Organizational Structure & Operating Mechanism Of Rural Church

The dissertation chooses the rural Christian church in O'bei town in Wenzhou as the case study, and regards the urbanization that is the main manifestation of the society change as my research background. Viewing the religion as one of the society organizational formations, the author discusses the church structure, operating-mechanism, organizational goal, the societal component of Christian and the interaction between the church and the powerful organizations in the grass community, as well as that between the church and the relevant governmental official sections, in the research framework governed by the Open-system theory.The dissertation want to probe into the church organizational characters and the Christian position in the social structure during the society rapid change and transformation in China. The two problems are highly correlated. On one hand, exploration into church organizational characters is the premise of locating Christian in the social structure. One the other hand, the Church organizational characters are determined by its social position.Logically based on the organizational theory involving variables of church organizational structure, operating mechanism, individual level, the interaction between the church and the relevant organization in the environment. Specifically, the organizational structure deals with hieratical framework of church. The operating mechanism concerns working procedure of the church, including the manner of interaction on the group level, the manner of the production and output of the religious goods and service and the resource input. The group level mainly discusses two questions, one of them regarding the process of the communication and the decision-making in the church, and the other the structure of the intrinsic power and authority during that process. Namely, the church's operating process involves the production and output of the religious goods and service. The manner of resource input mainly explores the way of recruiting church staff and funding. The analysis can reveal the intrinsic characters and the expressing approach in the church, which is also one of the reasons for the existence of the church organization. During the procedure of church operation, the organizational process and the performance are decided by its organizational structure and membership. The organizational structure has discussed above, so the forth variable studied in this dissertation concerns the feature of the individual level. The comparison between the social constitute of the Christian and the urbanizing rural stratum can tell certain bounds and relations between the church and the local society. Generally speaking, the four variables above analyze the intrinsic elements horizontally. The fifth variable, the interaction between the church and the organizations in the environment, is vertically analyzed. It mainly investigates the manner of interaction between the church and the rural grass powerful organizations as well as the relevant governmental sections. And these relations can reflect the location of the church's development and the expectation of the outside world to the church and its believers. Then, questions like these arise: on which dimension do these two aspects...