That is certainly true in the U.S., where about half of all social capital is religious. About half of all volunteering is religious. About half of all philanthropy is religious. About half of all group memberships are religious. You can’t talk about social capital in the U.S. without talking about religion. Religion is not only a large part of the connectivity, it is also an important motivation for getting people engaged with one another.

Things are quite different in Europe. Everytime I talk about social capital to people in Britain or Sweden or France, and then talk about the role of religion, people start looking at me strangely. Religion is a much smaller part of community life there. And you have to explain to Europeans that you’re not talking about kooks, or the Jim Joneses of the world. Anyway, in the U.S., religion is a source of connectivity. That doesn’t mean it’s always a source of connectivity.

In some circles people assume that involvement in religious communities detaches people from the larger society.

The main conclusion I draw from the data is that, other things being equal, the person who is involved in religious life is also likely to be more involved then his secular counterpart in the life of the community. That is, the people who go to church on Sunday are also the people who are more likely to be active in the PTA and to be giving to the United Way and to be volunteering for soup kitchens in secular settings.

This pattern is actually more true for some denominations than others. Broadly speaking, it’s more true for the mainline Protestant denominations and less true for fundalmentalist congregations. There is some evidence that this pattern has changed as the evangelical movement has expanded in America over the past 20 to 30 years.

How do you account for the remarkable attention given to your article “Bowling Alone” and the book that followed?

It’s because I accidentally stumbled onto a problem that many Americans know about from their own lives. People have a sense that, “Oh, my Mom belonged to Hadassah, but I don’t.” Or they know that their Dad belonged to Rotary, or that their parents went to church, and they know they don’t and they feel a little bad about that. They thought it was just their problem. And then along comes this Harvard professor who says, “It isn’t your problem, it’s our problem.” Suddenly my work was not just an academic study.

You mentioned television as one of the reasons for the decline in civic engagement. Would you make other connections between technology and the cultural change you’ve been mapping?

I wouldn’t say that all technology has the same effect on social connections. The introduction of the telephone, for example, was probably on average an aid to social connectivity, although at the time people were less sure about that. Lots of technological changes don’t have any effect on social networks. However, the one core social change that is directly related to technological innovation in the 20th century has to do with the privatization of our leisure time. By which I mean movies, radio, CDs, television, video games, the Internet and so on.

In 1900, you couldn’t listen to music here in Jaffrey unless you did it in the company of other people. And within ten miles of Jaffrey there were five community bands. None exists anymore. Of course, I can now listen to the finest music in the world in the privacy of my own earphones and not see another person. That fact has a powerful, largely negative effect on social capital. This kind of privatization is not just about our disengagement from public life. It tends to foster disengagement from one another in the private spaces of our homes as well.

The average American now watches four hours of television a day. Most people are watching Friends rather than having friends. That’s unquestionably bad from the point of view of social capital The Internet presents a more complicated story because the Internet is, after all, a network. In principle it could be supporting social networks. It’s way too early to know for sure what it’s doing. A lot depends on whether in practice the Internet turns out to be like a nifty telephone or a nifty television. In our work on Better Together, we discovered that computer based communication contributed most to the building of social capital when it functioned as a supplement to face-to-face communication, not as an alternative to it.

What can be done to reverse the negative trends you’ve identified?

I think there are some large-scale social changes that could have an impact. For example, offering greater flexibility in work hours would help people better balance family, workplace and community obligations. But in general I think this is a problem that requires bottom-up, not top-down, solutions. That’s why Better Together is mainly looking at local developments. In a very real sense, all social capital is local.

In Better Together, one of your case studies highlights two California churches not commonly linked—Saddleback Community Church and All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. What’s significant about those churches?

What they have in common is organizational innovation chiefly in their capacity to act small in important ways. I think that the folks at Saddleback have done a remarkable job of combining three things that don’t normally go together. First, they make very savvy use of marketing. Second, they present a consistent, theologically conservative set of views. They know what they believe. The third element, and in my view the most important, is their very thoughtful approach to building community. This church, with about 30,000 members, focuses on creating face-to-face relationships by forming small groups of eight, ten or 12 people.

At Saddleback, the Sunday service is for attracting seekers. And the threshold for that service is really low. You can be anonymous, and if you want to sit in a place that looks like Starbucks and watch video screens while you sip your coffee or read four newspapers, you can do that.

