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Church Planting in An African-American Context: A Guide for Independent Reformations
Get PDFThe purpose of this doctoral project is to provide a set of contextual church planting strategies for African American episcopal and pastoral leaders who will launch, develop and grow spiritually healthy leaders and churches. The church-planting movement of Calvary Revival Churches (hereafter CRC) is in southeastern Virginia. The area’s independent cities mirror the boroughs of New York City. The CRC brand launched four churches with five campuses spread throughout the Hampton Roads region. To date only two CRC church campuses, remain. The expansiveness of suburban sprawl and residential centers coupled with centralized commercial services have always left disconnected and disenfranchised people in urban neighborhoods where many Black churches resided. The African American Church has always been the epicenter of the “black community;” its affluence and influence has a rich heritage and historical impact in the pursuit of equality. The first section of this project examines the context of ministry with a closer look at Calvary Revival Church. The second section traces the history of the Black Church’s development and wrestles with the tensions surrounding church planting in an African American context. The impact of mega churches coupled with new ecclesiastical developments and reformations versus the decline of the traditional denominational Black Church has created a tension within the “black church community” and its ability to serve its community. The third section examines the trends of church-planting models within an African American Church context. The lack of intentional strategies coupled with an inability to address contemporary changing worldviews with biblical foundational truth has given rise to the decline in CRC launched campuses. The final section will develop best practices and strategies leaders can follow for launching, developing and growing spiritually healthy leaders and churches that serve their communities
The Decline of the Church in North America Calls for Creativity and the Celebration of the Imago Dei
Get PDFRecent studies have shown an American Church in decline. It is the belief of this author that the principles of institutionalism practiced by the twenty-first century Church could be factors in this decline. To reclaim Kingdom values the celebration of the imago Dei must be restored. Research shows that teenagers are leaving the Church after high school and emerging adults are leaving faith in and after college. Furthermore, this age group largely has been neglected by intergenerational adults. But there are others that are abdicating the church as well.
Senior adults, the disabled, their families, single adults and single-parent families share the same sentiments of neglect and have a hard time finding their place in an ill-equipped Church. The sexually traumatized are more likely to leave the Church as well. The Church must ask why the marginalized of society further marginalized. Also, why has the Church not learned from the days of Constantine and the Crusades that it must be a living breathing body and not a mandated structure of hierarchy and power?
The compelling love and life of the early church demonstrates humility by breaking bread together, sharing everything and waiting in prayer on the Holy Spirit. Jesus engages sinner and saint, child and adult, woman and man illustrating egalitarian principles, and celebrating the imago Dei. Embodying the counter-cultural Kingdom of God in the present context should be the mission of an adoptive church caring for the marginalized. This church should incorporate adolescents, and every other age and people group into its fabric and family. This church believes in compassionate community. It is a place where power, capitalism and consumerism are challenged. Humility, love, generosity and simplicity must reign. Celebrating the imago Dei with no exceptions will help the Church resist and dismantle institutionalization
Attachment, Childhood Maltreatment, and Resilience of Humanitarian Aid Workers
No full textHumanitarian aid workers are frequently exposed to the threat of violence and trauma and suffer with posttraumatic stress disorder at high rates. Several studies have suggested that attachment style mediates the effects of trauma on resilience, whereas other factors thought to impact resilience include childhood maltreatment and negative thoughts of the self and others. In this study, I sought to understand the relationship between these factors as they relate to resilience in humanitarian aid workers, taking into consideration the role of attachment. Questionnaire data collected for clinical purposes over a 5-year period from 1,841 humanitarian aid workers were used to investigate these relationships. A history of childhood maltreatment was associated with reduced resilience levels, greater posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, and an increase in sensitivity to perceived stressors. Contrary to what was expected, findings also suggest that aid workers with a history of childhood maltreatment are no more likely to have insecure attachment styles than aid workers without childhood maltreatment histories. Further, attachment style does not seem to mediate the relationship between traumatic experience and resilience for individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment. The results also suggest that possible mechanisms associated with a lack of resilience are avoidance and negative thoughts such as shame and blame
Equipping the Church Deacons of Chai Wan Evangelical Church with an Adaptive Leadership Approach
Get PDFChai Wan Evangelical Church was established with a “burden for evangelism [and the] pursuit of godly life,” according to its mission statement. The primary of goal of the church is to share the gospel and nourish Christians to become holy. In 2007, the church launched a student ministry, which resulted in an increase in evangelical and pastoral needs. In order to work well with the young leaders who are working with this ministry, a new paradigm for leadership is needed. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to develop a training plan for the deacons to be adaptive leaders.
