Faith-based promising practices: Innovative forms of collaborative social services

The goal of this study is twofold: to create a broader, more inclusive notion of what faith-based social services entails, and to introduce a new set of categories that serve as the basis for an updated mapping of religious social service organizations in America. Utilizing qualitative methods, the study investigates three religious social service programs that reflect the following characteristics: the Holistic Christian Gospel, Progressive Mainline Protestantism, and the Embodied Gospel of Roman Catholicism. The central argument of this study is that newer salient categories for religious social service providers are a theoretical and methodological necessity in order to understand the role of faith in the delivery of these services. This study challenges existing assumptions and understandings of the "faith factor" and frames the "effectiveness" question in a new conceptual and methodological light. Recent attempts to formulate newer categories have not described how religious social service providers implement their faith in their respective programs. Current attempts to systematize program types limit their scope primarily to church-state questions. They do not answer how these organizations specifically engage the world equipped with their religious and spiritual commitments; thus, they lack real relevance to the sociopolitical and socio-cultural ethos present in this era of the "faith-based initiative." My research addresses these problems by demonstrating that terms and labels such as "faith-saturated" and "faith-based" are misnomers. The programs under consideration in this study all demonstrate that they are "faith-imbued" and "faith-intensive" in how the leadership and staff members of these faith-based programs operationalize their faith commitments in the administration of these services.