Since 1960 over two hundred books and countless reports have examined either single
congregations or their species, and any new work such as mine gratefully follows the tracks that many sorts of explorers — consultants, management specialists, sociologists, psychologists, ethnographers, historians, and others — have already laid down.1 Prior to 1960 the investigation of the
local church was more
occasional, and except for a few books written to enliven parish programs2 and the pioneering sociology of H. Paul Douglass, 3 the analysis occurred primarily in Europe.4