Part One of this project explores the formation of leadership approach at Chai Wan Evangelical Church. This section also explores why the church’s current leadership approach is ineffective, while the evangelical and pastoral needs increase. Finally, this section describes the reasons for the implementation of adaptive leadership.
Part Two presents a theological reflection upon the challenge of church leadership. The importance of leadership for the church is discussed. The biblical theology of adaptive leadership is examined in order to give an account for its applicability and implications in a new era.
In the light of the leadership challenge before Chai Wan Evangelical Church and the theological understanding of leadership put forth in Part Two, Part Three presents a practical strategy for equipping deacons with adaptive leadership. It explains how key leaders, including deacons and young potential leaders, are recruited and trained, then adopt to exercise the new introduced leadership approach. This section also explains how the project will be assessed
A Ministry Initiative for Corporate Spiritual Formation at Lifelight Church Through Meditative Prayer, Encouragement, and Leadership
Get PDFThe purpose of this project is to develop a ministry initiative for corporate spiritual formation at Lifelight Church in San Francisco to encourage intentional spiritual growth of the community. Most critical to this project is to recognize the social element of spiritual formation. It imagines all members of the church practicing the presence of God to be formed to the likeness of Christ through meditative prayer, encouragement, and leadership as formative practices within the community.
This paper is divided into three parts. Part One examines current socio-economic and cultural shifts in San Francisco and its effects on Lifelight Church. Specifically, the unique landscape of the city’s lack of religiosity and the characteristic of millennials in Lifelight Church are explored in order to decipher a contextual basis for the need for spirituality.
Part Two of this paper engages a relevant biblical and theological foundation for corporate spiritual formation by reviewing literature that provides the rationale for prayer, encouragement, and leadership as formative, communal practices within the process of individual growth. A survey of the missio Dei throughout the Pauline letters is explored for its significant relevance to spiritual formation. The section also examines faith as a journey, observable in Israel’s story of exodus and the characters in the Old Testament.
Part Three presents the goals and plans for implementing the corporate practice of meditative prayer, encouragement, and leadership for the formation of members of Lifelight Church. This section includes a detailed strategy for teaching about spiritual formation as a process, practicing meditative prayer, learning about peer coaching, and discovering fivefold gifting. Finally, the implementation and assessment of the project are outlined in its process, resources, and assessment
Missionaries for America: A Strategy for Nurturing Bridge Leaders Serving in Greater Los Angeles
Get PDFThis project addresses the need, theological foundations, and strategy for nurturing bi-vocational missionaries (Bridge Leaders) to serve with unchurched people in the Greater Los Angeles area. The first section describes the need for bi-vocational missionaries (Bridge Leaders) in Greater Los Angeles. This need is particularly strong because of the diversity and number of people groups outside of existing churches. New missionary sending structures are needed that enable cross-cultural missionaries to start new forms of church in unchurched communities. The economic realities of America and life in Los Angeles require that the predominant pattern of missionary service be bi-vocational. The section also describes four bi-vocational missionaries who will serve as case studies for the remaining chapters.
The second section describes the theological foundations that inform the strategy of nurturing missionary Bridge Leaders to serve among the unchurched. A review of relevant literature identifies five missiological and theological foundations that inform the Bridges strategy. Next, a presentation of the theology of the Church results in a description of the intended outcome for Bridges—Christ-following communities. These Christ-following communities are what Bridge Leaders seek to form through their missionary service. Lastly, this section explores questions about each person of the Trinity as foundational for the overall vision and strategy for missionary ministry outside of existing churches.
