Browsing by Subject "Ecclesiology"

This thesis aims to develop a narrative strategy for the local church parish, drawing on postliberal and narrative theologies. It argues that the narrative nature of the incarnation is not only descriptive of God's movement into the world but also prescriptive for the movement of God's people within the world. To begin to develop this claim, the thesis examines denominational and consultant practitioners' approaches and proposes a practical strategy for carrying out a narrative movement in a contextualized seing.The thesis centers around the biblical feature that Jesus is from Nazareth, with a particular in-depth look at his time spent in the Nazarene synagogue in Luke 4:14-30. Building on Samuel Wells' A Nazareth Manifesto, the thesis argues that contextualized story should be more formative and shaping than the corporatized phenomena of mission statements and core values, following the pattern of the narrative nature found within Scripture. To test the proposed strategy's effectiveness, the thesis includes an on-the-ground experiment within the North Street Community Church of the Nazarene, spanning about two years. The experiment seeks to see if the strategy results in narrative formation of both the individuals within the church and the church itself. Finally, the thesis concludes with a project for congregational use that builds upon the experiment's results. The project proposes a practical application of the narrative strategy, incorporating both what was learned during the experiment and adaptations of strategies found elsewhere.

This dissertation explores the conceptual frameworks, social structures, and practices that organize communities of faith during periods of adaptive change. Combining methods and theories from qualitative research, practical theology, and organizational theory, it undertakes an extended study of two cases in the Pacific Northwest that are responding to adaptive challenges through collaborative approaches to religious organization, education, and leadership. Three interrelated questions organize a descriptive and normative inquiry: (1) What are the challenges confronting communities of faith in a context marked by religious entrepreneurship and a marginal social position for religious organizations? (2) What patterns of actual communal life, organizational structure, and leadership practice (both theoretical and empirical) best support individuals’ and communities’ engagement with the challenges they face? And (3) What implications follow for the practice of leadership and the study of religious organization amid periods of institutional change? An in-depth analysis of the two cases, which are identified as ‘hubs,’ extrapolates a response to the latter two questions, noting the challenges, social structure, practical wisdom, and practices of leadership that organize each site. This dissertation argues ecclesial imagination and Christian practical wisdom order and nurture the conditions, collaborations, and forms of leadership that enable each hub’s adaptive response, thereby enabling communities to live in light of the reality and promises of God.

Four parts encompassing seven chapters advance this argument. Part I is a case description of each hub, introducing the histories, missions, partnerships, and social structures that organize them. Part II continues an in-depth analysis by presenting the challenges and organizational structure that organize their collaborative work. As developed in conversation with Ronald Heifetz’s account of ‘adaptive work,’ seven primary challenges confront these hubs: relational engagement; leadership development; Boundary Zone work; post-Christendom; financial stability; loneliness and isolation; and connection to place. Further, organizational theory provides interpretive insights to describe these hubs as a novel organizational form within a broader organizational ecology.

Part III is a critical and constructive theological account of adaptive work that draws on field-driven concepts in conversation with Craig Dykstra and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In response to each hub’s stated aim to “reimagine church,” Dykstra’s work directs attention to the diverse “places” (e.g., congregations, higher education institutions, and theological educational institutions) that support adaptive change and how a broader ecclesial ecology serves as a “prism,” refracting leaders’ and communities’ engagement. Further, as explored in conversation with Bonhoeffer’s work, a Christo-ecclesial understanding of communities and organizations provides a basis for the organizational and ecclesial transformation each hub pursues.

Part IV builds a theoretical structure to understand the Christian practical wisdom that sustains conditions for each hub’s adaptive work. Specifically, six modes of leadership offer complementary ways of being with communities, organizations, and neighborhoods: a Caretaker, a Catalyst, a Champion, a Connector-Convener, a Surveyor, and a Guide. The project concludes by drawing out the implications of this analytical and theoretical work for these hubs, for a broader ecclesial ecology, and for the changing landscape of religious life beyond the Pacific Northwest.

