Browsing by Author "Musser, Sarah"

Many Christians struggle to be significantly formed by their faith through the traditional practices and ministries of the local church. The prevalence and power of competing voices in our culture create exhaustion and fragmentation. Busy schedules, work demands, and extracurricular activities add to this struggle, monopolizing many households’ time and availability. Acknowledging the continual decline in church attendance and engagement across denominational affiliations and traditions, and current research that clearly reveals the necessity of the institutional church for faith development, I will explore some of the ways the church can begin shifting its faith formation practices to help congregants rediscover the deep center of their being in Christ and grow in their faith.

Mining the depths of the Christian tradition, I will explore how the church can expand its educational ministries by reinstituting the ancient process of catechesis, which is how the church practiced faith formation for its first three centuries of existence. Arguing that the home is the primary source of faith and values, I will provide the church a method for extending the catechumenate outside the walls of the church by equipping families for the work of faith formation in the home.

Drawing from deep within the well of church history, I will examine the core Christian values of early monastic rules that believers must develop in order to participate in the life and mission of Jesus. Utilizing Aristotle’s process for cultivating virtues, I will examine the spiritual disciplines and shared practices of Augustine’s and Benedict’s rules to provide concrete steps for habituating the core Christian values in the lives of believers. As these values are fostered in the homes of believers, Christ can begin to transform their lives from the inside out. What I am proposing is an accessible method for churches to begin equipping families for how to live more fully in the way of Jesus that allows them to experience the abundance (John 10:10) that Christ promised in their homes and wherever they go.

The care of creation is the responsibility of all Christians. Consequently, the Black Church has a role to play and must attend to its responsibilities seriously. In this thesis, I take a comprehensive look into rituals of the Black Church related to death—funerals, memorials, and burial practices—and how the church can take ownership and be more responsible in the care of creation. For instance, the Black Church could benefit from a new aesthetic of beauty related to funeral processing. Currently, the Black Church funeral concept of aesthetics is tightly coupled with visuals and preservation of the corpse—shiny gold coffins and embalming. As a chaplain, director of bereavement, and minister of the Gospel, I focus on the Black Church’s relative silence and insufficient attention given to how our practices around death go against the foundational principle of covenant relationship and therefore distort our perceptions of Christian beauty. This thesis engages aesthetics and ecological commitments that lead to introducing practices of ministry that honor God and contribute to the care and sustainability of the earth.

This thesis, in part, seeks to provide a foundation for understanding the Christian call to ministry with those who are poor and suffering, specifically with the asylum seeker. It is a resource and formation guide for congregations and individuals sensing a call from God to extend themselves in this way. The project provides a foundation of Christian history and Scripture that speaks to the call of Christ to deny self and follow him in ministry with the least—those who are hungry, thirsty, poor, and forgotten. Included is some guidance on how to structure a ministry of this sort, important questions to consider, and reflection upon leadership challenges that arise in this type of work. It tells the story of one congregation’s approach to developing a ministry of a hospitality house for asylum-seekers and why churches should recover the discipline of hospitality.

This thesis explores some key reasons why it is often very difficult for Christians to love “racially” different Christians. Examining over eighty years of neuroscience and psychological research reveals key understandings about how the brain works when experiencing people who are racially different. Four psychological processes are major contributors to implicit biases that form mental barriers, feed stereotypes, cause discrimination, and lead to individual and institutional racism. These implicit biases are key obstacles to our call to cultivate a beloved community. Research suggests that once biases are identified, actions that counter biases are effective when the stimulus is ongoing. Building off these findings, I design a Bible Study referencing group psychology and theological reflection to be used with an intentionally diverse group of church leaders. By focusing on brain processes that impede racial reconciliation in conversation with Scripture, I develop a tool that begins healing to some of the forces that undermine unity and violate the integrity of the body of Christ.

Sacrifice often connotes death or some form of lack within popular discourse. The association of sacrifice with death is assumed in some strains of the Christian tradition that employ sacrifice within a penal substitutionary account of the atonement. In this framework, sacrifice is understood as death for the purposes of punishment. This dissertation challenges the identification of sacrifice with death. It presents a reinterpretation of sacrifice through a canonical and literary reading of Old and New Testament texts. Sacrificial practice displayed in Leviticus and Hebrews suggests that sacrifice is oriented at life rather than at death. Specifically, sacrifice in Leviticus aims toward a reinstatement of the good order of creation displayed in Genesis 1. The telos of the Levitical cult is humanity’s redemption and creation’s restoration. Both are achieved on the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 as a Sabbath. Hebrews expands upon the sacrificial logic of Leviticus in presenting Christ’s resurrection as the perfection of the cult. Christ’s sacrifice is his resurrected body, not his death. Christians are called to participate in Christ’s sacrifice, and discipleship assumes a form that challenges society’s deathly sacrifices.

Who we are and the world we live in is only discernable through the stories that shape our lives. Meaning, personality, and identity are each received via story. If one were to attempt to define oneself, such a person could only do so by using a story. One cannot understand personhood or action in the world without the narrative—it is uninterpretable without the story. Anything that we do has a story with it. Anything that we want to do will have a story with it—and when we in pastoral leadership help our people know, see, love, and understand the world and God, we will be telling them a story. In helping people understand their story in light of a larger story—they find the unity of their lives within the structure of the larger story—the story of God.The approach of this thesis has much to do with its storytelling nature. The goal is to use storytelling to communicate theological truth. Formatting the thesis in an imaginative short-story fashion to provide a robust and layered theological framework will lend to exploration that seeks to locate contemporary persons in the story of Scripture. The thesis takes ten central themes or subplots of the Gospel and portrays each in its own short story interwoven into an overarching story. Each section of the thesis focuses on a thematic expression of the Good News in a short-story method. Theological research and analysis for each follows in a 3-4-page essay in which I carefully analyze each story for the ways in which it expresses the theological concept in question. This provides a theological/literary interpretation of the story itself. Along with the 3–4-page essay, I provide a bibliography specific to the literary and theological concept of each chapter. In creating this collection, I hope to provide a unique resource for theological reflection that will be helpful for preachers, congregations, and anyone who’s willing to step into a story.

Abstract

This thesis argues that the challenges Zimbabwe has been facing since her independence in 1980 are a result of bad governance. There is undeniably a leadership deficit in Zimbabwe, as in many countries across Africa, that is evidenced by the continuous deterioration of living conditions of the general populace. The oppressive policies that emanated from the colonial era are still being enforced in contemporary Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, such policies are being perpetrated by the black government against black people. As a result, the economy and social lives of the populace have been ravaged by corrupt leaders, both social and religious. Many people have died at the hands of irresponsible and egocentric politicians without account. What theology can the church develop to mitigate such pernicious politics in Zimbabwe by the liberation struggle movement ZANU-PF? The church should be a non-partisan entity that functions as the soul of the nation. It is the church’s mandate to facilitate reconciliation and healing through dialogues that unify the people of Zimbabwe. The auspicious moment for the church in Zimbabwe is to facilitate an unbiased dialogue that is imbedded in Christian theology, seeking to promote democracy and leading the country towards recovery. Christian theology does not evade truth, justice and repentance. These three remain as the prerequisites for genuine reconciliation. This is the message of the church to the world, and it should never be compromised for any ungodly gain and self-aggrandizement.