Abstract
Rebecca Glazier’s Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society explores the vital, if often underappreciated, role that congregations play in their communities. While she provides additional evidence to a consistent finding that congregations are essential resources for direct services and well-being in local communities (Cnaan et al., 2004), her greatest contribution might be in demonstrating how engaging local communities also strengthens congregations, their individual members, and society at large.
This study is timely for multiple reasons. First, Glazier notes that congregations themselves are facing challenges as we see overall declines in religious affiliation, attendance, and membership in the United States post-COVID-19 (Jones, 2021; Pew Research Center, 2025). Second, congregations are seeing evolving trends around giving, volunteering, and other forms of participation. Third, our society is increasingly polarized around cultural, theological, and social issues that may make congregations and their leaders hesitant that any engagement outside their faith communities appears political or partisan. And finally, with significant cuts in federal and state spending, the ability of governmental and nonprofit services to meet immediate and long-term needs is increasingly limited. For all these reasons, Glazier’s focus at the intersection of congregations and community engagement is worth the attention of a broad range of scholars and practitioners whether interested in religion and faith-based organizations, nonprofit practice, public policy, or civil society.
Glazier’s data comes from an almost decade-long study in Little Rock, Arkansas, through the Little Rock Congregations Study (LRCS). With a strong focus on engaging student researchers and congregational leaders in the research itself, Glazier spearheaded three waves of data collection with congregations (2012, 2016, 2020). Through surveys of clergy and congregants, as well as interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, the LCRS research team collected a significant amount of data. Their multi-method approach helps to fill out the analysis and presents findings from different angles with a mix of quantitative and qualitative data that sprinkle illustrations and case studies throughout. Glazier is honest about the limitations of the data as questions across survey waves often differed in response to the pressing issues of the day and the desires expressed by clergy partners. She is also clear on the limits of the representative nature of the sample, noting, for instance, that some types of congregations may have been less willing or able to participate due to questions of trust or bandwidth. Altogether, Glazier’s transparency and self-reflection on the data collection, analysis, and community-engaged nature of the research are themselves a refreshing and worthy contribution.
Throughout, Glazier returns to the key measure of congregational community engagement, which she defines generally as “reaching beyond the membership to serve or connect with the broader community” (p. 10). The survey responses of individual members to questions of political efficacy (how they feel about making a difference) alongside community action (how much they are doing to help) serve to create a community engagement scale (p. 41). Aggregating the individual responses from within each congregation, Glazier can then compare the congregations’ community engagement scales with one another. Additional measures are important too, such as how much time members invest in serving both inside and outside the congregation, as well as multiple other variables such as attendance, theology, finances, and religious practices. With this data, Glazier then begins to paint a picture of a congregation more likely to be engaged in its community. Her finding is that overall, an engaged congregation is a congregation whose members are “more likely to be Black, more educated, younger, less well-off financially, and more liberal.” Members in engaged congregations are also more likely to “report hearing sermons about politics and community topics” and “serve outside their places of worship” (pp. 34–35). The rest of the book then goes deeper to unpack what predicts congregations’ community engagement as well as what that means for their members, the congregation itself, and the larger community.
In Chapter 3, Glazier focuses on what community engagement means for members of congregations. First, however, she introduces a helpful map of the pathways in which an individual may be influenced around community engagement. Of course, there are personal characteristics and the context of the local community to consider, but the congregation itself plays an important role. Within the congregation, cues from clergy leadership, social norms among fellow congregants, as well as the overall congregational culture (including programs, institutional structure, and theology) play an important role. Often overlooked in similar research, Glazier’s attention to congregational culture is a significant contribution that warrants further exploration.
Glazier’s findings illustrate that members who are more likely to be engaged heard sermons about community engagement, were engaged themselves inside their congregation, and more likely to volunteer outside the congregation. Yet, associations across traditional religious variables were more complicated. Higher levels of worship attendance did not lead to higher levels of community engagement; however, higher levels of devotional practices, such as prayer and reading sacred texts, did. What might these findings mean for future studies? First, Glazier’s work demonstrates that despite the thick cultures of congregations, there are clearly blurred lines between what happens inside and outside the walls of a church, synagogue, or mosque. In fact, not only are the lines blurry, but they are often interacting with one another, as engagement both inside and outside the congregation seems to go together. Similarly, while social capital and social norms are important, increased worship attendance itself appears to be less significant than individual or private religious practices. As the larger field has noted the need for additional and distinct measures of public and private religion to make sense of the motivations of giving, volunteering, and advocacy (King et al., 2024; Yeung, 2018), Glazier’s data demonstrates the role both practices play.
In her focus on individuals, Glazier makes clear that community engagement is beneficial for individual members, with correlations to improved physical and spiritual health, increased life satisfaction, and higher levels of political efficacy. In Chapter 4, she shifts from individual members to the congregation as a whole. The challenge is that community engagement is often presented to religious leaders as a choice over scarce resources. Do leaders focus internally on members or externally on the community? Do they invest their attention and resources for greater participation and giving for the health of the institution or for the community in which they are located? Do they attend to spiritual matters over material ones? Glazier’s data convincingly demonstrates that these questions are most often a false dichotomy. Higher levels of community engagement are also associated with greater internal engagement, as evidenced by increased attendance, service, giving, and connection to the congregation. For both individual members and the institutional congregation, the adage appears to be true: by helping others, you are also helping yourself.
In chapter 5, Glazier extends her argument to society at large. While affirming the role that congregations play in direct social services and other charitable contributions, she wants to make a larger point: congregations’ community engagement is essential for democracy. Congregations often hesitate, however, because they fear that this work will be perceived as political, divisive, or secondary to the congregation’s primary mission. While in the field with congregations in 2020, Glazier makes this vividly clear in observing congregations’ debates on how to respond in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In Little Rock, a city with a long history at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement fighting racial injustice, her extended focus on the issues of racial relations and social justice is well worth readers’ attention. In fact, if our neighborhoods and news channels are increasingly echo chambers, Glazier notes that in congregations with greater ideological diversity, individuals are more likely to feel that their voice matters and are more willing to serve. Perhaps ideologically diverse congregations can serve as schools of democracy where we encounter different perspectives and engage one another in meaningful ways.
In Faith and Community, Glazier’s argument is clear. She is quick to raise the significant challenges to congregations’ community engagement but responds by demonstrating how it is ultimately good for members, places of worship, and society at large. As noted throughout this review, scholars of religion, nonprofits, and civil society will find room to extend these general research questions beyond this particular local study. The book’s bibliography demonstrates Glazier’s knowledge of the scholarly literature on religion, politics, congregational studies, and nonprofits, even as the extensive appendices illustrate an openness for fellow researchers to build upon her work. Yet, with an ever-present attentiveness to her subjects as a community-engaged researcher, Glazier’s argument is perhaps even more pronounced to congregations and religious leaders themselves. Leaders need not face a binary choice between the spiritual or material, inside or outside, self-preservation or self-sacrifice. In fact, these questions are often interconnected and mutually beneficial. Viewing these questions through the lens of abundance over scarcity, engaged congregations may not only help themselves, but they may also play an increasingly vital role in the overall health of our communities and society.
