Religious and faith-based organisations constitute a large and important group of organisations. This is the first book to study systematically their characteristics and the distinctive challenges they pose to the people managing them. Malcolm Torry discusses how to define religious and faith-based organisations, how to study them, and the secular context in which they operate in Western Europe and the USA. There are chapters on congregations, denominations, governance, membership, the clergy, leadership, and religious and faith-based organisations' relationship to civil society. The book relies on research-based literature and case studies and contains full bibliographies, making it an essential tool for anyone studying the important new field of religious and faith-based organisations.