How can GroeneKerken get more churches engaged in its social movement?
Sustainability is becoming of increased importance. One of the aspects of a sustainable lifestyle is living in balance with nature, caring for the environment and ecological justice. These three aspects can be combined in ‘care for the earth’ which is by many Christians seen as a biblical task. They believe that God has created the earth and has given this earth to the people to work and keep it, and take a good care of it. When presuming this definition and biblical task, how can it be that there are so many churches in The Netherlands and only so little of them are seriously engaged with sustainability? Why are Christians not frontrunners in sustainability? These two questions were the start of designing and performing this research.
GroeneKerken is a campaign which is run by KerkInActie and Tear and wants to give sustainability a podium in Dutch religious institutions, mainly churches. The goal of this research is to determine how the GroeneKerken campaign can get more churches involved in its social movement. Therefore, the research question is: “How can GroeneKerken get more churches involved in its social movement?” This is researched by a combination of theory and practice. A literature research has been conducted around three themes: religion and sustainability, social movements and engagement in these movements, changing into sustainable behavior. The second and main part of this research was a qualitative case study with 22 in-depth interviews with different churches in The Netherlands, coming from different religious streams and with a varying level of engagement with the GroeneKerken campaign. The interviewees were either actively engaged, non-actively engaged or non-engaged with the social movement.
The results of the research are elaborated according to six aggregated dimensions, or main themes, coming from the interviews. These dimensions are: barriers for churches in joining the GroeneKerken campaign, incentives to do so, the process of implementing change and the outcomes of the changes, and finally the collaboration on different levels and the possible communicative role of GroeneKerken. It is highly beneficial for GroeneKerken to have these dimensions researched, especially the barriers and incentives to join the campaign. Besides, it is explained detailed how GroeneKerken can fulfil its role in the religious environment based on the insights gained from the performed interviews.
To summarize the research findings of this study, GroeneKerken should improve its promotion by adjusting the message of its campaign and broaden the communication channels. This conclusion is based on the literature and on the empirical research: it appealed that most churches either did not know GroeneKerken through the church but had heard from the campaign in their personal lives, or did not know about the existence of GroeneKerken at all while they were engaged in sustainability practices, which makes them potential new partners of the social movement of GroeneKerken. The combination of improving these two aspects (message and media) of the promotion strategy will eventually lower the barriers for individual churches to join the campaign, which implies that more churches will join the social movement of GroeneKerken. GroeneKerken should do so by 5 steps: local promotion by pioneer churches, automatically updating the website, changing the internal and external division within GroeneKerken, broaden its communication channels, become a facilitator. This way, the awareness of the existence of GroeneKerken will be increased which is the start of contact with new churches. Next, when these potential new churches are identified and triggered, GroeneKerken should adjust its message to potential barriers in joining the campaign. The combination of a broader promotion and adjusting the message to structural decrease the barriers for churches will lead to more engaged churches in the social movement of GroeneKerken.
There is a threefold contribution to the existing literature by this research. First, it combined different theories into one complete set of preconditions in joining social movements by groups. Second, thereby it especially focuses on groups, which has not been done extensively in the existing literature. Thirdly, the research provides empirical findings which demonstrate justify these theoretical set of preconditions. This provides us with many implications and especially the theoretical, societal, environmental and practical implications have been identified. Amongst others, five pillars for increasing engagement in social movement have been conducted and are discussed in the implications section: these pillars make the research more applicable for other social movements. Finally, a critical perspective on this research is taken and recommendations for further research are made.