In Defense of Studying Congregations

In the midst of penning this editorial, I was also working on an encyclopedic article on religious leadership that attempted to distinguish between societal understandings of “religion” and “spirituality.” In my review of various reference works and research articles, spirituality was predominantly painted as the more alluring, even glamorous, concept. In tracing the evolution of this term, Bregman noted that spirituality has moved beyond religion, even as its origins and continuing configurations remain rooted in religion, to constitute a more individualized and universalized “innate potential or capacity or attribute at the center of all persons” (Bregman 2014, p. 16). Religion, on the other hand, has largely been constructed within public consciousness as institutionalized, hierarchical, and focused on adherence to particular dogmas and practices, perhaps akin to what science (rationality) is to religion (non-rationality) in modern/Enlightenment paradigms (Bregman 2014, p. 6).

Such simplified and erroneously dichotomized understandings of these concepts within public imagination have positioned religion and its related histories and contextualizations at the losing end of the spectrum. This includes congregations as “organized group[s] of committed individuals that adhere to and propagate a specific interpretation of explanations of existence based on supernatural assumptions through statements about the nature and workings of the supernatural and about ultimate meaning” (Johnson and Grim 2013, p. 111). Contrary to public imagination, however, “The impulse to congregate is present in virtually all the world’s living religious traditions” (Ammerman et al. 1998, p. 7). Congregational life is on the rise globally, as most of the world’s major religious groups increased in adherents from 2010 to 2020, placing the number of religiously affiliated individuals at over six billion—more than three-fourths of the total world population—as of 2020 (Hackett et al. 2025). Even in the U.S. where organized religion has been on the decline, research reveals that attendance rates within congregations have increased since COVID-19 (Hartford Institute for Religion Research 2025). Regardless of generalizations, congregations—and their leaders—continue to operate as critically important contributors to organized life by serving a variety of individual, communal, and societal purposes and, therefore, are both necessary and worthy of study. In many ways, congregations are extraordinary ordinary organizations of human life. This extraordinary ordinary dynamic manifests in two primary rationales that ground the study of congregations and their leaders.

Firstly, congregations and their leaders are extraordinary subjects of study because they create, sustain, and transform meaning for individuals and communities in ways that are relatively unique among organizations. In other words, congregations and their leaders help make sense of the world and beyond-world in a manner that is qualitatively different from work, social, or other groups due to orientations around the “supernatural” and “ultimate meaning,” as referenced previously by Johnson and Grim (2013, p. 111). Between June 2024 and June 2025 alone, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion—only one among several prominent journals featuring research related to congregations—focused on differences in religious affiliation, religiosity, and/or participation in congregations relative to the following views or practices: COVID-19 (Corcoran et al. 2024; Seto and Ortiz 2024), religious diversity (Fierro et al. 2025; Greenberg et al. 2024), the environment (Ho et al. 2024), science and religion (Lu and Joosse 2024; Noy and O’Brien 2024), morality (Chvaja 2024; Reimer and Watts 2025), LGBTQ rights and abortion (Lefevor et al. 2024), capital punishment (Chuang et al. 2024), racism and anti-racism (Martí 2025; Kalinowski et al. 2024), radical action (Besta et al. 2024), and politics (Campbell et al. 2025; Schnabel 2024).1 Even if congregations may not have been the explicit subject of study in all of these contributions, the articles as a whole demonstrate that factors around religious and/or congregational engagement possess a distinct—though not wholly discernible—role in shaping perspectives and actions, even when accounting for other potentially mediating factors (such as political affiliation, for example).

The extraordinariness of congregations and their leaders as entities worth studying also lies in their impacts on participants’ lives. Drawing upon articles from the same journal and time period, religious affiliation, religiosity, and/or and participation were related with increased overall health (Cranney 2024), emotional wellbeing (Kent et al. 2024), body appreciation (Razmus et al. 2024), and relationship stability (Boulis and Torgler 2024) for individuals and families. Conversely, other studies have revealed the negative impacts that congregations and their leaders have on individuals and families, particularly on minoritized persons (Barnes 2024; Sorrell et al. 2024), often leading to disaffiliation from congregations and traditions (Bok 2025; Erhard 2025).

Again, while many of these articles do not involve data obtained directly from congregations or their leaders—and considering that the correlation between factors does not equate to causation—these studies are largely informed by individuals who have participated, or continue to participate, in congregations. Stated plainly, the locus for religiosity and religious affiliation is the congregation as a foundational social unit of religious life. Even as other types of groups create social and ideological cohesion through meaning making, scholars recognize by and large that “the sociology of contemporary religious behavior is vital to understanding a whole range of other contemporary social and political issues” (Glass 2019, p. 9). Such “religious behavior” is most immediately observed through the context of the congregation. In this manner, congregations offer an extraordinariness in their abilities to pervade—or intertwine with, to use a more positive phrase—the totality of worldviews, expressions, experiences, and activities of human being and doing.

