Western Sydney Faith Communities Project

The Western Sydney Faith Communities Project (WSFCP) will show how local religious congregations of diverse faith traditions contribute to the cultural, spiritual, and social lives of their neighbourhoods. They play a vital role in building social cohesion and wellbeing. Conducted from 2025 to 2028, this project will provide a map and an audit of local religious congregations and their services to the community.

This project will be strengthened by partnerships between universities, government, religious and community groups.  Outputs will have a strong positive impact for communities. 

Objectives

This project aims to:

• Build collaborative partnerships based on common interests
• Map the locations of religious congregations across faith traditions in Western Sydney
• Describe the roles, functions and types of services provided by congregations
• Provide information to religious organisations to support their mission
• Develop contacts for non-Christian religious groups
• In addition, there are a range of research objectives.

 

Why is this project important?

Religious diversity and social cohesion: Maintaining social cohesion is critical for thriving cities and regions. Australia is one of the most multicultural countries in the world. It is also a highly religiously diverse country, with a history of relative peace and tolerance. Western Sydney is particularly diverse, with 47% of people identifying with Christianity and 24% with a non-Christian religion, compared with 44% and 10% for Australia as a whole.[1] As such, Western Sydney is an ideal area for exploring a diversity of local expressions of religion.

This project will build knowledge about how local religious congregations (i.e. regular gatherings of people in a particular place who identify with a particular religious tradition) contribute to strong and well-functioning communities. They provide places for people to explore deep questions, to participate in worship and in rituals of meaning. Congregations also offer relational and emotional support, as well as providing social services and advocacy to their local and wider communities. Congregations are social capital structures that can play a critical role in the wellbeing of individuals and communities.

 

Timeline

• 2025/2026: Establish funding and core team, establish partners, finalise literature review, design and start data collection
• 2026: Run Congregations Survey and in-depth studies of target congregations. 
• 2027: Analyse and publish, develop outputs to partners
• 2028: Finalise delivery of outputs to partners. Plan ongoing publications using datasets.

 

Project design and method

Stage 1: A Census of religious congregations

Stage 2: Conduct a Congregational Survey

Stage 3: Conduct in-depth interviews with a small sample of selected congregations

 

Outcomes

• Local government and key community leaders will benefit from an up-to-date listing which can be used to benefit their regions.
• Congregations can learn from others about the creative breadth of potential activities that are being run. They may form regional or faith-based networks to collaborate. 
• Regional/denominational religious leaders will have an up-to-date audit of their organisations. It will be evidence for decision-making, strategic planning and review.
• Scholars will be able to use the new data collections to analyse questions of interest about the social, political, cultural and religious contributions of congregations.
• Academics will use Australian refinement of definitions & models to inform wider work.

 

[1] Western Sydney (LGA) Community Profile. https://profile.id.com.au/cws/religion?BMID=50, accessed 23/6/2025.