Managing Denominations

A religious organization is a group of people gathered for worship (Torry, 2005: 14–17). This means that a congregation is the only kind of religious organization. Congregations relate to each other in a variety of ways: members of one congregation might relate to members of another and the minister of one congregation might relate to the ministers of other congregations. The relationships between congregations might be highly formalized, highly informal, or somewhere between the two. An independent evangelical church might have good relationships with other congregations in its geographical area, and it might also belong to a loose federation of congregations, perhaps because they share particular theological views, or because an individual or a group of people founded the different member congregations. A Church of England congregation will relate to the bishop of the diocese in which it is situated, and also to the bureaucratic and democratic authority structures of that diocese, and its relationships with other parishes will be regulated by those episcopal, bureaucratic, and democratic structures. A congregation’s relationships with other congregations can be understood either by first asking how the denomination or federation functions or by first asking how the congregation relates beyond its own borders. In this chapter, our focus is the denomination or federation.