The active and inactive church member : a sociological analysis of certain aspects of St. George's Anglican Church, Winnipeg
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Date
1964
Authors
Jackson, James Edward Winston
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Abstract
The study of St. George's Anglican Church, Winnipeg, was an exploratory and descriptive one. An attempt was made to discover what variables were associated with the degree of involvement in church affiliation. A two-fold typology was employed for this purpose. Those who were more involved in the church were referred to as Active members; those who were less involved were termed Inactive... The thesis was based on an analysis of three hundred and three questionnaires filled in during two services on Sunday, April 28, 1963. In order to examine the subject in greater detail, personal interviews were conducted during the summer of 1963 with sixty-seven of the middle-aged males on the church's parish list. Age, sex, marital status, educational level, and socioeconomic position were found to be associated with the parishioners' degree of involvement in the church. Among those interviewed, it was found that the Active members displayed greater generational mobility, tended towards the middle of the socioeconomic range represented by the church's membership, and tended to maintain more rigid stands on social and religious issues. Furthermore, they exhibited more rigid behaviour patterns associated with religious practices and, for example, with political voting patterns... In the light of the findings concerning the Active and the Inactive members it was suggested, in the final chapter of the thesis, that further research, similar to that undertaken at St. George's, might well prove fruitful in increasing the sociologist's understanding of religious institutions.