Browsing by Author "Colón-Emeric, Edgardo"

If a church reflects its larger community, it will have more dynamic interactions among different people. Current U.S. communities consist of very diverse people who have different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Since the mid 20th century, various immigrant communities who have dissimilar cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions have accelerated the need of change in American churches. The drastic cultural change has demanded churches to equip their lay and clergy leaders with multicultural competencies for effective ministries.

My thesis explores imaginative leadership in cultural crossroads. Emphasizing the leadership imagination of cross-cultural ministry, I approach it in biblical, theological, and missional perspectives. In this dynamic cultural milieu, the study topic may help the church renew its ecclesial purpose by seeing cross-cultural ministry as a creative opportunity to reach out to more diverse people of God. I begin with a conceptual framework for cross-cultural ministry and cultural intelligence. Then I explain why cross-cultural ministry is significant and how it enhances the spirit of Christ Jesus. As I develop the thesis, I discuss leadership challenge and development in the cross-cultural ministry context. This thesis may contribute to equipping lay and clergy leaders by overcoming the homogeneous ‘in-group’ mindset in the church.

The primary focus is on developing marginal leadership of church in the post-Christendom era. Church leaders must creatively hold the tension between the current church context and Christian faith resources and seek a hopeful resolution as a third way through integrative thought process. While conventional leadership emphasizes a better choice out of the given options, marginal leadership takes time for integrative thought process to seek a new direction for the future. Conventional leaders take the center with their power, status, and prestige, but marginal leaders position themselves on the edge. Leading from the edge is a distinctive cross-cultural leadership and is based on the servant leadership of Jesus Christ who put himself as a servant for the marginalized. By serving and relating to others on the margin, this imaginative leadership may make appropriate changes desired in today’s American churches.

In addition to academic research, I looked into the realities of cross-cultural leadership in the local churches through congregational studies. I speculated that church leadership involves both laity and clergy and that it can be enhanced. All Christians are called to serve the Lord according to their gifts, and it is crucial for lay and clergy persons to develop their leadership character and skills. In particular, as humans are contextualized with their own cultures, church leaders often confront great challenges in cross-cultural or multicultural situations. Through critical thoughts and imaginative leadership strategies, however, they can overcome intrinsic human prejudice and obstacles.

Through the thesis project, I have reached four significant conclusions. First, cultural intelligence is an essential leadership capacity for all church leaders. As the church consists of more diverse cultural people today, its leaders need to have cultural competencies. In particular, cross-cultural leaders must be equipped with cultural intelligence. Cross-cultural ministry is not a simple byproduct of social change, but a creative strategy to open a door to bring God’s reconciliation among diverse people. Accordingly, church leaders are to be well prepared to effectively cope with the challenges of cultural interactions. Second, both lay and clergy leaders’ imaginative leadership is crucial for leading the congregation. While conventional leadership puts an emphasis on selecting a better choice based on the principle of opportunity cost, imaginative leaders critically consider the present church situations and Christian faith values together in integrative thoughts and pursue a third way as the congregation’s future hope. Third, cross-cultural leadership has a unique characteristic of leading from the edge and promotes God’s justice and peaceable relationships among different people. By leading the congregation from the edge, church leaders may experience the heart of Christ Jesus who became the friend of the marginalized. Fourth, the ‘homogeneous unit principle’ theory has its limit for today’s complex ‘inter-group’ community context. The church must be a welcoming and embracing faith community for all people. Cross-cultural ministry may become an entrance door for a more peaceable and reconciling life among different people. By building solidarity with others, the church may experience a kingdom reality.

This thesis focuses on the mission of the church and marginal leadership of church leaders in ever-changing cultural crossroads. The church becomes a hope in the broken and apathetic world, and Christians are called to build relationships inside and beyond the church. It is significant for church leaders to be faithfully present on the margin and relate to diverse people. By consistently positioning themselves on the margin, they can build relationships with new and diverse people and shape a faithful life pattern for others.

The following doctoral thesis explores the Catholic Church’s New Evangelization movement as it relates to the rise of the western-secular (American) paradigm. In an attempt to infuse this evangelistic movement with an undercurrent of rupture, it pulls from modern continental philosophy to faithfully engage the secular age with innovation and holiness. The thesis counters various perspectives on what constitutes the New Evangelization today, arguing instead that 'new evangelization' cannot occur without elements of rupture and subversion towards certain distorted ideologies of secularism.

The following doctoral thesis explores the Catholic Church’s New Evangelization movement relating to the rise of the western-secular (American) paradigm. In an attempt to infuse this evangelistic movement with an undercurrent of rupture, it pulls from modern continental philosophy to faithfully engage the secular age with innovation and holiness. The thesis counters various perspectives on what constitutes the New Evangelization today, arguing instead that a new evangelization cannot occur without elements of rupture and subversion toward specific ideologies of secularism.

