THE COLLECTIVE CHARACTERS OF RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS: with T. Ryan Byerly and Meghan Byerly, “The Collective Characters of Religious Congregations”; and Joshua Cockayne and Gideon Salter, “Praying Together: Corporate Prayer and Shared Situations.”

Our primary aim in this article is to advocate for the interdisciplinary study of the collective character traits of local religious congregations, taking as our focal example local Christian congregations. It should be clear that such study presently lies on the frontier of interdisciplinary religious studies. Yet, as we will attempt to show in the first section, the way has been paved for the study of such collective character traits through salient developments within several academic disciplines in recent decades. This frontier, in other words, is open for exploration, and there are available tools that can help us explore it. We will illustrate how such exploration may be undertaken fruitfully in the second section by focusing on two distinct kinds of virtuous collective character traits of Christian congregations: traits that enable a congregation to fulfill its distinctive role in the missio Dei , and traits that enable a congregation's members to flourish in their interpersonal relationships. In each case, we will identify a candidate collective virtue of the relevant type, discuss its nature from philosophical and theological perspectives, and, drawing on relevant empirical research, provide reason for thinking that applying empirical methods to it can yield additional insights about its value.