Browsing by Subject "Ministry"

This paper examines how individuals’ social interactions are influenced by the media environments they inhabit (Media Ecology) and the consequent impact on the practice of developing community in the local church (Ecclesiology). Too often, leaders in the church are uninformed about the ways media use, not simply content, is affecting the social structures of community. Consequently, technology in the church is uncritically embraced and little attention is given to what adaptations need to be made for the church to remain authentic to its Christ-given identity and mission. More specifically, this paper focuses on the obstacle and opportunity of building community in the local church, designed to be densely-knit, in a time of “Networked Individualism,” characterized by sparsely-knit, technologically-meditated interaction.

This paper argues that leaders in the church should strive to establish and preserve close-knit church community, however countercultural, because such community is the best reflection of the community within God’s self. Also vital to maintaining densely-knit community in the church is that human beings are biologically wired to be in close communion with others and thrive in such environments. After providing a biological and theological defense for dense community in the church, practical suggestions are provided for maintaining close communion in the church in light of technologically-mediated engagement. Specifically, an argument is made for prioritizing and encouraging face-to-face conversation amongst parishioners in the local church. Additionally, the paper takes a look at the ways media is currently used in local congregations and determines the merits of such use based upon their virtue or vice relative to maintaining close, embodied community. Finally, utilizing the Biblical narratives of the Tower of Babel and Pentecost, the paper concludes by viewing technology use and close-knit community from the perspective of soteriology and argues that the remedy for humanity’s insecurity and path to true greatness is found in Spirit-filled, densely-knit community.

If a church reflects its larger community, it will have more dynamic interactions among different people. Current U.S. communities consist of very diverse people who have different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Since the mid 20th century, various immigrant communities who have dissimilar cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions have accelerated the need of change in American churches. The drastic cultural change has demanded churches to equip their lay and clergy leaders with multicultural competencies for effective ministries.

My thesis explores imaginative leadership in cultural crossroads. Emphasizing the leadership imagination of cross-cultural ministry, I approach it in biblical, theological, and missional perspectives. In this dynamic cultural milieu, the study topic may help the church renew its ecclesial purpose by seeing cross-cultural ministry as a creative opportunity to reach out to more diverse people of God. I begin with a conceptual framework for cross-cultural ministry and cultural intelligence. Then I explain why cross-cultural ministry is significant and how it enhances the spirit of Christ Jesus. As I develop the thesis, I discuss leadership challenge and development in the cross-cultural ministry context. This thesis may contribute to equipping lay and clergy leaders by overcoming the homogeneous ‘in-group’ mindset in the church.

The primary focus is on developing marginal leadership of church in the post-Christendom era. Church leaders must creatively hold the tension between the current church context and Christian faith resources and seek a hopeful resolution as a third way through integrative thought process. While conventional leadership emphasizes a better choice out of the given options, marginal leadership takes time for integrative thought process to seek a new direction for the future. Conventional leaders take the center with their power, status, and prestige, but marginal leaders position themselves on the edge. Leading from the edge is a distinctive cross-cultural leadership and is based on the servant leadership of Jesus Christ who put himself as a servant for the marginalized. By serving and relating to others on the margin, this imaginative leadership may make appropriate changes desired in today’s American churches.

In addition to academic research, I looked into the realities of cross-cultural leadership in the local churches through congregational studies. I speculated that church leadership involves both laity and clergy and that it can be enhanced. All Christians are called to serve the Lord according to their gifts, and it is crucial for lay and clergy persons to develop their leadership character and skills. In particular, as humans are contextualized with their own cultures, church leaders often confront great challenges in cross-cultural or multicultural situations. Through critical thoughts and imaginative leadership strategies, however, they can overcome intrinsic human prejudice and obstacles.

Through the thesis project, I have reached four significant conclusions. First, cultural intelligence is an essential leadership capacity for all church leaders. As the church consists of more diverse cultural people today, its leaders need to have cultural competencies. In particular, cross-cultural leaders must be equipped with cultural intelligence. Cross-cultural ministry is not a simple byproduct of social change, but a creative strategy to open a door to bring God’s reconciliation among diverse people. Accordingly, church leaders are to be well prepared to effectively cope with the challenges of cultural interactions. Second, both lay and clergy leaders’ imaginative leadership is crucial for leading the congregation. While conventional leadership puts an emphasis on selecting a better choice based on the principle of opportunity cost, imaginative leaders critically consider the present church situations and Christian faith values together in integrative thoughts and pursue a third way as the congregation’s future hope. Third, cross-cultural leadership has a unique characteristic of leading from the edge and promotes God’s justice and peaceable relationships among different people. By leading the congregation from the edge, church leaders may experience the heart of Christ Jesus who became the friend of the marginalized. Fourth, the ‘homogeneous unit principle’ theory has its limit for today’s complex ‘inter-group’ community context. The church must be a welcoming and embracing faith community for all people. Cross-cultural ministry may become an entrance door for a more peaceable and reconciling life among different people. By building solidarity with others, the church may experience a kingdom reality.

