Managing God's Business Religious and Faith-Based Organizations and their Management

Religious and faith-based organisations constitute a large and important group of organisations. This is the first book to study systematically their characteristics and the distinctive challenges they pose to the people managing them. Malcolm Torry discusses how to define religious and faith-based organisations, how to study them, and the secular context in which they operate in Western Europe and the USA. There are chapters on congregations, denominations, governance, membership, the clergy, leadership, and religious and faith-based organisations' relationship to civil society. The book relies on research-based literature and case studies and contains full bibliographies, making it an essential tool for anyone studying this important new field.

Contents: Foreword; Introduction: The study of religious and faith-based organizations and their management; Defining religious and faith-based organizations and defining them as voluntary organizations; How should we study religious and faith-based organizations?; Secularization; Congregations: how they work and how they change; Federations of congregations: sects, denominations, churches, and more...; The governance of religious organizations; Faith-based organizations; Membership in religious organizations; The clergy: priests or professionals?; Religious and faith-based organizations: their contribution to civil society; Leadership in religious and faith-based organizations; Conclusion; Select bibliography; Index.

Dr. Malcolm Torry is Team Rector of the Parish of East Greenwich, and Senior Research Associate, Centre for Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector Management, Roehampton University, UK.