 | | ORIENTATION TO FAITH-BASED SOCIAL SERVICES RESOURCE | | | | |
Belief Systems in Faith-based Human Service Programs
by Diana Garland, Ellen Netting, Mary Katherine, and Gaynor Yancey (BaylorUniversity, 2004)
Scholars have reminded us that the values-expressive nature, roots, and traditions of nonprofit organizations cannot be ignored, particularly for those that consider themselves “faith-based,”[1] What is it, though, that makes a program “faith-based?” When the FASTEN Research Team asked the staff and administrators of these programs this question, they told us stories of mission-driven visions tied to forces beyond local programs and steeped in deep traditions, beliefs, and guiding philosophies. These stories shape their work in ways that have important implications for effective collaborative partnerships.
Of the 15 programs we studied, 12 were housed in religiously affiliated 501(c)(3) organizations and three were located in congregations. All were located in large urban areas and all served persons with low incomes. Each program is unique, yet a common theme emerged that transcends geographic site, even religious tradition. As one respondent put it, “our motivation . . . permeates the whole philosophy of the program . . . .[clients] take with them something that can never be taken from them . . . it won’t be lost anywhere.”
They are Driven to Serve by a “Moral Imperative”
A Baptist service provider referred to the spiritual component of their program as a “moral imperative.” Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike say that their traditions guide them to serve others. Whereas a Christian staff member calls it making a “difference in the future . . . and having the opportunity to impact generations we’ll never see”, a Muslim collaborator says that in order to serve God “when Muslims give back to the community they must give and give and give.” Another pondered, “If we can’t service clients, we can’t leave them empty-handed because, before we are a social service agency, we are a church. And because we’re the church we have to honor the oath of the spiritual realm, which is service.” The calling to service cannot be ignored even when resources do not match the need--empty-handedness is not an option. A respondent from a different program in another part of the country continues, “we will help you find wherever it is you need to belong. And if it’s not here, we will hook you up to wherever you need to be.” Yet another respondent in a different program comments that “mission is more important than the operation of the organization itself.” And still another, “So for me, I keep that model in my head; if I help someone, then not only have I done a great deed, but I’ve pleased God . . . I was raised to believe that if I can help someone along the way, then my living shall not be in vain.”
Implication: The programs and their staffs are less motivated by the need in the community or the gaps in services that need to be filled than by their own history, mission, and theology of service. Effectively engaging them as partners is more likely to happen if you take the time to know their history, mission, and theology rather than assuming that their knowledge of community’s needs and service gaps is enough to motivate them to collaborate with you.
Accountability to God
Across faith traditions, these programs are accountable to God, to a higher calling, for the service they provide and the call to serve transcends the program or organization. A Muslim says that the creation of the program is an “attempt to really embody the true understandings of why this religion was revealed to mankind . . . we don’t ask for a reward from anybody except God. That’s what it comes down to, and that is the basic tenet of our faith.” We often heard phrases like “I’m a Christian, so I prayed . . . . What do you want me to do, Lord?” or “it’s what God has planned for me” or “God has a plan” or “this is God’s program . . . we really don’t do anything without consulting God first.”
Religious traditions are often so ingrained in a person’s early development that they may override later professional education and training. Over and over, service providers explained why they do what they do as rooted in what they learned from early models, how they were taught as children, what they grew up with, what they experienced in formative years when they were part of a long-established tradition. Because they are socialized to religion in early childhood, far before they are socialized to professional values, they often return to the roots of their faith to guide their actions. When asked who they are trying to please, they answered “God” or some higher presence/being. Clearly, the pressures of funders and the dictates of professional standards have less importance than the calling that inspires them.
Implication: The most important outcome for these programs is to be faithful to their mission to serve. Outcome measures such as client or community change measures may or may not be important to them; certainly they are secondary. Collaboration with other organizations therefore may bring a new focus on outcome effectiveness related to the program objectives and new accountability structures. As important as these accountability structures may be to their collaborative partners, a faith-based program’s primary focus on accountability to God needs to be honored. If one’s tradition motivates a staff person to believe that their life in the hereafter is dependent on their ability to respond to others’ needs, then is the demands of faith on that person’s behavior certainly will be far stronger than professional standards or government mandates.
