Faith-based community social care in rural Indonesia: ngalap berkah and the kiai kampung as informal social service providers in Madura

This article examines ngalap berkah — the Javanese-Madurese practice of seeking spiritual blessings (barakah) from village Islamic scholars (kiai kampung) – as a distinctive form of faith-based community social care within rural Muslim communities in Madura, Indonesia. At a time when social work scholarship increasingly calls for engagement with non-Western and indigenous models of community care, the social welfare and social justice dimensions of Islamic vernacular practice remain substantially underexplored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between December 2024 and January 2026 in Pamekasan and Sumenep, this study employs a lived religion framework and a strengths-based perspective to analyze data from participant observation and in-depth interviews with eighteen purposively sampled participants. Findings reveal that ngalap berkah constitutes a multi-layered community social care encounter in which kiai function simultaneously as spiritual guides, psychosocial support providers, conflict mediators, and community advocates – fulfilling roles structurally analogous to those of faith-based social workers, yet grounded in the Madurese cultural logic of bhupaʾ, bhabuʾ, ghuru, rato. Participants understand barakah as holistic facilitation of wellbeing — ziyadatul khoir (the increase of goodness) – encompassing spiritual, psychological, and social dimensions that resonate with the biopsychosocial-spiritual model in social work. A critical social justice analysis reveals that the system’s care capacity coexists with structures of access inequality, gender subordination, and accountability gaps that an adequate social work engagement must name and address. It argues that ngalap berkah constitutes an indigenous faith-based social service system whose theoretical architecture offers generative resources for culturally responsive, decolonized practice and policy in religion and spirituality in social work.