Although the organizational founding process is subject to various isomorphic pressures, significant variation is still found in the completion, ordering, and timing of founding events. Prior research on entrepreneurship suggests the importance of education and previous experience in determining who is best positioned to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities, which may explain some of the variation in the founding process. In this article the authors present an analysis of an original survey of recently founded religious nonprofits to better understand how founder, organizational, and contextual characteristics influence the founding process in this specific nonprofit context. Overall, the authors’ findings show that founder education and experience particularly affect the founding process as well as organizational characteristics; however, these effects vary across different dimensions of this process.
Next to congregations, religious nonprofit organizations represent one of the most numerous categories of religious organizations in the United States. However, very few data exist that shed light on this sector. In this research note we introduce new data from a survey of two cohorts of religion‐related public charities, also known as 501(c)(3)s or simply as religious nonprofits. We also present initial findings from these data. Specifically, we provide a descriptive profile of religious nonprofits’ founders and how these individuals compare to leaders and founders of other organizations, including congregations. We also provide a descriptive profile of these organizations’ activities, staffing, and structure. This note serves as the first step in what we hope will be an expanding literature on religious nonprofit organizations.
Changes in leadership can be difficult for any organization. Leadership transitions in religious congregations might be especially challenging given the personal relationships involved and the spiritual dimension of a leader's position. This complexity often makes it difficult to separate the reasons for the transition from the impacts of the transition. For example, loss of membership and congregational conflict can be both a cause and a consequence of leadership change. Using the 2006-2007 National Congregations Study, this research explores how membership decline and congregational conflict are associated with leadership transitions in religious congregations. Although we find that leadership transitions are associated with conflict and membership decline, we also find that certain factors, such as whether the leader comes from within the congregation and context of the transition, moderate these associations.
Parachurch organizations are Christian, heavily evangelical Protestant, 501(c)(3) public charities focused on providing religious goods and services outside of any congregational or denominational sponsorship. The parachurch sector in the United States has been growing rapidly in recent decades, yet this growth has been highly uneven across communities. Many communities have very few parachurch organizations, while a few exhibit incredibly higher concentrations of them than would be expected based only upon their religious composition. Using IRS records, we isolate communities with the greatest concentrations of parachurch organizations, and then, drawing upon ideas developed in studies of industrial districts, we address this puzzle by exploring four of those communities, which we refer to as spiritual districts: Tulsa, Oklahoma; Nashville, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Washington, D.C. We utilize interviews with organizational leaders and archival records to attempt to account for the makeup of and dynamics of each of the four unique clusters of parachurch organizations, concluding with a discussion of how understanding spiritual districts can contribute to greater understanding of the phenomenon of industrial districts.
Religious congregations hold a unique status among public charities in that they are exempt from having to ask for recognition of their tax-exempt status from the federal government. Despite this privileged status, more than two hundred thousand congregations are registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the rate of registration appears to be increasing. We examine regional, religious, and administrative patterns among the congregations registered with the IRS. Certain denominations, such as the Latter-day Saints, appear to have taken a centralized stance against congregational registration, whereas others, such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, have made a centralized decision for congregational registration. Other denominations appear to have left the decision up to individual congregations. Of those congregations that are registered, the method of registration, whether independent or through a denomination's group exemption, appears to be related to the denomination's centralization of authority.
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