First, churches are in a good position to help meet the needs of their own congregants.
When congregants falls ill, faith communities come together to support their brothers and sisters in need.
The hundreds of congregants who used to show up for Friday evening prayers now number just dozens.
In Joplin, the torched mosque's 90 congregants invited 300 other people to join them Sunday for Eid.
Earlier attempts by Orthodox religious leaders to ban the Internet in congregants' households have largely failed, many said.
During one incident congregants shouted at him, telling him to leave, the center said in a statement released Monday.
When the white people fled the neighborhood in the 1970s, black congregants filled the pews and never changed the church's affiliation.
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For example, churchgoers might be healthier because they have the social support of their fellow congregants, who can help them when they're sick.
At Sunday's emotional church service in this farming town of fewer than 3, 000 residents, the priest told congregants his personal recollection of Wednesday's horror.
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Angry congregants gathered 300 signatures on a petition to keep the popular Yemeni cleric and throw out Mr. Ghali, who fought off the challenge.
Mr. Zwiebel told the Jewish Forward that he would continue to require congregants to consult their rabbis prior to going to the secular authorities.
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The services could last for hours, till the congregants' stomachs growled.
The earliest mutual life insurance companies in the U.S. date to the 1700s, formed by church groups to benefit their congregants in time of need.
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One of the congregants firmly behind the renovation from the beginning has been Sugerman, who says he grew up at the temple, as did his grandmother.
Mary's Catholic Church after Sunday's service, Father Boniface Onjefu hugged and consoled his congregants, and gave reassuring smiles and high fives to the church's youngest members.
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And even when victims want to speak out, some Orthodox communities require their congregants to consult with a Rabbi before taking their accusations to the secular authorities.
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According to a survey of American Catholics by the Pew Research Center taken after Pope Benedict announced his resignation, 58% of congregants favored allowing priests to marry.
Their pastor, Stan Weatherford, made the request on behalf of some congregants who didn't want to see the couple married there, according to CNN affiliate WLBT.
Steven Thompson is careful not to preach from the pulpit: He exhorts his congregants to vote but does not preach in favor of or against any specific candidate.
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He came to San Francisco from the Muath ibn Jabal Mosque in Detroit, where one of the congregants says his religious views split the community and the mosque's board.
Several expressed misgivings about President Barack Obama's support for same-sex marriage, and others had negative thoughts about Mitt Romney being a Mormon or the effect of his policies on their congregants.
But congregants began to trail him on the street.
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On Sunday morning, Eric Schneiderman, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, traveled Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn to address congregants at Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, the borough's oldest continuing black congregation.
Gregory's when they took the bread, trying to guess what they were feeling, but I was too proud and too timid to ask either priests or congregants the beginner's queries: Why do you cross yourselves?
B'nai Moshe was a few blocks from the heart of the old pushcart ghetto, still the city's poorest district though home no longer to B'nai Moshe's congregants but to a community of impoverished Negroes, recent migrants from the South.
Sometimes congregants were hostile.
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