Focus inwards to reach out

Hat-tip to Matt Weinberg of the Baha’i Internet Agency for this interesting piece.

Fellowship may spawn community involvement
Saturday, March 03, 2007
By Matt Vande Bunte

GRAND RAPIDS — The best way to reach out is to focus inward, according to a scholar who studies the civic role of religious congregations.

Churches, synagogues and mosques impact society less by adopting a “changing-the-world kind of agenda” than by concentrating on their primary spiritual purpose, Nancy Ammerman said this week at Calvin College.

“Doing good in the world depends, ironically, on congregations willing to spend most of their energy on worship, religious education and fellowship,” said Ammerman, professor of sociology of religion at Boston University’s School of Theology. “Congregations that don’t tend to their internal well-being end up running out of gas.”

Ammerman spoke as a guest of the Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics. Her research, based on a sample of the 300,000-plus congregations nationwide that provide a point of community engagement for about half of Americans, is published in “Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners.”

Ammerman said fellowship spawns “a broad and busy range of activities,” such as committee meetings and fundraising campaigns that ultimately
benefit the public good by inspiring people to volunteer and develop civic leadership skills.

Ammerman said congregations function as a “kind of first-response social service agency,” meeting the needs of members, and provide “person power” to a variety of religious and secular nonprofit organizations and government agencies, such as schools.

“Just going about what congregations think they ought to be doing builds a kind of infrastructure that’s critical to the larger community,” she said. “The more they participate in their congregation, the more likely that initial leap into volunteering is going to happen.”

It seems to me that there is something for Baha’is to reflect on here (and people of other faiths). And it provides a practical answer to those secularists who would like to push religion off the public square. Faith communities provide a huge amount of social service not only in the US but also here in the UK. For example, if the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish community were to withdraw from providing education, our educational system would be in terrible trouble.

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