What is it about?
Business is, conventionally, resistant to forming close relationships with churches and religious communities. Churches often lack the flexibility for finding new ways of working with business and other public organizations. However there is an emerging community of hybrid church organizations that use alternative organizational structures to build deep relationships with business organizations and business communities.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
As interest in traditional church institutions wanes in many Western countries and where their response is to turn inward on their own survival there is a clear decline in membership and a loss of public engagement and influence. Where the church is prepared to abandon conventional expectations of membership as engagement and is willing to step out of the church building and into the business working environment on the business community's terms, there is great potential for forging new engagement and new community.
Perspectives
This is one way in which the church can renew itself, by renewing its patterns of engagement and allowing itself to be re-formed by the influence of people and communities that are not attracted by traditional patterns of membership.
Richard Wilson
University of Divinity
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hybrid Organization in the Church: Hybrid Church as a Strategy for Public Engagement, International Journal of Public Theology, December 2021, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15697320-01540019.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