This dissertation examines those scenes in Acts where members of the church are banished, exiled, or displaced from the city, such as Acts 8:1, 13:50, and 16:35-39. It argues that Luke-Acts presents the church as a community of political exiles who have been exiled or banished from the cities of the Roman Empire. This narrative displacement prompts a response or solution, which in Luke-Acts is found in the community itself. Unlike other early Christian texts, which spoke of the church in exile from heaven or awaiting a city to come, Luke-Acts portrays the church itself as this “new city” that becomes a refuge for the displaced believers. Furthermore, exile or homelessness in Luke-Acts is not a problem requiring an otherworldly solution, but a part of the new way of life engendered by the proclamation of the gospel—it is a core part of following the way of Jesus, who himself is exiled from Nazareth in the gospel of Luke.The primary methodology I employ is literary criticism, by which I mean a careful, contextualized reading of Luke-Acts that attends to the form and content of the entire narrative. My reading of Acts is also a contextualized reading, by which I mean a reading that seeks to understand Acts in its late first-century context. This is especially important when talking about exile, since the study of exile in the New Testament has primarily focused on Israel’s exile without an adequate understanding of the socio-historical and literary reality of exile in the first century. To remedy this, I primarily read Luke-Acts alongside the consolatory literature of Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, and Favorinus. These texts address the problem of exile from different perspectives, but they all address the common themes of the loss of one’s homeland, the loss of possessions, and the loss of free speech or παρρησία. By reading Acts alongside these texts, which provide their own alternative visions of political belonging in the face of exile, I show how Luke-Acts envisions a new form of political belonging in local communities centered around the gospel.

This dissertation suggests that a Methodist theology of evangelistic mission requires placement within an account of ecclesiology and the theological distinction of Church and world. It argues for a vision of the Church not as the environment for or instrument of evangelistic mission, but rather as a visible, practicing, and witnessing "People" in, but not of the world. Such a People appear as Christians engage both the practices of intra-ecclesial formation and extra-ecclesial engagement with the "other half of the reconciling event" in the world, at the same time, leaning both ways at once.

In this equipoise the Church pursues evangelistic mission along a path between ecclesial accommodation for the sake of cultural relevance in the world (understatement) on the one hand, and ecclesial self-absorption that locates witness in an aesthetic display of holiness to the world (overstatement) on the other. Constructively, I argue that the pursuit of this evangelistic mission along this paradoxical path is best envisioned as a practice of intercession. Intercession names the stance of the People of the Church between formation and mission, between tradition and innovation, between God and the world, leaning both ways at once. Throughout I argue that these concerns are not foreign to but stem from Methodist traditions of theology and practice and address a need in the contemporary United Methodist Church for deeper ecclesiological reflection and clarity regarding the shape of faithful evangelistic mission.

The argument begins in Chapter 1 with a review of several contemporary voices in Methodist theology of evangelism, considering the presence (or lack thereof) of the theological relationship of the Church and the world and identifying those who "understate" and those who "overstate" that relationship. In Chapter 2, I ask, "What is the agency of the world?" as a means to engage the lack of theological reflection on the formative influence of the principalities and powers in contemporary (understated) theologies of evangelism. Given the agency of the powers mediated through the example of the modern market-state, I argue for the crucial role of intra-ecclesial formation within contemporary Methodist theology of evangelistic mission. Anticipating the challenge that such a turn to formation tends to favor an overstated differentiation of Church and world, I turn in Chapter 3 to an engagement with John Howard Yoder and the Methodist tradition in order to answer the question: "What is the agency of the Church?" Resisting a reading of Yoder that locates the Church's agency for evangelistic mission in an (overstated) form of aesthetic witness offered to a watching world, I offer a reading of Yoder that locates ecclesial identity in a particular Peoplehood sent to the world to discern and name the alliances between Church and world that reveal the truth of God's reconciliation with the world through Christ. In the final two chapters, I seek to develop an account of Methodist ecclesial identity that "leans both ways" between being a "People called Methodist" formed by the practices of Wesley's General Rules (Chapter 4) and, at the same time, a People shaped via the evangelistic mission of intercession in the world, an image borrowed from the theological vision of Rowan Williams (Chapter 5).

Taken together, these chapters argue for a location of evangelistic mission in the Church as a Peoplehood, a politics constantly in formation, engaging the "other half of the reconciling event" and extending "unrestricted communion" as it serves an intercessory role, standing between God and the world. I conclude with reflection on the impact of such theological vision on the ecclesiology and missiology of the contemporary United Methodist Church in the United States, suggesting the expression of evangelistic mission in "intercessory ecclesial" terms as a guide to the development of new ecclesial communities, institutional expressions of Methodist connectional structuring, and extra-ecclesial partnerships for the sake of service and witness in the world.

