Gallup-ing through the church?

It's a commonplace today for people to be "spiritual" without being "religious". By that, most people seem to mean that they are interested in matters of faith and spirituality, but not interested in membership in an institution. My guess is that institutional membership feels like a burden, an obligation. In any case, the result is a steady downward trend in church membership and participation over the past several decades. Even if there are new members entering a community every year, there also are members dropping out.

A program offered by the Gallup Organization -- source of all those Gallup Polls -- promises to reverse those trends, to make the local churches places where people will really connect with the institution and deepen their faith. The program is outlined in the book, Growing an Engaged Church, by Albert L. Winseman. His main thesis is that, contrary to the old wisdom that belonging follows belief, deep belief and growth in faith actually follows as a result of belonging to a living and lively community.

This makes a certain instinctive sense to a Catholic. Unlike many of the Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Emergant approaches to Christianity of recent years, institutional memberships really matters theologically to Catholics: we are baptized into the Body of Christ, not into an individual relationship. But Winseman notes that engagement means much more than mere membership. He proposes four areas in which congregational engagement can be measured:

• What do I get?
• What do I give?
• Do I belong?
• How can we grow?

These areas, of course, become the basis for a poll which can give statistical measurements of the "health" of a particular congregation. As he puts it,

Measuring engagement, and implementing strategies to improve it, is just like preparing the soil to produce an abundant crop. It is no secret that there are some churches that produce abundant fruit of the Spirit; and there are others that seem as dry as a withered fig tree, bearing no fruit. Increasing engagement in your church is simply employing the latest research and discoveries -- preparing the soil -- so God can produce a bumper crop; it's creating a receptive climate for the work of the Holy Spirit, so God can do great things in your midst.

I have no argument with any of this. Even my parish, which is known in the Archdiocese for being particularly fruitful and lively, recognizes that it is far from being the "good soil" described by our Lord's parable. And I think that the Gallup system does one very good thing that it sets out to do: it tests the soil to see if anything will grow.

Moreover, Winseman suggests three concrete tactics for increasing engagement:

• Clarify the expectations of membership
• Help members discover what they do best
• Create small groups

Again, taking these steps cannot help but improve the relationship between the individual and the institution. The first step alone could solve any number of problems in my parish, where misunderstandings are as rife as anywhere else on the planet.

But what Winseman misses is that it takes more than "good soil" to bear good fruit. In the Gospel parable, as in life, a seed must be sown for a plant to grow. All that the Gallup system really promotes is an atmosphere of strong membership in an institution. It doesn't really provide faith.

Now, as Winseman points out early in his book, faith involves membership in the Church; but membership alone is not a sufficient condition for the growth of faith or of the charity which is faith come to full fruit.

Perhaps this is because faith is not something that can be programmed institutionally. All an institution can do is provide an opportunity for faith, an opportunity for the encounter with Jesus which is the seed of faith. Winseman admits this, but says nothing more about it. He seems to see "preparing the soil" as the only work that we can do, and that everything else is entirely up to God. In short, this approach is entirely about how a particular congregation engages its members, and not at all about why a church seeks to engage anyone.

This is exactly where the seams show. This entire approach to churches is based on a model (called "The Gallup Path") originally designed with business in mind, where the ultimate goal is to increase profit for the company. But a church -- of any faith -- does not exist for the purpose of profit, and its members do not relate to leadership as employees to employer. The goal cannot be assumed, since the content of the goal varies dramatically from one faith to another. Rather, the content of the goal is exactly what divides churches and religions and cultures.

In short, what people are engaged in -- or better, whom they are engaged with -- is at least as important as how they are being engaged, when it comes to religion. And this is something Winseman studiously ignores and even dismisses as not significant.

Now, as I mentioned above, a church can certainly gain from the methods outlined in Growing an Engaged Church. I would simply warn that this book and the Gallup Path is not sufficient in and of itself to bring people to the fullness of life in Christ.