In this Issue:

• • Still Missing Connections? Probing the Presence of Religious Leaders and Institutions in American Civic Life
  • From Missing Connections to Meaningful Engagement
  • Are You Considering a Capital Campaign?
  • Kilama Dennis Awarded 2026-27 Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
  • Join Us for the 21st Annual Thomas H. Lake Lecture

By Elizabeth Lynn, former Special Projects Director, and Kelly Dunlap, Senior Program Manager, Lake Institute on Faith & Giving

“Clergy are not public leaders.” 

This blunt assessment, offered by the dean of a public university, sums up the findings of a research project on religious presence in civic life conducted by Barbara G. Wheeler, Elizabeth Lynn, and colleagues in the late 1990s. The research team visited four American cities, interviewing a range of government, non-profit, business, and higher education leaders and asking, How prominent are religious leaders and institutions in the life of your community? What they heard became a report titled Missing Connections, prepared for Auburn Seminary’s Center for the Study of Theological Education. As the title suggests, the researchers found a troubling story of missed connections. Theological schools seemed invisible to their neighbors; congregations were turned inward, taking care of their own; clergy seldom spoke in the public square. 

Lake Institute on Faith & Giving wanted to know how these dynamics might have changed in the decades since. While much of our focus at Lake Institute is on the giving of money, we understand that faithful giving takes many different forms, so we also explore how people of faith give their time, talents, and testimony to create positive change in their communities. To deepen understanding of these kinds of faithful giving (which we might call religious civic engagement), in 2022 we launched a follow-up probe of the role of religious leaders and institutions in the life of one American city: Richmond, Virginia. 

With expert consultation from Barbara Wheeler, we conducted interviews with 28 of Richmond’s leaders across faith traditions and the nonprofit, business, civic, and political sectors. Sadly, Barbara passed away just as we were finishing the Richmond report. We set the work aside for a time but now return to it with a renewed desire to share what we learned. Indeed, what better way to honor Barbara Wheeler than to continue a conversation she cared so deeply about? 

A Complex Picture Emerges 

Our follow-up probe, centered on Richmond, VA, reached a slightly more complex conclusion than the 1999 report. Visibility of religious institutions and their leaders and members in the city’s civic life remains low, especially when compared with the roles that religion played in Richmond’s past. Interviewees pointed back to the civil rights movement and other periods of social change and recalled how religious leaders were prominent figures shaping those changes. Today, according to some, political and business leaders do not generally rely on religious support, and clergy, with a few exceptions, are not “a force to be reckoned with.” 

Beyond the bright lights of the public square, however, we uncovered a surprising range of ways that religious organizations and people of faith are actively engaged in the life of Richmond and its region.  

Seven Forms of Religious Civic Engagement 

This engagement takes seven forms: 

1. Service: Coordinating to meet basic needs and to improve educational opportunities for groups and neighborhoods with fewer resources.
2. Advocacy: Forming and joining coalitions to press for policy change at the city and state level. 
3. Protest and Witness: Staging public responses to perceived injustice and immorality in the form of statements, vigils, marches, and more.
4. Public Leadership: Seeking to lead in the larger community in ways that express and further one’s faith, by running for political office, serving on non-profit boards and commissions, stewarding one’s vocation, etc. 
5. Public Education: Offering programs to the public that illuminate the community’s history and its current challenges.
6. Relationship-Building: Fostering intentional relationships with neighbors, city leaders, and people of different faiths, for diverse purposes of reconciliation, bridge-building, and moral influence.
7. Repair: Seeking to mend past harms by revisiting collective history, re-writing narratives to tell a more truthful story, removing memorials and plaques, expressing repentance. 

Some of these forms of engagement are long-standing and well-established traditions of religious presence in public life (service, for instance, or advocacy). 

Others, like relationship-building, are more experimental and organic, as individual clergy and laity work out what it means to act on their faith in an increasingly polarized political arena, without the assurance of a seat at the civic table or (in some cases) a congregational mandate.  

Still others, like repair and protest and witness, gained definition and urgency in the racial reckonings that swept the nation in 2020, although it is not clear whether that urgency has been sustained over time.  

Comparing Typologies 

Those who study American religious presence in civic life may want to compare these seven forms with earlier typologies, like the Hartford study on Varieties of Religious Presence (Pilgrim Press, 1984) or some of the findings of the National Congregations Study reported as part of the essay collection The Quiet Hand of God (University of California Press, 2002).  

Differences among the typologies are easily discernible, if not easily explained. For instance, whereas previous typologies focused on the civic orientation of the congregation and the nature of activities taking place within the congregation’s own walls, our probe found a greater emphasis on the actions of individual leaders (both clergy and laity) and cross-group coalitions. This may be a function of how we focused our research; it could also reflect changes in the relationship between religious leaders and their constituencies—or changes in what is perceived to be effective religious engagement in our time. 

Further Research – and Conversation – Needed! 

The findings of our limited probe are at most suggestive, inviting further conversation about the ways that religious leaders and institutions are giving faithfully to their communities today—not just through money, but through time, talent, and testimony. We hope you will be inspired to learn more and add to this important conversation.  

You can read our full report here. Most of all, we hope you will share the seven forms of engagement with your congregation or theological school and ask:  

Where do we see ourselves at work across these forms of engagement? Are there other forms of engagement we would add to the list? 

Where are we still missing connections that could be made … for the sake of our faith and the common good?