This thesis focuses on the mission of the church and marginal leadership of church leaders in ever-changing cultural crossroads. The church becomes a hope in the broken and apathetic world, and Christians are called to build relationships inside and beyond the church. It is significant for church leaders to be faithfully present on the margin and relate to diverse people. By consistently positioning themselves on the margin, they can build relationships with new and diverse people and shape a faithful life pattern for others.

As faith communities engage in conversations about the meaning and significance of gender, many people have begun exploring the concept of gender beyond a fixed binary of male and female. These conversations can be challenging, raising complicated questions and employing unfamiliar concepts. This thesis seeks to engage the conversation about gender by attending to voices found in the biblical tradition, discovering a resource for better understanding the contemporary questions that have been posed. Although some may argue that the Bible endorses a strict, male-female binary, a close examination reveals that the Bible paints a much more complex picture of gender and its significance. This thesis will explore gender from several angles, discovering biblical and theological resources for a more expansive conception of gender beyond the binary. Written from a perspective that supports the full inclusion and embrace of transgender and nonbinary people in Christian churches, this thesis seeks to highlight ways that the Bible can be a useful tool for understanding gender in a way that is more nuanced and ultimately more faithful to the beautiful complexity of God’s creation.

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Our knowledge of the kinds of trauma people experience and the impact that it has has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Some margin of that knowledge has crossed over into the religious landscape, particularly about pastoral care and theology. This paper will take up the idea that preaching and, by extension, the other parts of the liturgy can be a part of reforming and healing the fractured imaginations of persons and communities who have experienced traumatic events, leading them to post-traumatic growth and thriving.My knowledge of preaching being far greater than my knowledge of trauma theory, my first priority was extensive research in that field; I studied how trauma impacts both individual bodies and whole communities, first utilizing Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Hermann, two established and well-regarded researchers. From there, I moved into source material from the medical field, finding significant intrigue in a 1688 dissertation from a medical library that was one of the first texts to describe the way traumatic events fracture imagination. Then I moved to experts in the field of preaching and worship – Will Willimon, Barbara Brown Taylor, Rick Lischer, Luke Powery, and more. It became clear that preaching is a vocation of words and imagination, and trauma’s chief impacts rob people of those very things. Thus, preachers have a critical role to play in the healing of their communities by providing shared, sacred language and a space to reintegrate broken imaginations.

This thesis will address the role of nonverbal communication for clergy, while examining the impact such communication has on the ability of a congregation to most fully receive the gospel. My thesis contends that information shared by clergy is not received adequately by congregations when those providing these messages fail to understand the connection between content being offered, and the manner in which the content is delivered. My contention is not that communicating is merely a matter of technique; the Spirit works through our shortcomings as speakers to provide powerful messages which inspire transformation. Instead, my assertion is that we as clergy have a responsibility to embrace nonverbal communication practices that best serve to enhance reception of the good news, whether that communication is shared during a sermon, while teaching a class, participating in a meeting, or offering pastoral care.

Methodology to be employed during this work will draw together resources and experiences shared by communication consultants from my earlier employment as a television meteorologist, and research offered through texts related to nonverbal communication practices and the psychology of communication. Offerings from both early and contemporary church leaders will be included, as I seek to incorporate theology and homiletics related to nonverbal communication.

The primary conclusions of the study are 1) Oral communication is enhanced or subverted depending on the manner in which nonverbal communication accompanies the spoken word. 2) Nonverbal communication is transmitted in numerous ways, including facial expression, gestures, body posture, and eye contact. 3) Gender plays a role when interpreting nonverbal communication.

The criminalization of African Americans is a major issue in the United States of America and for American churches of all racial backgrounds and denominations. In fact, American churches, with notable exceptions, particularly among Black Churches, have acquiesced to this narrative or actively supported it. This criminalization has historically and is currently leading to violence against African American women, men, non-binary, and children, both physically and psychologically. This violence is justified by the dominant socio-cultural and political designation of African Americans as possessing inherent or heightened criminality.