Influence of Mission on Operations
The accountability to a higher being influences what people do in these programs. One explains it this way: “I think our investments are different from government; our ways of dealing with people are different.” A collaborator with a Muslim based nonprofit says that it “is not really different because it’s a Muslim organization . . . certainly there are certain things about Muslim philosophy that might come into play.” Leaving things “in His hands” indicates God is the ultimate director. According to another respondent “ . . . maybe He’s the extra push in the intangible willingness to adopt and make things work. It’s not written in stone, but it’s just there. Another respondent says “I don’t think that it’s that the secular community can’t. I just don’t think that they do. I don’t think that their heart is there . . . we feel called by God to do this.”
Entire programs may be built on religious texts. For example, a program targeting African American men is based on “the last book in the Old Testament, the last verse, talks about God going to turn the heart of the fathers back toward their children and the heart of their children back toward their fathers . . . when a man is out of place, you have the whole nation out of place. So until the man gets back into his home, and to raise his kids, our nation will never be right.” One respondent summed it up by saying “we know who we are.”
Implication: Much has been made of visual and day-to-day programmatic elements of faith-based programs, such as prayer, spiritual enrichment classes, and religious objects on the walls. There is a is a less visible middle ground, however, between the beliefs and mission of the organization and those easily-noticed elements. Listen to service providers talk about their motivation for service, what in their minds makes the program faith-based. A collaborative relationship will be much stronger if connections are made to those motivations than if you make assumptions based on the artwork on the program’s walls.
Long-Term Commitment
If a higher being calls staff to perform the mission of service, then the commitment to perform in a consistent and long-term manner seems equally imperative. A staff person working for a Southern Baptist program invoked the long-term view, describing their mission in terms of “mak[ing] a difference in the future” and “impact[ing] a generation that we’ll never see . . . . the most important and special part is that we have the opportunity to introduce client to the Creator of the universe . . . to impact a life for eternity.” Other respondents refer to “trying to break the cycle of homelessness,” seeing the “big picture,” looking out for the “next generation.” An administrator in a United Methodist program for children remarks, “Everyone is told from the day they come in the organization that we attempt ‘to touch a life and create a future.’” Another service provider says, “Perhaps we have planted a seed that ten years from now can make a difference. And even if it never makes a difference we have responded to our call and done what we should do.”
These programs have stamina to stick with clients when others might give up. Talking about the commitment of foster families recruited through local congregations, one respondent says,
“I know if their hearts weren’t dedicated to what God wanted them to do, they would have called the social worker and said, we are so done with this. . . .. It doesn’t matter what the child does, what the child steals or what the biological parents are putting us through or what the system is putting us through. We, through prayer and through our friends’ support, are committing to this child. And it’s like being married and divorced, saying divorce is not an option.”
Calling and long term commitment seem to go hand-in-hand. “so we’re not really fly-by-night people with a wild idea, you know, ‘I’m just going to give this a shot and if it doesn’t work ‘. . . we don’t consider these children just cargo or, you know, just baggage . . . they are lives!”
Implication: Because they are accountable to God for serving and less focused on being able to show effective outcomes, they may be willing to take on more difficult problems that don’t show immediate outcomes. Faith-based organizations bring a tenacity that perhaps no other partner in a collaboration can bring, and that needs to be underscored and appreciated.
The Faith Community as a Context for Service
These programs are not isolated; they are networked within their religious traditions and these ties appear to strengthen the level of commitment. Some are based in congregations that have an established association of members who participate in the life of the program. Respondents talk about how clients are often invited “into their churches to go and worship with them.” Another person adds, “I think what the faith community adds to the mix is a commitment to personal relationships because that really is a sense of community that is at the heart of every faith community.” Visibly expressive language, symbols, and activities are present in most programs and within the organizations that sponsor them. Freedom to engage in God-talk or religious sounding language is part of program culture without apology. In fact, respondents reveal how important it is to be in a place in which the norms allow one to talk about God or their own spirituality.
