Introducing Suzie Macaluso

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Suzie Macaluso has joined the Siburt Institute team as our Research Director.

Dr. Suzie Macaluso has been a long-time partner of the Siburt Institute in some of our initiatives, and we are thrilled that she is joining the team in a fuller way as our new Research Director. Dr. Macaluso is trained as a sociologist of religion and survey researcher, and she and Dr. Carley Dodd developed what is now known as our Church Health Assessment (CHA) in 2016. That work grew out of Suzie’s desire to better understand the factors that make a congregation “healthy.”

As it happens, Dr. Macaluso’s passion for helping Churches of Christ was ignited through undergraduate research during her baccalaureate work at Cascade College, where she surveyed church leaders in the Pacific Northwest on why members were leaving their congregations.  This interest continued in her master’s and doctoral work at Purdue University as she studied church growth among white Protestant Christian denominations and then how changing local demographics impact feelings of a sense of community in Catholic parishes. Since she completed her Ph.D. in 2010, her research agenda has focused on understanding Christian college students' spiritual formation, learning more about why people choose to leave their congregation and where they go when they do, and researching what makes a congregation healthy. 

As of September 2024, the Siburt Institute has been able to serve 58 congregations through Dr. Macaluso’s work on the Church Health Assessment, and we are so grateful for this aspect of our ministry.  The CHA is a robust and statistically reliable instrument that compiles congregational members’ perceptions on nine different areas, resulting in a report that provides church leaders with a unique, personalized, objective dashboard for their church. Suzie finds incredible joy and fulfillment in her small role in helping congregations use data to better understand their strengths and potential challenges and how that opens up dialogue in the congregation. 

Until recently, Dr. Macaluso served as a faculty member at ACU for thirteen years, but she has recently transitioned to focus more fully on her research and service to the church community. Her current projects include updating and maintaining the CHA and working with the interfaith group Faith Communities Today (FACT) to gather data from Churches of Christ as we seek to understand the United States' religious landscape better. She believes that using data can help us make more informed decisions about how best to serve our congregations individually and as a larger fellowship. Dr. Macaluso currently serves on the board of the Religious Research Association, is a member of the Faith Communities Today steering committee, and is a member of the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.