutions were losing their religious substance. According to this perspective, congregations had made a deal with North American culture: churches could have Sunday morning, nice buildings and tax exemption, but they had to stay away from corporate boardrooms, executive suites, smoke-filled rooms and other places central to the nine-to-five world.

A decade later a handful of anthropologists and sociologists began to see something else. They described how congregations built worlds of belief and value of their own, how each fashioned itself out of a particular amalgam of personal stories, denominational heritages, local history and larger cultural events. Their discoveries bring into view the distinctive character of the congregation and challenge us to stop taking these institutions for granted.

These explorations of congregational culture also challenge those who lead these institutions--and those who seek to shape their leaders--to learn to read a new kind of text: a congregation. The discovery of congregational culture poses an interpretive challenge as sizable as that presented by the scriptures themselves. Think of how much we invest in preparing people to read the scriptures. We need to make an equal investment in preparing people to interpret congregational life.

A powerful example of interpreting congregational life is provided by Melvin Williams's exploration of Zion Church in Pittsburgh. (For a complete account, see his Community in a Black Pentecostal Church, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974.) Williams did not turn to sermons or Sunday school curriculum materials to unearth Zion's culture. Instead, he watched what congregation members did. Williams spent two years watching members at worship and at other moments in the church's formal and informal life. These African-Americans had migrated from the South earlier in the 20th century and became day laborers, custodians, maids and busboys--if they landed jobs at all. According to the American status system, they were part of the underclass. But Zion's culture subtly made much more out of them. Williams noticed that their church suppers were full of collard greens and other southern favorites. Those suppers kept memories of old ways of life alive in the face of a city that had no use for them. Details like church supper menus create what anthropologists, following Clifford Geertz, like to call "thick descriptions" of the multilavered and many-textured reality of cultural life.

Zion members also had a distinctive social ritual that occurred every time someone moved--which, in the inner city where rents are gouged, jobs lost and crime is high, was often. Whenever a member moved, the rest of the congregation came to help and to re-create community around the relocated individuals.

The church members also had what Williams called an "alternative status system." In their everyday worlds, Zion members did not count for much. But at Zion everyone had a title. They were "Brother" or "Sister," deacon, nurse, president, treasurer, secretary or teacher. Even their seating patterns at worship reflected their standing in the church; in countless ways they were reminded that they belonged and counted.