In a more ordinary sense, however, congregations and their leaders are quite similar to other kinds of groups and leaders. This ordinariness is evidenced through two prevailing dynamics. First, like most organizations, congregations and their leaders function as fitting units of study for understanding individual and communal forces within organizational life, including the patterns of organizations themselves and the varying leadership interactions therein. Most broader frameworks developed by leadership, organizational theory, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other scholars beyond the disciplines of religion and theology also apply to congregations and their leaders, even though their area of study usually lies beyond religious contexts. Granted, there is a great deal of overlap between some of these disciplines and religious and theological studies, speaking as a sociologist of religion. For other disciplines, however—such as organizational theory and leadership—greater interdisciplinarity is needed in order to center and draw upon congregations and their leaders as worthy subjects of study. As Tracy et al. observed, “While religion plays such an obvious and prominent role in virtually every society and economy, organization and management theorists have largely ignored it” (Tracey et al. 2014, p. 4). Moreover, while the field of leadership studies has taken care in increasing the study of religion within secular organizations—noting that much of the scholarship in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, the Journal of Religion, Management and Governance, and the Journal of Studies in Religion, Spirituality and Management falls in this category—it has not fully embraced the study of religious leaders themselves as subjects of inquiry. On the whole, these two fields would do well to follow the lead of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others who have sought to study religious leaders both within and beyond congregational contexts and in conversation with the theories and tools of their respective disciplines.

Likewise, but perhaps to a lesser extent, those situated within religion and theology might find avenues for drawing upon the vast body of research related to organizational and leadership studies. Even as the loci of contexts for such research have been secularized businesses and nonprofit organizations, learnings and theories developed in these contexts also possess applicability for congregations and their leaders. Religion and theology journals that draw upon broader organizational and leadership theories and practices are few and far between; however, the Journal of Religious Leadership and the Journal of Applied Christian Leadership are two notable exceptions, along with a few journals that cover the theory and practice of ministry. Such scholarship, when produced and shared with and among congregations and leaders themselves as the subjects of study, possesses the potential to shape processes and practices in religious life and leadership as a whole. Now more than ever, congregations and their leaders need resources that aid self-understandings and that might offer tools for increased organizational functioning. The ordinariness of these entities—in simpler words, their similarities to other types of organizations—should be envisioned as an asset that scholars and practitioners alike might harness toward greater flourishing.

Second, congregations and their leaders are ordinary because they reflect both the range and the possibility of responses to local and global phenomena present in communities and societies at large. In short, they are microcosms of macrocosms, helping us to understand cultural phenomena and how other organizations, leaders, and communities might respond (or not) to societal shifts and events. This ordinariness constitutes the main theme of this Special Issue’s call for proposals, crafted to gather wisdom from congregations and their leaders about how they were responding (or not responding) to the impacts of COVID-19, racialized and/or religious violence and nationalist movements, climate change, globalization, political instability, immigration, demographic shifts around age, ethnicity, and gender, technological advancements, and other phenomena. Even though some articles in this Special Issue examined subjects that seem related only to congregations or religious leaders, they possess implications for organizations, leaders, and communities more broadly. To invoke a stark biblical image, the rain falls “on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45)—meaning that all organizations are impacted by the same “weather” of various phenomena, though often in different ways. To be clear, any research engaged with lived religious communities and leaders can only claim an understanding of that particular context in that particular time and that particular place. Simultaneously, however, study of the particular can reveal that which has relevance for other particulars beyond the singular.

On a practical level, congregations and their leaders are models for how others might respond to cultural phenomena. Congregations function as community hubs, cultivate safety nets, and engage in witness and advocacy on issues of justice, both singularly and in partnership with other entities. To be fair, many of them do so imperfectly or find themselves discussing rather than engaging in such work; yet their deliberations and their attempts deserve attention because others can learn from those activities as well. Within the same set of Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion issues cited above, some articles centered on differences by religious affiliation, religiosity, and/or participation in congregations relative to increased charitable giving and volunteering (Goldner et al. 2025; Taggart and Jensen 2024; Yalley 2025), refugee resettlement (Lee 2024), helping people in poverty (Parsell and Stambe 2024), LGBTQ activism (Wilkins et al. 2024), and racial justice (Glazier et al. 2025). For those of us who have worked with congregations for many years, it is easy to critique these communities for their lack of responsiveness to cultural phenomena; and that critique is an important one. At the same time, it seems that there are at least some congregations that, together with their leaders, are responding—or trying to respond—in ways that are congruent with their contexts, beliefs, and traditions. Several contributions within this Special Issue add to existing scholarship by offering new frameworks, best practices, and practical recommendations, all based on experiences and research with congregations and religious leaders.

In sum, these extraordinary ordinary qualities firmly (re)establish congregations as one of the most important units—if not the most important unit—for the ongoing study of religious life today. Even as spirituality continues to be centralized in public consciousness, religious structures of organizational life tether spiritual discourses to history and tradition, existing, adapting, and even flourishing amidst change and challenge. Beyond journals that focus more directly on congregational research, such as the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Review of Religious Research, additional scholarship is needed in comprehensive publications like Religions. This Special Issue constitutes an attempt to bring into the wider religious discourse a series of articles centering congregations and their leaders, both to highlight emerging trends and to encourage future Special Issues like this one. It is my enduring hope that more scholars recognize the extraordinary ordinariness of these enduring entities and, subsequently, proliferate this journal and others with research on, with, and for congregations and their leaders.