Abstract

This dissertation queries the ongoing significance and fruitfulness of Augustine of Hippo's insight that the Holy Spirit is the Love of God. Rather than turning to the standard text, his De Trinitate, this project examines closely the earlier Tractatus in Epistolam Joannis ad Pathos, a set of sermons on 1 John delivered mostly during the Octave of Easter.

The study of the Tractatus is offered in conjunction with a much later interlocutor, John Wesley. A close reading of Augustine's sermons of the Tractatus is synthesized with a close reading of Wesley's five extant sermons on texts from 1 John. The principal argument in this dissertation is that a synthesis of Augustine and John Wesley on the Holy Spirit produces a nuanced understanding of the Holy Spirit as the Love of God that enriches contemporary systematic theology. Furthermore, instead of either a purely archeological retrieval or genealogical study of these two theologians, this dissertation demonstrates the potential for enrichment by offering constructive proposals concerning the systematic coherence between a theology of divine desire and a theology of Christian initiation made possible by this Augustinian-Wesleyan approach to the Spirit.

The opening chapters, one through three, form an exegetical and synthesizing foundation, establishing the basic building blocks of the constructive proposals of chapter four, a theology of divine desire, and chapter five, a theology of Christian initiation. In the early chapters, the dissertation draws on the recent insights into systematic theology of Sarah Coakley and A.N. Williams in order to approach systematics in a way that brings coherence to a disparate set of homiletical texts. The conclusion of the dissertation is that Augustine's naming of the Holy Spirit, far from being an ancient relic best abandoned, resonates strongly with Wesley's own insights into the Spirit's person and work and that an Augustinian-Wesleyan pneumatology suggests possibilities for further cross-centuries examination of these two significant Christian preachers.

This thesis introduces a new interpretation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective. It will argue that religionless Christianity reflects Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission for the modernized and globalized world. Bonhoeffer observed the world becoming nonreligious in all aspects of life and challenged the church to prepare for a generation of people without religious a priori knowledge, whose language would be vastly different from the language of the church. Advances in science and technology have precipitated modernization and globalization, which result in a movement toward human autonomy. The authority of God in the public sphere has lost its significance and influence, and Christianity is considered an individual preference in the private sphere. The world appears to operate just fine even if God does not exist.

The conventional method of mission focuses on communicating the Gospel to individuals residing in a secular environment. This is achieved by adapting the core tenets of Christianity into a vernacular that resonates with them, with the ultimate aim of converting the nonreligious world into a Christian one. In other words, the objective of the mission is to transform the context (secular world) by contextualizing the content (Christianity). Bonhoeffer’s approach is unique in that he attempted to transform Christianity to make it meaningful and relevant for nonreligious people. Bonhoeffer’s theology of mission challenges the church to embrace religionless Christianity as a new form of Christianity for a nonreligious world. Instead of requiring nonreligious people to accept religious doctrines and traditions to become Christians, religionless Christianity offers them to remain in a nonreligious world by becoming religionless Christians.

The term “religionless Christianity” is difficult to reconcile when “Christianity” is already understood as a religion and if Bonhoeffer’s concept of a “completely religionless age” is interpreted as a world without religion. Efforts have been made to resolve this logical fallacy by (1) removing religious aspects in Christianity to make it secular and calling it “secular Christianity,” (2) claiming that Bonhoeffer’s prediction of the religionless age has been proven wrong by presenting the statistical evidence of religious revivalism, (3) suggesting religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s apologetics to explain and defend the core beliefs of Christianity to nonreligious people, and (4) interpreting “religionless” to mean “without legalistic religious traditions of the church” and suggesting that religionless Christianity is Bonhoeffer’s version of a “seeker-sensitive” church.

In this thesis, I will argue that Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity is vastly misinterpreted because anthropological, sociological, and theological approaches to Bonhoeffer’s concepts of “religion,” “religionlessness,” and “Christianity” are not adequate to explain Bonhoeffer’s motivation in exploring the necessity of religionless Christianity. I will present Bonhoeffer as a missionary who stood between two worlds—the world of the religious and the nonreligious—struggling to transform Christianity for the religious and the nonreligious by restoring the centrality of Jesus Christ as the Lord of the world. By analyzing key aspects of religionless Christianity from a missiological perspective, I will establish religionless Christianity as Bonhoeffer’s proposal of a new form of Christianity for today’s church.

