Today Sightings has it easy. In a time of free-floating spiritualities, we call your attention to a survey that should be useful to everyone related to "organized religion" or "the institutional church." Let the surveyors do the sighting, which they do well.

Simply go to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research and you will find an astonishing assortment of documents. I printed out the major part of the report (it came to 66 pages), but an executive summary is available for you busier or less-interested folk.

What's it all about? Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, blessed with some Lilly Endowment funding, has undertaken "the most inclusive, denominationally sanctioned program of interfaith cooperation" in research. All groups were invited; only a few-Jehovah's Witnesses, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Church of God, etc.-chose to sit it out. Otherwise, the call "Y'all come" was answered by all kinds who came. Over 14,000 local churches responded to survey questionnaires, and Carl S. Dudley and David A. Roozen, old pros at this, prepared the materials for wide use, use that I hope will be wider after you've read this.

Much of what the researchers found was unsurprising. If you want a big congregation, be sure to be in the suburbs. Though little-bitty churches do well on intimate levels, governments had better think again if they are counting on congregations to take over welfare duties and other social services: half the congregations in America have fewer than 100 "regularly participating adults." Over half are in town and country, not city, settings.  Everyone worries about attracting the young. Religious institutions are moving from South to West. "Contemporary worship"-when will someone figure out a better name for it?-pulls in more of the young and new. There's some dumbing down at work: highly educated seminarians in denominations with creedal heritages attract fewer than do the experimenters and folksy types.

One of the surprises, say Dudley and Roozen: though many social critics and advisers urge congregations not to try to change the world or to serve up calls to justice and then to act, "congregations with a strong commitment to social justice and with direct participation in community outreach ministries are more likely to be growing than other congregations."

The downside of these reports: they can make "growing" seem like the whole show. Hartford folk don't believe that themselves; they know of many other dimensions of religious life and are ready to account for them and nudge toward them. But if you ask demographic questions you get demographic answers, and this new study is very good at what it does.