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.

In this dissertation I offer a constructive account of the church’s role in the process of reading and understanding Scripture. This task has become especially relevant due to the recent popularity of “ecclesial hermeneutics.” In response to intellectual trends that sought, explicitly or implicitly, to remove Scripture from the sphere church and relocate it within a supposedly more hermeneutically salubrious environment (e.g., the academy), many ecclesial readers have endeavored to return Scripture to its proper home. As Bonhoeffer claimed in 1933, presaging contemporary trends, Scripture is “the book of the church” and must be “interpreted as such.” Drawing from various theological and philosophical developments that emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, Christian interpreters have felt emboldened to follow Bonhoeffer’s lead, not only tolerating but prioritizing and accentuating the particularity of their ecclesial vantage point and the unique form of thinking constituted by its language, traditions, and practices.

This dissertation enters the debate at just this point. Ecclesiology has obviously carried great weight in recent conversations about biblical interpretation, but rarely has ecclesiology itself become a direct object of theological focus within them. Ecclesial hermeneutics has remained ecclesially ambiguous. In this dissertation, therefore, I ask an ecclesiological question as a means of answering a hermeneutical one. I set out deliberately to consider what it means to read in, as, and for the church. What “church” is presupposed in theological interpretation? What practices come embedded within it? And how does this shape the ends of faithful interpretation? In short, how, precisely, does the church function as a hermeneutical space?

Beyond merely describing what others have offered, I put forward a constructive vision. I propose to understand the church as a confluence of four dynamics, each of which is marked by a particular relationship. Together, these four dynamics constitute the church as a hermeneutical space. In short, the church exists (1) in relationship to the risen Christ, (2) in relationship to its own historical-institutional past, (3) in relationship to a particular place and the concrete bodies gathered there, and (4) in relationship to the world. Each of this dissertation’s four parts focuses on one of these dimensions, showing how its particular aspects carry hermeneutical significance. Each part consists of two chapters. In these two chapters I first focus on the hermeneutical implications of a given dimension and then listen to Bonhoeffer as a means of complexifying and deepening this analysis. It thus becomes evident that the coherence of my project owes much to Bonhoeffer, whose voice serves as the keynote that allows me to draw diverse others into conversation.

Listening to Bonhoeffer, I hope to show that these four dimensions cohere to shape the church as one hermeneutical space. This coherence is important, for I argue that recent proposals within ecclesial hermeneutics have accentuated particular dimensions of the church, but have failed to do so comprehensively. In other words, explicitly ecclesial hermeneutics commonly display onesided tendencies by relying on a truncated account of the church in which only one dimension of ecclesiology carries hermeneutical significance. Beyond being theoretically deficient, this tendency exerts a distortive effect at the level of practice. What is needed, then, is a more complex ecclesiological imagination, the fruit of which will be a more complete and theologically robust account of what it means to read in, as, and for the church.

While this dissertation’s animating concerns are deeply theological, they are altogether practical. A properly theological account of hermeneutical faithfulness is impossible without attention to the actual activities involved in the reading process. Bonhoeffer understood this well, and he proves himself to be a pastoral theologian by the facility with which he moves from the theoretical to the practical realm. Following Bonhoeffer’s example, I hope to make a constructive claim not only about a theology of Scripture or scriptural hermeneutics but about the practices and habits that sustain faithful reading.

While my heavily Christological focus (Part One) may seem to perpetuate the same onesidedness I seek to correct, I hope to show that when properly construed, the Christological dimension of the church is capacious enough to include the others. By jointly imagining the church’s historical-institutional past (Part Two), life together (Part Three), and missionary relationship to the world (Part Four) in terms of Jesus’ ongoing presence and particularity, we will find the resources necessary to imagine the ecclesiology that serves as a space for faithful reading. What ultimately emerges from this account of Christ and the fourfold account of the church that corresponds to him is a hermeneutic of discipleship, a way of thinking vis-à-vis Scripture that takes place in the wake of Christ’s ongoing action and ultimately aims at participation in it.

