Ecclesial Practices

Dissenter Protestantism and Pietist and revivalist movements have played an important, but seldom recognized, role in the emergence and development of an independent civil society, democracy, religious freedom and freedom of expression, the struggle against slavery, and the feminist movement. The article begins with the example of the Oberlin community and College in Ohio and then focuses on the emergence of dissenter Protestantism in seventeenth-century England, its continuation in the US, and similar developments in places like Germany, Sweden, and South Africa. The article also shows how effects of this history are reflected in quantitative studies undertaken within the social sciences. Using theories from sociology, moral psychology, and other behavioural sciences, it is argued that this social role of dissenter Protestantism is an effect of a complex combination of theology, practices, and institutions together with specific historical circumstances. The theology is not unique, but the emphasis on following Jesus Christ and sanctification is important. Other factors include the role of friendship and thick social networks, a relative egalitarianism, a certain distance and independence from dominant institutions and cultures, and the creation of self-organized and relatively autonomous organisations. The combination of these theological and social elements leads to the opening of free spaces that make the development of different or new practices possible. Also important is the ability to unite reasoning and affective powers and the specific practices and institutions one can enter and grow into. The article ends with a short theological reflection on sacramentality.

For the comparatively young Protestant churches in Indonesia, questions of Christian identity are of vital importance within their cultural environments which are shaped by other religions. Drawing on examples of developments in the history of three Indonesian churches in Sulawesi, Java and Bali, different aspects of the struggle to con-textualize Christian identity are traced. For this, two Academic concepts of Indonesian contextual theology are employed, those of Theodorus Kobong and Emanuel Gerrit Singgih. Interpreted with the aid of basic categories used in theories of intercultural theology, those developments are read as pointing to the question on which role eccle-sial practice plays within the hermeneutic circle between text and context for constituting Christian identity.

This article explores the effects that digital mediation has on the experience of Christian worshippers by examining the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing, given by Pope Francis on March 27, 2020, as a case study. The Urbi et Orbi blessing took place sixteen days after the World Health Organization declared the spread of COVID-19 a “pandemic,” and was a direct liturgical response to the global health crisis. In some ways, Urbi et Orbi epitomizes the impact of technology on liturgical prayer; while only a handful of participants were physically present at the blessing, millions tuned in digitally to listen to Pope Francis’ words and to receive the blessing and accompanying indulgence. In her 2017 book @ Worship, Teresa Berger reflects comprehensively on the themes of embodiment, participation, and ecclesial formation as they relate to digital liturgical practices. Drawing from methods offered by the field of ritual studies, this treatment seeks to weave together the experience of a participant observer (myself) in the Urbi et Orbi blessing with the theoretical reflections provided by Berger. Specifically, this article aims to analyze the Urbi et Orbi blessing in light of its digitally mediated nature in order to reflect on the themes of embodied participation and ecclesial formation. Ultimately, it argues that digitally mediated liturgy, like “brick-and-mortar” liturgy, has the capability to facilitate religious experience and real reception of the grace of God. The same methods of ritual analysis used to study brick-and-mortar liturgies can therefore also be fruitfully applied to evaluating digitally mediated liturgy.

Published in Anaphora 15.1-2 (2021): 59-70.

This essay defends the significance of ethnography for ecclesiology. It does so by engaging with the ecclesiology of John Webster, particularly his essay ‘In the Society of God’, which directly challenges the appropriateness of ethnographic methods for a theology of the church. The discussion demonstrates the importance of Webster’s warning against the reduction of ecclesiology to an uncritical embrace of the apparent ‘givenness’ of empirical observations, but also argues that his approach is less useful for analyzing and criticizing the failures of the church community. The essay concludes by arguing that ethnography has the potential to enhance the church’s capacity to recognise, and thus confess, its sins, but also to deepen its corporate discernment and attentiveness to the presence of God’s activity in its midst.

The Church in Australia finds itself pushed to the margins of society and lacking the status it once enjoyed in previous generations. The importance and role of the church in society’s life is now questioned and it would seem that the church’s long term survival is being challenged. How should the church respond? One response is found in the exploration of new forms of church birthed out of missional theology – a theology that sees the church partnering with the God who is actively on mission in his world. This response however, does not come without its own inherent challenges. Leaders of missional communities within the Australian context were interviewed in an attempt to decipher what those challenges might be. The results can largely be covered under the rubrics of: Ambiguity, Anxiety, Audience and Abandonment.

This study investigates the notion that congregations act as subcultures which impact their members’ approaches to daily life conflict resolution and decision-making. Fourteen interviews of churchgoers from two congregations in New England were conducted to gain insight into how Catholics and Baptists differ in their approaches to conflict resolution and decision-making in daily life situations and how those approaches are impacted by the ecclesiology of the respective congregations. This study finds that the major differences between the churchgoers’ approaches to conflict resolution and decision-making are the values to which they adhere. It is concluded that those values are a result of each congregation acting as a subculture which has been formed by the importance of hierarchy, global and local focus, and, especially, the role of the church in each congregation. The study also finds that the relationship between church leadership and churchgoers is stronger in the Baptist congr...

The proliferation of religious and spiritual practices in new media spaces presents challenges and opportunities for religious leaders—and for the people who train them. This article reports on an interview-based study of theological educators actively engaged in preparing their students with skills and experiences for online engagement. We present and discuss seven digital literacies for ministry that emerged from our thematic analysis of transcript data and were subsequently refined with a subset of study participants. We conclude with a brief discussion of new initiatives this research has prompted.

Systematic theology is often the negative foil against which practical theology defines itself as a discipline. Practical theologians worry that systematic theology is committed to a detached objectivism and finality, and that it denies or resists the influence of context on Christian thought. It is argued here that amongst its best exponents, systematic theology has its own well-developed reasons against completion and finality, and that it shares a suspicion of contextually unaware rationality. Re-imagining the relationship between these two disciplines in a way that takes these observations into account requires the rejection of the common theory/practice account of the relationship. What is proposed here instead is an account of the relationship that understands both disciplines as ecclesial practices that each have their own – sometimes overlapping – responsibilities in the church’s collective ‘performance of the scriptures’ and in the development of the church’s ‘social imaginary’

This essay defends the significance of ethnography for ecclesiology. It does so by engaging with the ecclesiology of John Webster, particularly his essay ‘In the Society of God’, which directly challenges the appropriateness of ethnographic methods for a theology of the church. The discussion demonstrates the importance of Webster’s warning against the reduction of ecclesiology to an uncritical embrace of the apparent ‘givenness’ of empirical observations, but also argues that his approach is less useful for analyzing and criticizing the failures of the church community. The essay concludes by arguing that ethnography has the potential to enhance the church’s capacity to recognise, and thus confess, its sins, but also to deepen its corporate discernment and attentiveness to the presence of God’s activity in its midst.

This article examines how the liturgy in evangelical churches is influenced by digital media and digital culture. This was accomplished via an ethnographic study at a medium sized church in East Central Texas where participant observation was combined with qualitative interviews with four members of the church’s pastoral and media production team. Theorizing that decisions made about orchestrated liturgical design in churches of this type are strategic responses to social and technological developments rooted in the mediatization of society, the study revealed three key interconnected themes of significance. These are: media as intentionality, media as environment, and media as audience. A critical discourse analysis of these themes demonstrates that the unique liturgical approach in churches of this type is the result of an intentional, strategic orchestration of entertainment media and media techniques rooted in the mediatization of religion and the amplification of select element...