But here the service providers diverge, with differing perspectives about what is appropriate and inappropriate as expressions of faith in practice and action. They differ in the extent to which their programs include religious education services, chaplaincy services, community ministry coordination positions, use of staff from local congregations, and spiritual enrichment components. Beyond these more overtly programmatic artifacts, faith may be infused in various ways--the name and history of the organization in which the program is located, the founder’s vision grounded in faith, the membership of the board, the ownership of property, even the current administrator’s ties to a faith tradition.
Guiding philosophies are much deeper because they permeate every choice made, every option taken. These guiding philosophies are not only externally-driven by a transcendent force, but they have been completely and developmentally internalized into the worldviews and sets of assumptions held by the persons who participate in these programs.
Implications: These programs have much in common when they describe their calls to serve and accountability to God. They diverge, however, in how this call is carried out in direct services. They serve God in multiple ways, even in contradictory ways. Don’t assume that because an organization is faith-based that its programs operate in the same way that other faith-based programs operate. Nothing can substitute for learning--program by program--how mission translates into actual service practices. Ask service providers to describe not only what they do but how it connects to the faith that motivates them. Listen for the themes; these will provide connecting points for strong service collaborations.
Conclusion
A cadre of researchers and practitioners have joined forces to seek that illusive “faith factor” that makes a difference as if the question will be settled once and for all. We conclude that we have been focusing on artifacts because they are tangible, when it is the interpretation of belief into assumptions that guide practice that permeate every choice made and every action taken if a program is faith-based.
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This is part of a series of Research Briefs to be released by Baylor University School of Social Work as part of a 30-month research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. This project is designed to identify the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in addressing problems of urban poverty. Baylor is leading this project with researchers from BaylorUniversity’s business school, the schools of social work at the University of Pittsburgh and VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity, and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
A team of researchers from these four universities have interviewed various stakeholders from fifteen (15) promising faith-based programs in four United States cities. This ends the data collection portion of Phase I of a grounded theory research project in which participants, board members, administrators, program coordinators, and collaborators in these fifteen programs have been interviewed face-to-face.
The findings of this first phase will be the foundation for a quantitative national survey designed to determine the extent to which the grounded theory that emerges in the project’s first phase can be applied nationally across the diversity of faith-based social services in the United States. The Hudson Institute and the Center for Faith and Service of the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC), Baylor’s partners in this project, are disseminating the findings of this research through the creation of the Faith & Service Technical Education Network (FASTEN).
Authors for this article are Diana Garland, Ellen Netting, Mary Katherine, and Gaynor Yancey.
References
Billis, D. (1991). The roots of voluntary agencies: A question of choice. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 20 (1), 57-69.
Chambre, S. M. (2001). The changing nature of “faith” in faith-based organizations: Secularization and ecumenicism in four AIDS Organizations in New York City. Social Service Review, 75, 435-455.
Jeavons, T. (1992). When the management is the message: Relating values to management practice in nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 2(4), 403-417.
Milofsky, C. (1997). Tradition. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 26(3), 261-268.
Queen, E.L. II. (Ed.). (2000). Serving those in need: A handbook for managing faith-based human service organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
[1] Jeavons (1992) has been particularly articulate in examining the values-expressive character of nonprofit agencies. He reminds us of the historical roots of nonprofit activity as social welfare services were considered “the business of the church because they could be undertaken as an expression of religious calling and religious tenets” (p. 404). He argues that “it is precisely the values-expressive nature of religious, philanthropic work and the agencies engaged in it, that created social space in which an independent sector could form . . .” (p. 404). He goes on to point out that managerial literature has often ignored this values-expressive nature, focusing instead on instrumental tasks and activities. Other writers have focused on the importance of the roots (Billis, 1991) and traditions (Queen, 2000) of nonprofit organizations. For example, Milosky (1997) sees tradition as “especially noteworthy as symbols or icons that call forth images both of what the work is and how in its most virtuous form it is carried out” (p. 261). Queen (2000) contends “that religious traditions combine a commitment to community with a commitment to the inherent worth of individuals [thus providing] a focal point for the increasing attention paid to the role of religiously based human and social services” (p. 12).
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