Multiethnic churches could be places of healing and profound witness to the reconciliation found in Christ. Unfortunately, our habitus, that interior framework that shapes the way we conceive of the world, is not currently sufficient to allow for the flourishing of multiethnic churches. Western cultural habitus has shaped us to see divisions as normal, to place value judgments on people and see them as other, and to prioritize success and efficiency over the slow growth of humans and relationships. The church has largely accepted this habitus, which has resulted in Christians who are unable to imagine and live into the realized reconciliation, communion, that is the hallmark of the new creation in Christ.Multiethnic churches and their people need a new habitus to enable them to reimagine their gathered life together. Drawing upon Paul’s discussion of the Lord’s Supper and the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians, we find that Spirit-led communion with Christ allows us to reimagine communion with others. Herein, four elements emerge as helpful in forming the new habitus: finding identity and belonging in communion with Christ; discerning the body of Christ; waiting for and receiving one another; and becoming a witness to the crucified and risen Christ, for the sake of the world. These suggest slow, embodied practices that, when led by the Holy Spirit, reshape our vision of the world and our ways of gathering. Ways of engaging a number of such practices toward the formation of a new habitus, and thus a new communion, will be suggested. Slow communion becomes a way of describing both the long journey of reconciliation, and those practices that reshape us for communion on this journey. Our communion is slow because it takes time to form a new habitus, and be formed by it. It is slow because the new vision of life together requires us to engage the brokenness we wrought in our old habitus of division and speed, a reckoning which cannot be skipped over or rushed. And it is slow because it leads toward a realized reconciliation, a communion for lifetimes together, never ending, always seeking to follow close to the leading of the Holy Spirit. By learning to see the life together as a Spirit-shaped, slow communion, multiethnic churches may be able to become bodies of true communion, living and proclaiming the reconciliation of Christ, for the sake of a weary and hopeless world.

Multiethnic churches could be places of healing and profound witness to the reconciliation found in Christ. Unfortunately, our habitus, that interior framework that shapes the way we conceive of the world, is not currently sufficient to allow for the flourishing of multiethnic churches. Western cultural habitus has shaped us to see divisions as normal, to place value judgments on people and see them as other, and to prioritize success and efficiency over the slow growth of humans and relationships. The church has largely accepted this habitus, which has resulted in Christians who are unable to imagine and live into the realized reconciliation, communion, that is the hallmark of the new creation in Christ.Multiethnic churches and their people need a new habitus to enable them to reimagine their gathered life together. Drawing upon Paul’s discussion of the Lord’s Supper and the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians, we find that Spirit-led communion with Christ allows us to reimagine communion with others. Herein, four elements emerge as helpful in forming the new habitus: finding identity and belonging in communion with Christ; discerning the body of Christ; waiting for and receiving one another; and becoming a witness to the crucified and risen Christ, for the sake of the world. These suggest slow, embodied practices that, when led by the Holy Spirit, reshape our vision of the world and our ways of gathering. Ways of engaging a number of such practices toward the formation of a new habitus, and thus a new communion, will be suggested. Slow communion becomes a way of describing both the long journey of reconciliation, and those practices that reshape us for communion on this journey. Our communion is slow because it takes time to form a new habitus, and be formed by it. It is slow because the new vision of life together requires us to engage the brokenness we wrought in our old habitus of division and speed, a reckoning which cannot be skipped over or rushed. And it is slow because it leads toward a realized reconciliation, a communion for lifetimes together, never ending, always seeking to follow close to the leading of the Holy Spirit. By learning to see the life together as a Spirit-shaped, slow communion, multiethnic churches may be able to become bodies of true communion, living and proclaiming the reconciliation of Christ, for the sake of a weary and hopeless world.

Christian theology and discourse work by separating the human individual from “the environment.” The science of the human microbiome exposes the ecological, social and theological inadequacies of this and other western conceptions of the human individual. As multiple disciplines work to accommodate the reality of the human as a multispecies amalgam, the increasingly accepted anthropology of the holobiont presses against theological anthropology’s main trope of the imago dei. While the imago dei is classically identified as some combination of human freedom, self-movement and intellect, holobiont science suggests none of these are possible apart from our microbial symbionts. The idea that I am not myself without God may sometimes be forgotten, but the idea that I am not myself without microbes has scarcely been thought. At least it has scarcely been thought by theologians. Doing theology alert to the boundary-breeching microbe opens the door to a more symbiotic anthropology that re-centers humanity’s dependence on creation.

Barriers to developing a holobiont theology include not only a theological genealogy that is prone to set the human at odds with animality, but also a history whereby theology, theories of disease and a pasteurian microbiopolitics have co-evolved to support a habit of self-deceit that traces back to the Fall, both the event and the doctrine.

This dissertation develops a theology of the holobiont by fusing aspects and interests of relational theology, new materialism and animality studies to suggest imaging God and epistemology are symbiotic.

