Browsing by Subject "Community organizing"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Organizing the Kingdom: Community Organizing as a Model to Empower a Telos of Human Flourishing in New Church Plants
    (2019) Butler, Jason

    The Church in America is in sharp decline despite the nearly 4,000 new churches that are started each year. This thesis poses critical questions about the viability and effectiveness of church planting in America and inquires whether new “missional” churches are truly impacting their communities. Through research and field experience, this project will present a church-planting and church-renewal model that may lead to both missional community impact and growing communal influence through the principles of community organizing. The model presented here in this thesis will drive church planters and leaders to view church more as a social movement that empowers communal agency toward a telos of human flourishing rather than simply a footprint of a worshipping community that is focused on numeric growth. The key finding presented in this work is the framework of building institutional power through empowering participants toward three specific sets of practices that make a church “missional”: Kingdom Missiology, Incarnational Ecclesiology, and Political Theology. This thesis argues that precisely within the intersection of these three principles, paralleled in models of community organizing, is where all churches, but especially church plants, can create movements that shape identity and cultivate human flourishing.

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    The Organized Community: Visions of the New South in Black Atlanta, 1880-1922
    (2020-05) Nuzzolillo, Gino
    At the turn of the 20th century, the city of Atlanta flaunted its status as capital of the New South – filled with civic pride, focused on commerce, and devoid of racial conflict. W.E.B. Du Bois commented that the nation “talked of [Atlanta’s] striving,” an image effectively projected by the city’s elite Black and white communities. For all of its New South aspirations, however, inequality along lines of race, class, gender, geography, and access to the Atlanta’s many resources defined daily life. In September 1906, a violent massacre – which left dozens of Black Atlantans dead at the hands of a white mob – tarnished Atlanta’s New South veneer and made clear the ways in which competing visions of a “New South city” were playing out in Atlanta’s streets, saloons, and neighborhoods. This thesis focuses on these many visions, primarily from the perspective of diverse community organizers, social workers, educators, and preachers who articulated their worldviews and put them into action. Using personal papers, maps, city ordinances, conference proceedings, and newspaper archives, this thesis tells the story of how Black Atlantans made claims upon, and asserted a right to, a rapidly changing Atlanta from 1880 to 1922.