Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Religion and community'

The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church faces a crisis: a postmodern world has taken away our Lord. As seeker-sensitive mega-churches retreat after a desperate bid for relevancy, traditional congregations see their demise as part of a more widespread collapse. Yet, who knows? Perhaps God has called all churches, regardless of worship style, for such a time as this.

The mostly-retired members of Asbury United Methodist Church wonder how much longer the congregation will survive on the corner of DuPont Highway and Basin Road. Yet while young families have left the church, the Asbury Child Care welcomes fifty children each week. The money the Child Care pays the church for rent keeps the church afloat. We wondered what would happen to the relationship between the congregation and child care family if the church became host instead of landlord.

Since we were gifted at making and serving food (to each other and to our hungry neighbors), we decided to invite our child care family to a series of suppers on Wednesday nights during Lent. We trained our members to serve as Table Hosts. We welcomed children by offering them the freedom of unstructured play after supper as well as an invitation to join in stories, songs, and activities celebrating the special place of children in God's realm.

In the course of the suppers, we discovered Christ's presence in the gap between our congregation and our neighbors. As we celebrate our Seventieth anniversary, we see God's grace as an abundant gift to all, rather than a dwindling resource. Christ's calling to host our neighbors in love invites us to discover the body of Christ in our neighbors. In this new millennium, Jesus Christ calls the one, holy catholic, and apostolic church to a Pentecostal Pilgrimage from our pews to a feast of love and grace with our neighbors. And if we need help, the little children will show us the way.

This project examines the dynamics of discipleship and missional community. The concept and perceptions around both topics are relational. As all relationships are, by definition Discipleship is multilayered and multifaceted. Christian Discipleship is revealed through Christ’s example, as evident in His teachings and His ministry within the community. This project begins with a specific definition of Christian Discipleship followed by a demonstration of how that definition can be executed within a particular church. The paper will not limit Discipleship solely within the church but will articulate discipleship through community outreach and conclude with an evaluation of the project and its methodologies.

The goal of the project is to define and effectively utilize Christian Discipleship principles as revealed through the life of Christ. This paper seeks to explore the making of Christian Discipleship within a church in transition, as we seek to be engaged with the larger neighborhood context. This project will address two major social challenges in East New York: Mental illness and homelessness. It will examine discipleship as a model for effective ministry among and within those realities.

Shinto is a native Japanese religion with a history that goes back thousands of years. Because of its close ties to Japanese culture, and Shinto’s strong emphasis on place in its practice, it does not seem to be the kind of religion that would migrate to other areas of the world and convert new practitioners. However, not only are there examples of Shinto being practiced outside of Japan, the people doing the practice are not always of Japanese heritage.

The Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America is one of the only fully functional Shinto shrines in the United States and is run by the first non-Japanese Shinto priest. This thesis looks at the community of practice that surrounds this American shrine and examines how membership is negotiated through action. There are three main practices that form the larger community: language use, rituals, and Aikido. Through participation in these activities members engage with an American Shinto community of practice.

ABSTRACT Title: An Evaluation of a Mentoring and Partnering Program to Mobilize Small Harlem Churches to Intentional Community Engagement Author: Carlton T Brown Degree: Doctor of Ministry Date: 3-1-17 Adviser: Dr. Frank Chan The purpose of writing "An Evaluation of a Mentoring and Partnering Program to Mobilize Small Harlem Churches to Intentional Community Engagement" is to address and evaluate a mentoring and partnering program designed to mobilize small Harlem churches to intentional community engagement. The approach of the project focuses on the modification of ministry views of the pastor and key leader(s) of small, less resourced churches through the intervention of the Pastor of a large 500 or more member church in the area of community engagement and potential partnership opportunities for that purpose. Chapter 1 provides the purpose, goals, context, and rationale of this project. This chapter includes the Researcher?s inspiration for the research, purpose of the study, ministry problem addressed, Bethel Gospel ministry and community context in which research was conducted, research questions and model of research, definition of terms ?Ark Mentality, black liberation theology, great commission, theology of the priestly and prophetic, storefront churches ? and possible limitations and delimitations of the current project. Chapter 2 provides literature review and theological foundations for historical and current state of the ministry of the black church inner-city and its approach to community engagements and partnerships dealing with the prevailing spiritual and social condition in context of the churches mission. Chapter 3 sets forth the research methodology utilized in approaching managing attitude changes of pastors and leaders of small less resourced churches, the instruments used to establish initial position, procedures employed during mentoring session, and data collection procedure. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the findings including: quantitative and qualitative data of the 5 areas of assessment and intervention including: Discipleship, Mission and Vision, Community Engagement, Great Commission, and Shared Missional Commitment, along with information gleaned from interview and finally post-intervention Church Philosophy Questionnaire. Chapter 5 summarizes the purpose of the project, the findings as regards the attitudes and commitments of the participants. The research questions are restated. The Researcher?s conclusions include challenges of participants? schedules and ministry commitments, and the possibility of conflicts around theological issues.

