Browsing by Author "Neal, Jerusha"

This thesis will describe the way a story functions within a sermon as a layer of meaning placed over the biblical text that enhances a particular message from the Gospel. Stories allow the faithful to become active listeners as they unite their own stories to the one being told, creating a shared, lived experience. To demonstrate how the layering of stories function in a homily, I have created an art series of assemblages, visually illustrating how each layer focuses on certain textual details while discarding others. This visual exegesis highlights themes in the biblical text and illuminates the sermonic role of stories. It also provides an avenue for spiritual reflection, revealing similarities between my artistic process and my process of sermon preparation. The thesis is completed with a homily, synthesizing the elements described and sharing a message of hope from the scriptural account of the three young men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3).

This is a book about life-in-death work, what the Christian tradition has often called salvation or atonement. How does the life, arrest, trial, conviction, execution, and release from state-supervision of Jesus Christ enact the salvation of the cosmos. How does that one carceral life-in-death link up with life in the face of prison death today? I have sought to answer these questions by taking my body in and out of prison as a prison chaplain while conversing with other prison chaplains, theologian Karl Barth, and the biblical witness to Jesus Christ. In the tradition of theological ethnography, this work brings together theological and biblical reflection with data from a two-year, collaborative ethnography on current and former prison chaplains. This is the first nation-wide study of prison chaplaincy based on an interview protocol rather than a survey, and it provides a wealth of narratives on the complexities of prison chaplaincy, an understudied profession. Karl Barth serves as a conversation partner throughout because he enters the witness box as one who knows and writes the incarcerated Christ, has been arrested and convicted himself, and practiced prison chaplaincy as a volunteer chaplain at Basel Prison from 1954-1964.As a practical soteriology, this work describes how prison chaplains follow the arc of Jesus’ life and work. Chaplains follow Jesus’ incarnation in their ministry of presence, embodying the way that Jesus’ prophetic work threatens social divisions and death-dealing authorities. They receive the same death-threats that Jesus received and bear the impact of prisons in their bodies, being made sin for the sake of salvation. They stand with Jesus and others in carceral death, and they participate in Jesus’ resurrected life-after-death, sometimes while still in prison and sometimes having been freed from it. The architecture of this book follows that story line – the arc of Jesus’ incarnation, prophetic ministry, arrest, death, and resurrection – what Christians confess to be the arc of salvation. That salvific scaffolding is then filled up with the narratives of chaplains – historically, from within this study, and from my own professional experiences. The words of chaplains become the eyewitness accounts to life-in-death work, i.e., to the texture of salvation.

This thesis looks to Peter as a model of witnessing to Christ through the act of preaching. Its primary material are the speeches delivered immediately after the arrival of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, 3, 4, and 5. A study of the similarities those speeches reveals the basic components of Peter’s model: the involvement of the Holy Spirit; building the sermon on recent miraculous events; presenting a clear, concise, and consistent version of the kerygma; making use of Scripture as evidence; and finishing with a call to response. To apply Peter’s model to a mainline Protestant pulpit, the author utilized her observations in the preparation and delivery of a Christmas Eve sermon. The effectiveness of that application was measured through an anonymous follow-up survey and a comparison of January attendance with the previous year, as well as the author’s own impressions. Although the application of Peter’s model did not translate into a miraculous increase in attendance, the survey responses and the author’s positive experience indicated that it is both possible and beneficial to follow Peter’s example in contemporary preaching.

The work of missions has been integral to the church’s identity since Jesus commissioned his followers to make disciples, to teach, to baptize, and to tend to the needs of his people. In the long history of the church, missions is a complicated story full of both success and failure. It is also an aspect of the church’s identity that has at times been misunderstood, even by those within the church. This project is a response to one local congregation whose attitudes about and participation in missions revealed an opportunity to develop a more complete understanding of missions.

Using Jesus’ last words to his disciples and the apostle Paul’s writings to the church at Corinth, this project builds the case that biblical missions is sacrificial, formational, holistic, and transformational. In Luke-Acts, Jesus tells the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit before they go into all the world. They sacrifice their control, their comfort, and their preferences. In Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples not merely to go into the world, but to make disciples as they go, by baptizing and teaching. Their work is formational, as they make more disciples in the same way Jesus formed them. In John, Jesus tells Peter to tend to the physical needs of his people. The work of Peter and all subsequent disciples of Jesus is to treat the needs of others holistically, nurturing the body as well as the soul. Finally, in 2 Corinthians, Paul explains to the Corinthians how giving to the collection for Jerusalem will open the door for their own transformation. This transformation – more than the benefit to the believers in Jerusalem – is what Paul puts forward as a motivation for benevolence.

Taken together, these four truths about missions paint a picture of how and why the modern church still ought to engage in missions. The product that came out of this congregational and biblical research is a 4-session Bible study with Leader Guides that is designed to teach each of these truths. At the culmination, the Bible study participants will have the opportunity to learn more about specific missions opportunities and to find a way engage in missions through the local church.