But once you’re past that threshold, there’s a really steep slope of increasing commitment that’s expected. And it’s not a bait-and-switch strategy. It’s not as if you go in for the Starbucks atmosphere and then are asked to buy all the religious stuff. They’re upfront about what they’re offering, and it’s not religion lite.

But the leaders see the church in terms of the small groups. That’s where the learning goes on, where the serious praying goes on, where the communion goes on. What interests me as a social scientist is this strategy of creating social capital.

In your work you make a distinction between “bonding social capital” (social connections based on affinity) and “bridging social capital” (social connections across genuine differences). How much of these different kinds of social capital did you find in these churches?

One question I’d raise about the Saddleback groups is: How homogenous are they? Are they connecting people who are just like one another or are they connecting people unlike one another? On this point I think All Saints offers a contrast, because its small groups are diverse by design. Whereas at Saddleback the small group will involve, say, all young couples or all young parents, at All Saints the groups will include some gays and some straights, some men and some women, some married and some single, some black and some brown and some white. Those groups have more bridging social capital.

The Saddleback groups are much more durable. And they probably provide a deeper community. They provide a real sense of home when people find themselves in crisis. But if you think about social capital from a broader social perspective, you would conclude that the U.S. needs nothing more than it needs connectivity across lines of class, race and gender—that is, we need more bridging social capital.

Both bonding and bridging social capital are valuable. It’s like vitamins. You need both vitamin A and vitamin C. But it’s harder to build bridging social capital. People just feel more comfortable around people like themselves. The creation of bridging social capital is in a sense an unnatural act.

If you were speaking to a group of pastors about your work on social capital, what thoughts would you want to leave them with?

I would urge them to think about their congregations from the perspective of social capital, and with the realization that we are in a period when America as a whole, and not just the church, needs to build more connections. I wouldn’t have said in the 1950s that the biggest task of pastors is to build connections. Now I would ask them to think about their congregations and their leadership in terms of building social capital especially building bridging social capital.

The next thing I’d say is: Be willing to think outside the box with respect to strategies for building social capital. Not because your crazy, quirky new idea is necessarily going to be a success. It probably won’t be. But the only way we’re going to see progress is by trying lots of creative, innovative ideas. There will be mistakes along the way but they will be excellent mistakes.

There are no quick fixes. Building social capital takes time. It takes a lot of “face time.” But face time is never wasted time. Pastors need to remember this. They need to remind their congregations of this reality.

The last thing I’d say is: When you get a new idea that works let the rest of the country know about it.

Copyright 2004 Christian Century. Reprinted by permission from the February 10, 2004 issue of the Christian Century. Subscriptions: $49/yr. from P.O. Box 378, Mt. Morris, IL 61054 800-208-4097.

Robert K. Moriarty, S.M.

(From time to time small church community members call or write to explore various issues and events of small community life. The e-mail message around which these reflections are written arrived this past fall. It has since occasioned some valuable reflection and convers- ation among members of the department’s advisory board and at a recent meeting of the Alliance parish core teams. A summary of my reflections spurred by this e-mail follows here.)

When this e-mail inquiry appeared on my screen I was immediately struck by the wealth of implications that are involved. A quick note back would not allow a nuanced reply that would address a whole range of issues. A conversation was needed. So, I called Bev Thompson (The names have been changed, of course.) that same day. My initial concern was to communicate my respect for the tension that was involved and to suggest that this one should not be too quickly or too summarily resolved. Off the bat, my basic thought was that there is too much fundamental common ground between what small church communities and the JustFaith program are about for them to find themselves in opposition to one another.

Before we go any further, a few words of explanatory background will be helpful. JustFaith is “a conversion-based process that seeks to integrate personal spirituality and social ministry”. It is centered on a multi-faceted 30-week learning process that aims at “training and forming parishioners to be agents of social transformation”. The book, Gods’ Politics by Jim Wallis is one resource that folks may use for on-going reflection and mutual formation in the JustFaith process. The subtitle of the book, Why the right gets it wrong and the left doesn’t get it, captures the basic tone of the book. It aims to look at contentious social issues in a way that moves beyond mere partisanship. It aims to consider these issues rather in the light of the biblical tradition or from the perspective of God’s politics.

Small church communities, of course have their own structure and identity. They are centered on the experience of ordinary people helping each other to connect life and faith regularly. The elements of belonging, formation in faith, prayer and service (or as the Rite of Christian Initiation would put them: word, community, worship and witness) are the touchstones around which to test the authenticity of a fully-fledged small church community.

