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Remember My Chains: New Testament Perspectives on Incarceration
Get PDFUnderstanding the physical realities and social attitudes concerning incarceration in the ancient world provides a fuller context to the New Testament’s unadorned and ambiguous references to people’s experience of being held in custody. The context is crucial for interpreting biblical passages that commend caring for prisoners, that reaffirm God’s strength and nullify the ignominy associated with incarceration, and that declare God’s power over the means and motives of imperial coercion. Such passages also compel the contemporary church to advocate on behalf of prisoners and to denounce the systems that regularly victimize them
Lutheran Higher Education in a Secular Age: Religious Identity and Mission at ELCA Colleges and Universities
Get PDFThis exploratory mixed methods case study examined the relationship between espoused and perceived religious identity and mission at five colleges and universities of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America through the lenses of secularization theory, missional leadership, ecclesiology, Trinitarian theology, adaptive leadership, and challenges in the higher education market. Results indicated that humanism is the primary means of describing religious identity and mission at ELCA schools and there are widely varying assumptions about what it means to be a college or university of the church. Advocates and skeptics of the institution’s religious identity and mission interpret reality through the lens of secularization despite the fact that it has been called into question. This leads to an unproductive tug of war between groups who believe that either acquiescence or resistance to secularism is the proper response
Celebrating the Congregational Anniversary: Planning the Congregational History, Part 1
Get PDFThis article discusses deciding scope, audience, and format of composing a congregational history, as well as determining the capacity for completing such a project
Luther\u27s Understanding of Grace and Its Implications for Administration of the Lord\u27s Supper in the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria (LCCN)
Get PDFThis thesis will describe Luther’s understanding of grace and its centrality for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper. The thesis will also describe and analyze theological and pastoral problems of withholding the sacraments to non-communicant members by the LCCN, which claims to follow after Luther’s teaching. This thesis is not anti-church discipline, but rather, will argue for a better form of church discipline than withholding the Lord’s Supper from the excluded members of the church. The thesis will also provide some suggestions for a better form of church discipline than withholding communion from excluded members of the church. This will help the church to change its sacramental administration or practice to accommodate everyone in the body of Christ without the fear of being seen as encouraging or promoting immoral acts amongst its members. This will help the church check the loss of its members to other church denominations on the grounds that they have been denied access to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Moreover, it will develop a theology for the church where grace and forgiveness of sins are offered freely to people through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper rather than being a place where grace and forgiveness of sins are withheld from people
Celebrating the Congregational Anniversary: Planning the Congregational History, Part 3
Get PDFThis article provides answers to some common questions that arise when planning a congregational history
The Spirit\u27s Playground: How God Speaks Through Scripture to Develop Contagious Missional Imagination
Get PDFThis mixed method Action Research project sought to answer the question: How might an AR intervention involving engaging Scripture playfully expand missional imagination? The study documented play in the engagement of Scripture within worship services, Bible study, and board meeting devotions. Appreciative Inquiry interviews and a congregational event provided insight into the growth of missional imagination in this congregation. Lenses employed include those of the theology of play, narrative imagination, the Bible as metanarrative, the creative Word made flesh, playful passages, and participation in the perichoretic relationship of the triune God. Missional leadership is imagined as perichoretic play
Confirmation Basics
Get PDFThis article moves the findings of The Confirmation Project research from theory into practice. Three members of the research team highlight three themes (purpose, design, and leadership) and walk congregational leaders through a process of discovering how these ideas can help them find a way forward that is meaningful to their congregation
Liberating the Imago Dei: An Examination of Jewish and Christian Feminist Biblical Anthropology
Get PDFThis study provides a comparative analysis of the work of Roman Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson and that of Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow, who have both sought to reconstruct the Imago Dei (“image of God”) within their respective traditions. By way of this analysis, it makes a methodological and a substantive contribution. Methodologically, it expands on Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza’s feminist critical approach to reading Scripture by relating it to Francis Clooney’s comparative theological approach to reading texts in religious traditions other than one’s own. Although there have been attempts at comparisons of various religious traditions from a feminist perspective, this study seeks explicitly to attend to a feminist reading of biblical texts in a fashion—following Clooney—that makes the very enactment of a comparative reading of two traditions the mode for attending to the disclosure of truth. Substantively, it expands our understanding of the Imago Dei by setting in constructive dialogue Johnson’s practices for understanding God’s incomprehensibility in her rethinking of God as Sophia (as a corrective to a tradition that emphasizes male-oriented ‘doctrines’) and Plaskow’s practices for understanding God’s immanence in her rethinking of God within the context of relationships (as a corrective to a tradition that emphasizes the interpretation of the ‘law’).” Throughout, the dissertation argues that such iii a feminist and comparative approach contributes to a richer and more robust understanding of the biblical theme of the Imago Dei, one that not only expands our understanding of God but also contributes to a more just and humane vision of humanit