This thesis seeks to first show how we ended up in this situation and how instrumental the role of the Western church and theology was in shaping this reality. Moreover, the depths of the violence are brought forth and examined to fully understand how it was legitimized through this justification narrative, as an accepted aspect of church, culture, socio-political, and economic life. Secondly, this thesis offers a solution to this problem in the form of theological reflection on the formation of the Black Church in the Antebellum South and “free” North. This theological reflection is also done in conversation with the early Christians/Church’s understanding of the imago Dei, as the image of Jesus, and their resulting ministry.

Thirdly, this thesis translates theology into practice. With an understanding of how the problem came to be and through theological reflection on transformative solutions, practical examples of not only espousing change verbally but embodying it through everyday practice as churches, clergy, pastors, individual believers, and faith-based organizations are outlined. Finally, in keeping with the tradition of the faith, the importance of evangelization as translating theology into practice is reimagined. Although the focus is specifically the African American experience of being criminalized, that experience has universal implications for all those who are violently otherized.

The challenge is the Roman Catholic Church's need for a bit more aggiornamento in the ecclesiology of parochial ministry. The persistent priest shortage has been met with provisional solutions, harboring hopes that increased ordinations of new presbyters would replenish the altars now empty. The restoration of the deacon in the United States has resulted in ordination of nearly eighteen thousand older Caucasian men to a service more attuned to the subordinated liturgical diaconate that fell into extinction a millennium ago. Instead, I believe that the model of the first deacons called to serve by the apostles to steward the temporal administration of the church shows this order's true calling, as personified by the great service of their medieval archdeacon successors. The challenge is to draw from this history a theology intended for the diaconate, seek out its canonical limitations and establish a new ecclesiology ready for implementation in praxis today.

In this work I will first explore today's challenges to ministry in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and the circumstances surrounding the priest shortage. A brief quantitative analysis of the church and its ordained ministers will be contrasted to the sociological trends they paralleled. Then the historical church legislation and the leaders that influenced it will be examined to ferret out theological and canonical possibilities and limitations for the restored diaconate's service. Analyzing the ordination, approved diaconate functions, and possible roles in a parish where a priest is not serving as pastor will be addressed by investigating Vatican II Conciliar documents, the codes of canon law, and guidelines from both church wide universal law and the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops.

In examining this history of the origin of the diaconate, its greatest success came in serving the temporal works of the church. The diaconate in theological and canonical terms suffers no divine legal blockades from being populated by a truer more experientially matched cross section of God's people in the pews. The possibilities for the role of the deacon in the future are married to the seriousness of the commitment to the permanence of its restoration; it is here that I propose the church must seek the theological possibilities for a more fully evolved sphere of ministry for the deacon and a canonical approach to a new ecclesiology implementing an ecclesiastical role for the deacon in the parish reporting to his bishop. The prescriptive elements will then seek out these supportive structures in order to insure beneficial orthopraxis in diaconal ministry. My conclusion is that the deacon can once again, as a phoenix rise or fall to ashes, raised by the ecclesiology of the Apostle's first calling of the seven to serve or left to fall as a subordinated solely liturgical order.

This thesis outlines how a Christian leader can guide the faithful to live their life rightly in light of true stories of God, self, Church, and Creation. Each of us perceives, contextualizes, and interprets our experiences in life through our social imaginary, an interpretive framework that is narratively and communally formed. This social imaginary can be distorted by false stories that corrupt our understanding of what gives meaning to our lives, leading us to embrace destructive desires and no longer live in harmony with God’s intention for us. To unlearn such false stories and to re-form our social imaginary in harmony with God’s true stories is the work of narrative repentance, a cooperative effort of priest, parishioner, and God to heal our souls from the corrosive spiritual affliction of sin. Narrative repentance encompasses the human work of purifying our social imaginary from false stories and the hoped-for divine work of revealing to us the true story of our soul through divine illumination and communion with the life of the Holy Trinity. Understanding narrative repentance as a pastoral principle that underlies all pastoral work impacts the Christian leader’s effective practice of preaching, teaching, and worship. Most notably, an understanding of narrative repentance allows a Christian leader to enter the sacred space of parishioners’ social imaginaries and collaborate with them in unlearning false stories of God, self, Church, and Creation, and in adopting the true stories that may free them from captivity to their distorted desires and thus allow them to live freely in the world as witnesses to God’s love and the joy of life in His Kingdom.