In this thesis I examine various statements relating to the Jain lay community in the early Śvetāmbara texts. My approach is deliberately and consistently historical. The earliest extant Śvetāmbara writing presents an almost exclusively negative view of all non-mendicants. In the context of competition with other religious groups to gain the respect and material support of members of the general population, the Śvetāmbara mendicants began to compose positive statements about a lay community. Instead of interpreting the key terms and formulations in these early statements anachronistically on the basis of the later and systematized account of lay Jain religiosity, I attempt to trace how the idea of lay Jainism and its distinctive practices gradually came into being. The more familiar account that is often taken as the basis for understanding earlier sources in fact emerges as the end product of this long history.

This historical reconstruction poses numerous challenges. There is little reliable historical scholarship to draw from in carrying out this investigation. In the absence of a widely accepted account of the formation of the Śvetāmbara canon, the dates of the canonical sources that I examine remain uncertain. I argue that by focusing on key passages relating to the Jain lay community it is possible to establish a relative chronology for the composition of some of these passages and for the compilation of some of the texts in which they appear. We can thus observe development in the strategies employed by the mendicants as part of their effort to establish and maintain relations with a community of householders who respected and regularly supported them. What I offer here is a preliminary but important step toward writing a critical and comprehensive history of lay Jainism. More broadly, scholars of monastic religious traditions may be interested in this account of how one group of ascetics in ancient India garnered lay support and developed a role for non-monastic members of the community.

The author presents a legalism orientation as a problem in ministry for Stonecrest Community Church. The researcher developed the Stonecrest Survey of Discipleship Orientation (SSDO), an instrument to measure movement in a person’s discipleship orientation with relation to legalism. The attitudes of ninety-one responders who participated were measured, first to establish a baseline for the study, and eleven months later to measure their movement in discipleship orientation regarding legalism. With the help of a local church elder who conducted interviews with twelve congregants looking for factors of movement from legalism orientation to abiding faith spiritual orientation, the researcher discovered that the Stonecrest congregation's discipleship orientation shifted due to the influence of its lead pastor's own journey away from legalism. Based on these findings, the author made ministry recommendations.

This final project report set out to design a peer-led learning model that would assist pastors in building competencies and strengthening peer relationships among Presbyterian pastors in northern New Jersey. The project addressed a national trend that reveals an increasing number of pastors are leaving Christian ministry today because of inadequate support and their lack of varied and specialized skills to serve congregations. However, some of the most recent research by the U. S. Congregational Life Survey (US CLS Wave Two), the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence (SPE) project, and the Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey confirmed pastors and their congregations benefit by pastors participating in peer learning.

Grounded in the theology that Christian ministry is nurtured by communities that embody and practice what they believe, and by theories that enduring learning takes place in association with others, this project drew from Presbyterian ecclesiology, the company of pastors (Calvin), a community of practice (Wenger), self-directed learning (Knowles), group theory (Johnsons), and the areas of learning pastors volunteered to lead. There were no attending costs and the monthly format was simple: pastors shared a meal and fellowship followed by worship and relevant teaching led by the pastors themselves.

Twenty-five pastors, representing one-fifth of the congregations in three regional bodies, attended one or more of the nine gatherings. A large part of the report concentrated on the more active twelve mature, highly stressed, and highly motivated pastors who represented different urban and suburban communities, genders, races, and sexual orientations. The report evaluated what facilitated and hindered this project's objectives. Its conclusion provided seven insights for pastors and seminarians, denominational agencies and regional body leaders, seminaries and foundations concerned about pastoral preparation for the rigors and challenges of congregational ministry.

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The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question: What would constitute an effective strategy for training and developing holistic small group leaders, specifically at Renaissance Community Church? To begin the process of answering this question the author identified four specific steps that were necessary to assist in the development of holistic small group leaders at RCC.

Prior to the project design, the author, working with Dr. Bobby Hill of Hill Consulting, and using the NCD assessment tools, discovered that small groups were the minimum factor. It was at that point that RCC began transitioning from a church with small groups to a church of small groups.

This led to the first step of the ministry project, which involved recruiting twelve potential leaders and administering a pre-test designed to gauge the participant’s current level of understanding and confidence to explain the following concepts: understanding God’s purpose for small groups, understanding a leader’s personal development, understanding and developing new leaders, understanding the dynamics of spiritual development, leading small group meetings, comprehending group progress, understanding the role of a shepherd, and with these competencies impact their world.

For the second step, using a Modeling/Turbo group model, the author developed an eight-week small group setting using the Leading Life-Changing with Small Groups as the leadership curriculum for the twelve participants. The author then used a post-test to measure the participants’ development in their abilities to explain and implement the material.

The third step consisted of the turbo launch in which the participants led six groups for eight weeks using the material ReGroup: Training Groups to be Groups, specifically designed by the author in order for the participants to implement their new skills.

This eight-week process ended with the fourth step, an exit interview with questions (see Appendix F) designed to measure the qualitative efficacy of the Leading Life-Changing with Small Groups training program. The participants’ showed signs of significant increase in both the understanding of the material during the eight week modeling/turbo group.