Browsing by Subject "Christian"

How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.

This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.

Coming Home: A Historical Assessment of Private Domestic Space as the Primary Locus of Christian Hospitality

ABSTRACT

Subject

Contemporary Christian individuals and institutions seeking direction in a post-Constantinian world have begun turning to the earliest communities of faith for guidance. Theologians, scholars, ecclesial leaders, and laity alike are finding that the concept of hospitality frequently surfaces as an integral dynamic of Christian communal identity, discipleship, and Gospel transmission. They consistently argue that hospitality is a necessary component of Christian life and that it represents a lost discipline worthy of reclaiming. This thesis builds on previous work by arguing that not just in the beginning, but in every epoch of Christian faith, private domestic space has provided the most suitable and effective environment for such practices. Therefore, if there is hope to be found in reclaiming the discipline of hospitality, the home must be restored as integral to the concept. If private domestic space as the primary locus of hospitality disappears from the Christian cultural landscape, the essential and most basic model of the dynamic will disappear with it. Evidence will confirm that throughout its entire history, although in varying degrees, hospitality has served as a central tenet, a consistent thread, and an ongoing leitmotif of Christian faith and witness. It will be established that its ultimate expression has consistently been found in the intimacy of the personal home, and it is this environment that has most effectively provided a recognizable paradigm for various manifestations of the dynamic. The image of hospitality being offered and/or withheld can be found in numerous areas of human endeavor. The concept emerges politically, socially, economically, and theologically. Thus the question is begged of Christians, “What are the implications of a diminished and weakened physical, incarnational, home-based hospitality, and how might history offer the help necessary in restoring its authenticity?”

Materials and Methods

Because readers are encouraged to rethink Christian hospitality as a lost legacy whose original potency has diminished over the course of history, each epoch will be deconstructed, examined and analyzed for clues as to when, how, and why this change occurred. What will emerge are clear and continuous patterns of activity and behavior, patterns that only a historical perspective can bring to light. The evidence, consisting of over one hundred books, peer reviewed articles, and primary sources will not be presented as a simple chronology of “proofs.” In some instances, literary metaphor is considered an acceptable form of persuasion whereas in others concrete models and paradigms are more effective tools. Whereas dozens of voices will enrich the conversation of some periods, individual life models will dominate the discussion of others. Early evidence will not necessarily represent Eastern or Western Christianity, but as the faith expands, geography will become more of a factor. Some evidence is historically accurate; some is ancient but venerated hagiography.

Conclusion

The conclusion of the paper is that although the centrality of private domestic space has clearly declined, there are signs of hope for the recovery of authentic home-based Christian hospitality, as communities of worship and individuals alike are encouraged to seek and find inspiration in successful past practices.

“Investigating Contemplative Christian Spirituality as Christian Formation through a Process Hermeneutic: an analysis of History, Evolution, and Neuroscience in Christian Meditation” argues that a contemplative approach to contemporary Christianity may serve to deepen the formation and discipleship of Christians in a manner that endeavors to shape the worldview and the epistemological lens through which followers of Jesus experience life in this world. This thesis offers a social and theological critique that addresses a failure in Christian formation by considering obstacles to intimacy with God created by common ecclesial pedagogical approaches that neglect the experiential and the intellectual dimensions of the faith journey due to outmoded cosmological models and a lack of dialogue with neuroscientific research on the human brain. Considering theologians in the early, medieval, and modern church who have cultivated approaches to experiential understandings of faith through meditation, this thesis argues that contemplative practice in dialogue with a theology of process may provide a necessary vocabulary for the future vitality of Christian discipleship. Rooting a theological methodology in the ‘evolutionary’ perspective proposed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in concert with findings at the intersection of religion and neuroscience, this thesis finds that convincing biological and theological warrants exist for incorporating meditation into paradigms for Christian formation.