After addressing the crisis of the microbiome to theology, I analyze a history of the doctrine of the Fall and a history of disease to suggest that germ theory is a palimpsest of the Fall; it impresses upon, writes imperfectly over the still partially visible ancient doctrine of the drama of evil and sin. I construct a doctrine of the Fall and recovery from it in an ecological mode to show that symbiosis extends beyond matters of biology to matters of grace. A microbially-informed doctrine of the Fall as “turning to the wrong tree” paves the way for an embrace of holobiont theology. The project of holobiont theology exposes the ancient and theological distortions about being human that fund and amplify in germ theory, a modern epidemiological framework, and reforms these distortions by centering microbial matter in the story of how God makes, humbles and saves humans.

I test this thesis on the pivotal theologian of Thomas Aquinas. His treatment of spontaneous generation, his theology of digestion and personhood and his non-subject-centered, participatory way of knowing and being human anticipates holobiont theology. His doctrines of creation and anthropology are a fitting tool to think towards a holobiont theology that takes up the wisdom of indigenous accounts of the ecological body, where human and world support, absorb, assimilate and become each other without violation.

Christian theology and discourse work by separating the human individual from “the environment.” The science of the human microbiome exposes the ecological, social and theological inadequacies of this and other western conceptions of the human individual. As multiple disciplines work to accommodate the reality of the human as a multispecies amalgam, the increasingly accepted anthropology of the holobiont presses against theological anthropology’s main trope of the imago dei. While the imago dei is classically identified as some combination of human freedom, self-movement and intellect, holobiont science suggests none of these are possible apart from our microbial symbionts. The idea that I am not myself without God may sometimes be forgotten, but the idea that I am not myself without microbes has scarcely been thought. At least it has scarcely been thought by theologians. Doing theology alert to the boundary-breeching microbe opens the door to a more symbiotic anthropology that re-centers humanity’s dependence on creation.

Barriers to developing a holobiont theology include not only a theological genealogy that is prone to set the human at odds with animality, but also a history whereby theology, theories of disease and a pasteurian microbiopolitics have co-evolved to support a habit of self-deceit that traces back to the Fall, both the event and the doctrine.

This dissertation develops a theology of the holobiont by fusing aspects and interests of relational theology, new materialism and animality studies to suggest imaging God and epistemology are symbiotic.

After addressing the crisis of the microbiome to theology, I analyze a history of the doctrine of the Fall and a history of disease to suggest that germ theory is a palimpsest of the Fall; it impresses upon, writes imperfectly over the still partially visible ancient doctrine of the drama of evil and sin. I construct a doctrine of the Fall and recovery from it in an ecological mode to show that symbiosis extends beyond matters of biology to matters of grace. A microbially-informed doctrine of the Fall as “turning to the wrong tree” paves the way for an embrace of holobiont theology. The project of holobiont theology exposes the ancient and theological distortions about being human that fund and amplify in germ theory, a modern epidemiological framework, and reforms these distortions by centering microbial matter in the story of how God makes, humbles and saves humans.

I test this thesis on the pivotal theologian of Thomas Aquinas. His treatment of spontaneous generation, his theology of digestion and personhood and his non-subject-centered, participatory way of knowing and being human anticipates holobiont theology. His doctrines of creation and anthropology are a fitting tool to think towards a holobiont theology that takes up the wisdom of indigenous accounts of the ecological body, where human and world support, absorb, assimilate and become each other without violation.

The aim of this project is to provide a compelling and theologically sound understanding of the ordination of Elders in the United Methodist Church. Unfortunately within 21st century United Methodism, the telos of the ordination process is often portrayed as a credentialing or licensure that most poignantly speaks to what someone has done to receive such a certification, but says little to nothing about what lies beyond it. This unintended and inadequate portrayal of the telos of the ordination process bears significant consequences for the depth of ordained leadership and the vitality of the church. In this thesis, I will argue that the ordination of Christian leaders is primarily a covenant made between God, the church, and the ordained regarding a particular ordered way of living that provides leadership to the church for the flourishing of communities and in service and witness to the Triune God. Ordination is not a possession. It is a confession and patterning of lives around the life of Jesus. In particular, I will demonstrate how this understanding of ordination is deeply “at-home” within the Methodist tradition, and how this understanding and praxis of ordination can cultivate a vibrancy in both ordained and lay leadership for the flourishing of our communities.

In order to make this argument, I will draw from the resources of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience which offer a fourfold lens of theological engagement that is central to the Methodist tradition. This project will begin by exploring a theology of ordination more broadly, followed by a more specific exploration of ordination in the Methodist movement. From here, this project will draw on the ecumenical witness of Saint Óscar Romero who offers a critical example for what ordination as an ordered way of living looks like. Finally, this thesis will work to establish the fourfold ministry of Elders – Word, Sacrament, Service, and Order – not simply as duties or tasks to complete, but rhythms by which Elders and congregations can pattern their lives in witness to the Reign of God being revealed in our midst.