ABSTRACT

This thesis touches on several massive themes within Christian theology, including questions of ecclesiology, eschatology, soteriology, and missiology. Yet it is grounded in a very real and practical question. What definition of the church should guide me, as the senior pastor of an incredibly diverse Sabbath-keeping local church in the Seventh-day Adventism denomination,as we develop the strategic vision for this next season of ministry, and decide how we want to fund those goals. What should the “markers” of the church be?

In order to help narrow my focus, I will explore this question in four parts. In Chapter 1, I provide a brief history of Seventh-day Adventism, with a specific focus on the development of the doctrine of the Sabbath and the doctrine of the church, such as it is. In Chapter 2, I turn more directly to various models of the church. Using Avery Dulles as a conversation partner in hiswork Models of the Church, I examine Adventism in the light of some of the most prominent models and note which of these Adventism seems to lean towards. I then recommend a new eschatological understanding of the church that I believe could be uniquely well-suited for Adventism.

In Chapter 3 I turn to the question of the Sabbath. Given that Sabbath-keeping is considered a marker of faithfulness for most Seventh-day Adventists, I propose that the biblical Sabbath has always been about more than humanity’s faithfulness, and that the Sabbath should be seen instead primarily as a pointer to the purpose and faithfulness of God. Drawing from Sigve Tonstad’s book The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day, I suggest a reframed understanding of the Sabbath that includes seeing the Sabbath as an indicator of God’s future purpose promised from the very beginning of creation. I suggest that the Sabbath can best be seen as a promise, grounded in the past, pointing to the future, that shapes and directs the present.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I consider how the idea of the “church as foretaste” and “Sabbath as promise” could shape the lived reality of a local community, and recommend some practices that we as a local church could explore that would help us better embody the coming kingdom of God.

Questions about the nature, purpose, and mission of the church have been asked and answered and asked again for generations. Most recently, the coronavirus pandemic has caused the longest disruption to the regular rhythms and practices of the church in recent memory. Clergy and laity alike are wondering, as we imagine what a post-pandemic life will look like, justwhat impact this new reality will have on the church, which practices will stay the same, and which will shift. A season of new beginnings is an excellent time to reconsider old assumptions, and to recalibrate where needed.

It is my hope that this thesis will be helpful in three ways. First, I hope for it to be helpful on the local church level, especially for Sabbath-keeping churches interested in a reframed perspective on the Sabbath that moves it beyond a question of obedience, to a question of meaning, liberation, and purpose. Secondly, I hope to contribute to the much needed and growing conversation within Seventh-day Adventism regarding Adventist ecclesiology. Over the past two decades, Adventist scholars have become increasingly convinced of the need to further develop our ecclesiology, but it is still a relatively recent field of study within the denomination. This thesis will offer a reframed understanding of Sabbath-keeping that is linked to an eschatologically-shaped ecclesiology.

Finally, I hope this thesis will have something to offer to the broader Christian community. The biblical concept of the Sabbath has experienced something of a renaissance in the wider Christian conversations over the past half-century. The Sabbath has been linked to creation and as a potential response to the environmental crisis; to economics, debt relief and jubilee; and to emancipation, messianic ethics, and spiritual formation. Yet while many of these Christian authors draw on themes inherent in the biblical Sabbath, very few of them have lived in communities already profoundly shaped by its counter-cultural power. We as Adventists are deeply indebted to the gift of the Sabbath; it is my hope that our lived reality can provide inspiration to others.

This dissertation investigates the interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology from 1927 through 2015. The history of interpretation of Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has never been attempted in such a comprehensive way as what is attempted in this dissertation. That is its basic contribution.

The primary argument of the dissertation is that Barth’s ecclesiology has been mischaracterized in five different ways. The investigation reveals that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology has thrilled and puzzled interpreters. They end up characterizing Barth in a largely appreciative way or dismissive way but in whatever way, it is reductive. When all the secondary literature is investigated it is revealed that Sacramental interpreters applaud the fierceness with which he defends the importance of the church in the midst of a confused world but are disturbed by what they perceive to be his lack of attention to the institutional church. Free Church interpreters gloat in his denunciation of infant baptism and his preference for congregational polity but wonder why he is not even more firmly congregationalist. Architectonic interpreters bask in the genius of his Trinitarian and Christological descriptions of the church but then criticize him when he does not hew to their elegant explanations. Actualistic interpreters, disenchanted with the institutional church, relish his attacks on religion in his early commentaries on Romans but ignore that he calls his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics. Missionary interpreters trumpet his emphasis on witness but play down his obsessive denunciation of syncretism. When all of this is seen, it becomes clear that Barth’s ecclesiology defies easy characterization. The specific evidence for different characterizations are identified and analyzed in light of what Barth really said. Sometimes the characterizations are due to a misreading of what Barth was saying. Other times Barth’s interpreters have identified an isolated statement that Barth developed elsewhere more adequately. The great advantage of this close analysis is to convey the complexity and nuance of ecclesiology. Someone who generally shares Barth’s approach to ecclesiology may learn what objections may be posed by other church traditions. For people critical of Barth’s ecclesiology, they can more adequately weigh whether indeed their critiques are well-founded.

