Let me tell you the story about one graduate student who reached out to ICTG for help with researching ministry leaders' experiences with trauma. 

Steven is a middle-aged pastor at a large, urban, mostly African-American church. He believes congregations play vital roles in disaster response and community care. So much so, he went back to school for an MBA at Fresno Pacific University to gain further skills in community development and management after disasters. 

For his final group project, he secured permission from his school to use ICTG surveys to sample leaders and measure how aware, prepared, and responsive congregations were to disasters and traumas they encountered. His group surveyed 31 congregations in Louisiana, Missouri, and New Jersey, where community-wide disasters occurred between 2004-2011. These congregations represented the following denominations:

Adventist
Baptist
Catholic
Episcopal
Evangelic Free
Lutheran
Methodist
Pentecostal
Presbyterian
Non-Denominational
Unitarian Universalist

They also included 3 rural churches, 9 small town churches, 6 suburban churches, and 13 urban churches. Membership included 19% multi-ethnic backgrounds, 4% Central or South American backgrounds, 15% African-American, and 62% Canadian- or European-American. 

The project revealed several key insights that more ministers should know about.
For example: 

Many congregations experience more than one trauma or disaster within a few years. 54% of the congregations surveyed experience two or more collective traumatic events within just 5 years of the hurricane or shooting they first reported. 

High turnover rates exist among ministry staff following traumatic incidents. Within only 3 years of the first incident, 62% of the ministry staff among these congregations changed, including one pastor dying of a heart attack. 

Membership and stewardship radically change following traumatic incidents. Nearly 80% of the congregations surveyed had between 100-2100 members the year before the first disaster occurred. 56% of them decreased in membership as much as 20% in the first 3 years after, even as financial giving increased 70%. 

We need more projects like Steven's to provide congregations with the information they need to face what's ahead. Surveys like this one significantly help clergy and lay leaders better assess their congregation's current practices and increase resiliency to withstand the pressures of collective traumas.

Want to support more innovative students like Steven and create more projects that get congregations information and tools they need?

• Support financially – It takes ICTG $60 / month to support a graduate student with materials and mentoring. To contribute to all or part of these costs, become a monthly donor today. 
• Participate in a new research project – In an effort to expand resources and inform congregation leaders, Associate Professor of Psychology, Cynthia Eriksson, is working with a team of graduate students at Fuller Theological Seminary's Graduate School of Psychology to survey of ministry leaders about their own encounters with trauma care. The survey takes about 30 minutes. Take it, and pass the link along to other ministers you know. 
  

The boards, staff, and volunteers at ICTG heartily agree with Steven – congregations can play vital roles in disaster response and community care. Especially when they are informed and have access to tools they need to promote safety and growth. 

According to summary findings from the Pew Research Religious Landscape Survey, "the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children.  Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion."  The survey also finds that "constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents." 

ICTG is interested to learn more about how trauma experiences factor, if they do, into the "constant movement" and senses of being "unaffiliated."  

Presently, no denomination has intentionally tracked the patterns of membership behavior, including participation in worship, mission and stewardship, following trauma events.  Also, interestingly, no denomination has intentionally tracked the rise and fall of membership participation in light of trauma affects after the World Wars.  In America, Protestant congregations often refer to the 1950s as a golden era of membership, with significant declines beginning the in the late 1960s and the 1970s, with some never returning to their former sizes.  

Consider this: On September 3, 2013, interviewer Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, spoke with jazz musician John Zorn. At one point Gross asks Zorn, "What is the Jewish music you were exposed to when you were young and what is the Jewish music you investigated?"  

Zorn replies, "Well, my parents were not outwardly Jewish.  They came out of a generation where being a Jew was not only a disadvantage, it was actually a death sentence. And they escaped all of that and . . . we celebrated Christmas.  We didn't have Jewish music in the house."  A few minutes later he says further, "I think they found it difficult to understand why I wanted to reconnect with being Jewish.  My father literally said to me, 'Hey man, I gave you a way out of this.' Because I went to a Protestant church when I was growing up.  And that was a little confusing."

"Why did they do that?" Gross wonders.  

Zorn responds, "Well, they were trying to help me.  They were trying to save me from what they thought was disadvantage. And I never really gave it a second-thought . . . but as I got older, and I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and I had Jewish friends all my life, as I started making music and I started thinking about it in my conscious brain I began to realize that a lot of these cats are Jews.  Why is that? Why am I attracted, why am I more comfortable with this . . . in asking those questions, a bunch of friends got together . . . and we began to talk about it . . ." 

This meeting of friends eventually leads to Zorn's acclaimed Radical Jewish Culture series of concerts.

Presumably, there were other people like Zorn, whether Jewish or not, whose parents raised them among Protestant or other faith groups to "protect" them in some way.  Could some of the movement that we are seeing among religions today in America be explained, in part, because of movements after trauma – both movements toward particular religious practices, as appears to be the case in the 1950s, as well as movements away from religions, which may be the case in more recent years following cases of sexual crimes, suicides, arson, and other kinds of congregational traumas? 

ICTG is interested to learn more about the factors involved in religious practice, or the absence of religious practice, in the aftermath of trauma and how those factors may inform us for best practices of care and human health in the future.  

You can join this project by participating in the surveys we have posted on our website and by sharing the surveys with congregation leaders.