Faculty and students at UA Little Rock have been studying religion and community engagement through the Little Rock Congregations Study since 2012. In that time, we have learned a lot about faith and service in our city! We have learned that when congregations serve the community, it creates a culture of service that also leads members to serve in their own places of worship. We have learned that growing congregations are significantly more likely to be led by clergy who are engaged in the community. And when we brought over 50 religious leaders together last year to talk about the biggest problems facing our city, we learned that they would like to see more opportunities for collaboration with each other and with nonprofits.
Members from Fellowship and Saint Mark Baptist Church work together to serve the community.
When our research team began planning for the 2020 Little Rock Congregations Study, we knew we wanted to do something more to give back to the community. So, thanks to UA Little Rock’s investment in professional survey software, we are expanding the reach of the 2020 study by going fully online. Not only will more congregations be able to participate in the research, but every congregation will receive a report on the anonymous data of their members, including data on demographics; worship service attendance; mental, physical, and spiritual health; congregational and community engagement; perceptions of community and racial unity and division; and issue importance.
Leaders will also receive data on whether their members think their place of worship should be involved in helping to solve the community issues they see as most important and whether the members would be willing to volunteer on those issues. Because we know how important collaboration is to religious leaders, for each of the top three community issues of concern to their congregants, we will include the contact information for other congregations and nonprofits currently working on those issues. These reports will provide immediate, valuable data to leaders to know what matters to their members and how to get engaged.
Dr. Glazier and student researchers working on the Little Rock Congregations Study
The surveys have been prepared by an interdisciplinary research team at UA Little Rock, including Dr. Rebecca Glazier, Dr. Gerald Driskill, and Dr. Kirk Leach, in consultation with our Clergy Advisory Board. Graduate and undergraduate student researchers are also part of the Little Rock Congregations Study team and an entire course on “Religion and Community” will be working on this project and helping to write the reports in the fall of 2020. The faculty and students of UA Little Rock and the Little Rock Congregations Study researchers are providing the reports to participating congregations at no cost.
For more information about the research and to read results of past studies, please visit the project website: https://research.ualr.edu/lrcs/.
If your congregation is interested in participating in the 2020 LRCS, please contact the project director, Dr. Rebecca Glazier at raglazier@ualr.edu.