The secondary argument of the dissertation, impossible to prove, is that Karl Barth’s ecclesiology is reasonably solid ecclesiology. The dissertation seeks to take seriously the major accusations hurled at his ecclesiology and they are found wanting. The dissertation concludes with what Barth wanted the church to be—over against the five schools of interpretation—practicing, local, catholic, confessing, and witnessing.

This thesis presents the ecclesiology of Resident Aliens as an alternative to overcome the crisis of the Korean church and focuses on the ways to establish a Christian community through “virtuous leadership”. This thesis points out the crisis situations facing Korean churches in the 21st century as a culture of quantitative growthism, secularization, an increase in “dones (Ga-na-an saints or group)”, “nones”, and a fall in credibility. This thesis compares and analyzes solutions to those crises and various ecclesiology proposed during the last 20th century and demonstrates why the community-centered and countercultural church model shown in Resident Aliens is still how biblically viable, relevant, and balanced it is. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes that the essence of the crisis of the church is not the lack of out-reach to the world, but of Christians who are not sufficiently equipped with virtues. Therefore, this thesis suggests ways to shape God's faithful people through the virtuous leadership.

This thesis presents the ecclesiology of Resident Aliens as an alternative to overcome the crisis of the Korean church and focuses on the ways to establish a Christian community through “virtuous leadership”. This thesis points out the crisis situations facing Korean churches in the 21st century as a culture of quantitative growthism, secularization, an increase in “dones (Ga-na-an saints or group)”, “nones”, and a fall in credibility. This thesis compares and analyzes solutions to those crises and various ecclesiology proposed during the last 20th century and demonstrates why the community-centered and countercultural church model shown in Resident Aliens is still how biblically viable, relevant, and balanced it is. Furthermore, this thesis recognizes that the essence of the crisis of the church is not the lack of out-reach to the world, but of Christians who are not sufficiently equipped with virtues. Therefore, this thesis suggests ways to shape God's faithful people through the virtuous leadership.

U.S. faith-based organizations (FBOs) founded by Christians have gained wide recognition and influence both nationally and internationally and have become, to a large extent, the de facto bearers of contemporary Christian mission in an increasingly post-denominational landscape. Yet the focus of this thesis is how FBOs suffer from a separation between missiology, ecclesiology, and theological reflection in ways that inhibit their participation in the mission of God, or missio Dei.

The thesis draws on history, sociology, and missiology to provide a critical framework for an inter-disciplinary analysis of FBOs that illuminates the problems they face and describes what is required for a recovery of faithful witness. The thesis begins with the emergence of FBOs as a uniquely Protestant story, locating their origins within the history of Protestant missions, the emergence of the voluntary society, and their evolution into humanitarianism and the problems which emerge out of that history. A move to sociological analysis situates contemporary FBOs within a wider social ecology of powerful forces that cause non-profits to behave like for-profit corporations, often giving themselves over to bureaucratic models shaped by a technological understanding of practice. The final move to missiology and ecclesiology makes the claim that the critical reference point for evaluation of the FBO is the flourishing of the practice of Christian missions.

This constructive missiology provides the basis for proposing marks of a faithful mission-type organization in the contemporary context which can sustain the practice of missions not primarily as humanitarian activism, but as participation in the missio Dei. The thesis re-narrates FBOs and the marks we should look for in FBOs by proposing several organizational disciplines that provide a response to the challenges facing the contemporary FBO. These marks are displayed through brief case studies from three FBOs: L'Arche International, the U.S. national organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and New Song Urban Ministries in Baltimore.