Because a temple committee controls real property, meaningful sums of donated money and the organization of a festival that can draw an entire town or neighborhood into the street, its role has historically extended well past strictly religious matters into local civic life, functioning at times as an informal chamber of commerce, a dispute mediation body, and a channel through which local elites converted wealth into social standing by funding temple renovations or festival expenses.
Scholars of Chinese and Taiwanese folk religion, notably John Lagerwey's work on the social history of Chinese ritual, have documented how rival temple committees, or committees representing rival lineage or place-of-origin factions within a single community, could become sites of real local political contest, with control over a prominent temple carrying prestige and influence well beyond religious authority narrowly defined.
In postwar Taiwan, where folk religion has continued to flourish with relatively little state interference compared to mainland China under Communist rule, temple committees remain a visible and often well documented part of local civic infrastructure, and their public accounting, festival organizing and property management functions place them, functionally if not doctrinally, closer to a neighborhood association or civic trust than to a denomination's national governing body, the very absence that the parallel Denomination gap for Chinese Folk Religion reflects rather than omits by oversight.