My basic message to Bev was – whatever decisions they would be making, and there is more than one way to go in all of this – that the members of the community needed to have a full conversation about all of the values at stake so they all would be enriched and stretched in a mutually encouraging and challenging way. I shared a number of thoughts on a variety of issues that needed to be considered. Since then, having given the e-mail message some more focused attention, I would suggest that there are at least eight key issues that are at stake in this e-mail for Bev’s small Christian community and for any small community.

The importance of how we integrate new members. New members to a small community are jumping on a moving train. The community needs to slow down, pause, so that new members have a chance to get on board. This takes time and attention. Members need to share the history, the story of the community. New and old members need to share their hopes, dreams and expectations of the community. How the small community operates needs to be fully shared, so that newcomers can check that out with their own expectations.

Members of the Spring ‘06 Quest Design Team gathered for review and conversation about their respective weekly units. From left to right: Lilyan Fraher, R.S.M., Jo-Ann Iannotti, O.P., Rich Dalidowitz, Andrée Grafstein, Deacon Julie Marcarelli, Fr. Bob Burbank, Bob Moriarty, S.M., Fr. Bob O’Grady, Pat Piano and Rosemarie Greco, D.W.

The need to acknowledge and deal with conflict. Conflict is uncomfortable, but it is a fact of life and of interpersonal relations. Acknowledging it and dealing with it creatively offers a path to growth and new life. Avoiding it leads to subversion, passive aggression or explosion. Some people think they have to take a nice pill before they go to their small community gathering because, “After all, this is church; people should be nice.” People are different. Each of us sees things from an angle. No one of us has the whole picture. People care deeply about things they care about. We need to listen to and learn from each other and sometimes, we even need to change.

The importance of periodic evaluation. Taking time to assess how the community is doing on a periodic basis serves to surface issues that may need the group’s attention before something becomes really problematic. Evaluation serves to facilitate the deepening of the small community experience. Evaluation needs to take place both at the level of group dynamics (Does everyone have the opportunity to speak? Are people feeling listened to, etc.), and at the level of testing the authenticity of the small church community in terms of its cultivating the four elements of word, community, worship, witness.

The centrality of scripture. Scripture, ordinarily the lectionary readings of the week ahead or the week before the gathering, is the gathering point around which the small church community orients its life. The word of God is the privileged lens through which the members look to find meaning and to give shape to their lives.

Facing the challenge of long term communities. Sometimes long-term communities start taking the experience for granted. Things plateau; they might even get boring. “I know what she’s gonna say even before she speaks.” “He keeps telling the same old stories.” Longer-term communities often need a break in their routine. Scripture may be the primary lens through which the members look at their lives, but some additional new grist for the mill may also be helpful. Reading an article or a book as a supplement to the community’s prime engagement with scripture can offer a helpful spur to stimulate the community. When this is done, it does not replace the scripture, but complements it. Any chosen article, say, on spirituality, the environment, social issues, prayer should be reflected on in a way that connects to the life and faith experience of the members.

The need to balance word, community, worship and witness. The church is not one-dimensional. The authentic small church community can not be either. No community begins with the four elements fully cultivated. Rather over time, they must each be attended to. The small church community is not a prayer group; it is not a bible study; it is not social action group; it is not a support group. All of these elements need to be present and fully developed.

The need to be church both gathered and sent. We have a church because we have a mission. We are called not only to the transformation of individual hearts in coming to know Jesus as Lord; we are called as well to the creation of a world of justice and peace, so that God may be “all in all” in a transformed world. Whether we are speaking of big church or small, we are called to a vital inner and public life. As church we are a people both gathered and sent.

The importance of pastoral facilitator gatherings. The regular gathering of the communities’ pastoral facilitators with the pastor/pastoral staff member offers the ordinary and necessary setting for issues of concern to be shared and reflected on for the encouragement and challenge of the communities. While fully respecting the confidentiality that may be appropriate, the shared reflection of pastoral facilitators and pastoral leadership is meant to be the support communities need in good times and especially in times of difficulty.

Finally, let it be said that Bev’s small church community is still intact. They have not resolved all their issues of concern, but they are engaged in the process of sifting and sorting these eight issues, each of which offers some important contribution to addressing Bev’s presenting concern.