What is a Flourishing Congregation in Canada?

What is it about?

How do Canadian congregational and denominational leaders in Catholic, main-line, and conservative Protestant settings perceive and define what constitutes a flourishing congregation? Drawing on interview and focus group data with over one hundred leaders across Canada, we bring to description the perceptions, narra-tives, and experiences that church and denominational leaders hold about flourish-ing congregations. We highlight three central findings: (a) there is a divide between those who believe that flourishing entails numeric growth and those who do not; (b) depending on the Christian tradition in question, there are several partially overlap-ping and conflicting pictures of what constitutes a flourishing congregation, evident in three overarching domains and several subsequent dimensions—organizational ethos (clear self-identity, leadership, innovation, and structure and process), inter-nal factors (discipleship, hospitable community, engaged laity, and diversity), and outward variables (evangelism, neighborhood involvement, and partnership); and (c) supernatural discourse figures into how leaders discuss flourishing congrega-tions over and against secular or human-controlled narratives. We draw on cultural sociology, notably discussions on group boundaries (between Christian traditions, within Christian traditions, and between Christian and non-religious organizations), to describe and explain the similar and dissimilar cultural narratives that Catholic, mainline, and conservative Protestant leaders hold about flourishing congregations. We then encourage social scientists to pay greater attention to how leaders them-selves perceive and define a flourishing congregation, including the narratives and boundaries that contribute to leader constructions of reality.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This article is about pastoral leaders' perceptions, definitions, and experiences of flourishing in their local contexts.This article is timely as it begins to look at dimensions and contexts of flourishing for the church in Canada across the Christian tradition: Roman Catholic, mainline and conservative Protestant.