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compare the rate of free riding among congregations without some sort of standardized
measure. In other words, we should assess the rate of individual participation relative to
the total number of available opportunities for participating.
We provided respondents with a list of eleven broad categories of community
outreach activities and asked them to report how frequently their church had participated
in or sponsored these types of activities during the past year. The categories are blood
drives, community health education, family planning programs, food pantry or food bank,
Hospice, mission work, nursing home visits, prison ministry, recycling programs, soup
kitchens, volunteer work at homeless shelters, and other specific community outreach
activities listed by the respondents. The frequency of the level of activity is coded as
follows: 0 = never, 1 = annual, 6 = occasionally, 12 = monthly, 52 = weekly, 365 =
daily. In short, this question measures the congregants’ perception of the type and
frequency of outreach activities sponsored by their church (see Fig. 1).
[Figure 1 about here]
Table 2 provides the percentage of parishioners indicating the level of activity by
their church on a variety of community outreach programs between September 2001 and
September 2002. Overall, the parishioners in our survey claimed that their congregations
were the most active in conducting nursing home visits (4.6%) and participating in
recycling programs (10.3%) on a daily basis. A majority of our respondents (53.7%)
stated that their place of worship supported a food bank each month. Approximately
25.0% of our sample stated that their organization did not participate in family planning
programs and 16.8% claimed that their church was inactive in Hospice and in prison
Convention