“Investigating Contemplative Christian Spirituality as Christian Formation through a Process Hermeneutic: an analysis of History, Evolution, and Neuroscience in Christian Meditation” argues that a contemplative approach to contemporary Christianity may serve to deepen the formation and discipleship of Christians in a manner that endeavors to shape the worldview and the epistemological lens through which followers of Jesus experience life in this world. This thesis offers a social and theological critique that addresses a failure in Christian formation by considering obstacles to intimacy with God created by common ecclesial pedagogical approaches that neglect the experiential and the intellectual dimensions of the faith journey due to outmoded cosmological models and a lack of dialogue with neuroscientific research on the human brain. Considering theologians in the early, medieval, and modern church who have cultivated approaches to experiential understandings of faith through meditation, this thesis argues that contemplative practice in dialogue with a theology of process may provide a necessary vocabulary for the future vitality of Christian discipleship. Rooting a theological methodology in the ‘evolutionary’ perspective proposed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in concert with findings at the intersection of religion and neuroscience, this thesis finds that convincing biological and theological warrants exist for incorporating meditation into paradigms for Christian formation.

This project explores the ways in which clergy and Christian leaders can positively affect the continued development of the self-image of Black, Christian, Gen Z women. For those who are privileged to hold a space of influence with this demographic, experience among those in collegiate ministry shows that there is an abundance of curiosity and doubt, tenderness and fragility related to their self-image. These circumstances provide the opportunity for building up the self-image of these young adults, God’s beloved.The thesis first defines “self-image” using psychology, sociology, and theology as a foundation. Next, using a methodology that is womanist in nature, this project allows Black, Christian, Gen Z women to speak for themselves. The project explores via in- depth interviews with ten Black, Christian, Gen Z women how their self-image has developed over time, specifically in regard to their encounters with Christian organizations and clergy and Christian leaders. Finally, this project asks these young women to recommend actions Christian clergy and other Christian leaders can take to positively affect the self-image of women like themselves. What results are recommendations that will benefit not only Black, Christian, Gen Z women, but also will benefit others far beyond this limited demographic. A project that was implicitly womanist yields explicitly womanist results.

Church leaders, both lay and clergy, shape Christian community. Among their central tasks are: building communal identity, nurturing Christian practices, and developing faithful structures. When it comes to understanding the approach of the earliest Christian communities to these tasks, the Didache might well be the most important text most twenty-first century church leaders have never read. The Didache innovated on tradition, shaping the second generation of Christians to meet the crises and challenges of a changing world.

Most likely composed in the second half of the first century, the Didache served as a training manual for gentile converts to Christianity, preparing them for life in Christian community. This brief document, roughly one third the length of Mark’s gospel, developed within early Jewish-Christian communities. It soon found wide usage throughout the Mediterranean region, and its influence endured throughout the patristic and into the medieval period.

The Didache outlines emerging Christian practices that were rooted in both Jewish tradition and early Jesus material, yet were reaching forward in innovative ways. The Didache adopts historical teachings and practices and then adapts them for an evolving context. In this respect, the writers of the Didache, as well as the community shaped by its message, exemplify the pattern of thinking described by Greg Jones as “traditioned innovation.”

The Didache invites reflection on the shape and content of Christian community and Christian leadership in the twenty-first century. As churches and church leaders engage a rapidly changing world, the Didache is an unlikely and yet important conversation partner from two millennia ago. A quick read through its pages – a task accomplished in less than half an hour – brings the reader face to face with a brand of Christianity both very familiar and strikingly dissimilar to modern Christianity. Such dissonance challenges current assumptions about the church and creates a space in which to re-imagine our situation in light of this ancient Christian tradition. The Didache provides a window through which we might re-examine current conceptualizations of Christian life, liturgy, and leadership.

This thesis begins with an exploration of the form and function of the Didache and an examination of a number of important background issues for the informed study of the Didache. The central chapters of this thesis exegete and explore select passages in each of the three primary sections of the Didache – the Two Ways (Didache 1-6), the liturgical section (Didache 7-10), and the church order (Didache 11-15). In each instance, the composers of the Didache reach back into a cherished and life-giving aspect of the community’s heritage and shape it anew into a fresh and faithful approach to living the Christian life in a drastically different context.

The thesis concludes with three suggestions of how the Didache may provide a resource for the way the Church in the present thinks about training disciples, shaping community, and developing leadership structures. These conversation starters offer beginning points for a richer, fuller discussion of traditioned innovation in our current church context. The Didache provides a source of wisdom from our spiritual forebears that modern Christian leaders would do well not to ignore. With a look through the first century window of the Didache, twenty-first century Christians can discover fresh insights for shaping Christian community in the present.