The third section presents a strategy for nurturing missionary Bridge Leaders among the unchurched in Greater Los Angeles. This strategy is designed to help Bridges facilitate a multiplying movement that results in one hundred new Christ-following communities in Greater Los Angeles by 2021. The strategy is elucidated through describing the mechanisms designed to identify leaders as well as the structures and a grouping of services designed to cultivate key missionary skills within Bridge Leaders. This section lastly presents a new ministry initiative designed to implement the strategy
Developing Grace Assembly of God, Singapore To Become A Missional Family Church
Get PDFThe purpose of this doctoral project is to develop a ministry model with a theological framework, biblical strategy and equipping process to transform Grace Assembly of God (GA) to become a missional family church (MFC) for the fulfillment of God’s mission for Singapore and beyond. This ministry model is meant to be a comprehensive and broad framework for church ministry rather than an in-depth study on one particular theological theme
As For Us, We Will Serve the Lord: Preaching the Theology of Joshua for the Church’s Mission
Get PDFThe purpose of this dissertation is to provide a theological interpretation of the book of Joshua, with special attention to the ethical problem of violence in the book, and to set forth a homiletical model for preaching the theology of the book to shape the church’s mission. The homiletical model includes suggestions for both how to handle the violence of the book in the pulpit and how to appropriate the theology constructively in the life of the church. This model is applied specifically to the ministry of Brookdale Presbyterian Church in St. Joseph, Missouri.
This study surveys the relevant literature for handling the violence of the conquest, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, before arguing that the book of Joshua is a highly ritualized and sacralized account of Israel’s early history, initially written during the years of Josiah’s reforms and intended to be a metaphor of the religious life in service to the one true God. Based on this approach, a constructive theological reading of the book is then offered, highlighting the four key theological themes of the narrative. These four themes are reframing the identity of God’s people, encouraging faith in the power of God, combatting idolatry and urging an exclusive devotion to the Lord, and identifying bold and courageous obedience as the path to rest.
Finally, the theological interpretation of Joshua is applied to the specific task of preaching. The four key theological themes are refracted through the New Testament witness to demonstrate how each theme should shape the life and mission of the church. Then, a practical homiletical model for the preaching the book is developed, providing a practical strategy for handling the violence in the book and applying the four theological themes to the mission of Brookdale Presbyterian Church
Evangelicals and Identity Politics: Reconsidering the World-Viewing Impulse
No full textThis project is an inquiry into evangelical identity, particularly the identity politics of white, American evangelicals as played out both within the broader evangelical stream and in public. I focus my study through the “world-view” concept that has been a key instrument for generating an evangelical identity by analyzing three of its most powerful expositors: Abraham Kuyper, Harold John Ockenga, and Richard J. Mouw. Each of these figures has operationalized a world-view concept vis-à-vis the evangelical identity (in Kuyper’s case, the “Calvinist” identity as paradigmatic of true, evangelical Protestantism) for cultural engagement and sociopolitical transformation. Their attempts to both define, galvanize, and limit membership in the movement and take their views public with thin, publicly-available expressions like “as an evangelical” and “the biblical world-view” has made these terms the stuff of an evangelical identity politics. To date, evangelical scholarship on the world-view concept has focused primarily on cataloging its intellectual resources and rendering it increasingly serviceable in the consolidation of evangelical identity—over against threatening alternative world-views as well as the perceived breakdown of traditional sources of moral authority. Along the way, the language of world-view has been used intentionally and explicitly in ways ranging from naïve to authoritarian. Thus, it will not do to fixate on the concept while allowing the impulse that generates it to escape scrutiny.
The world-viewing impulse, I contend, drives its evangelical devotees to narrate human lives in this world (including their own) in ways that warp Christian identity as a personal, social, and theological reality. I offer several kinds of tests (psychological, sociological, and theological) that dispute the adequacy of the world-viewing concept to the cases under study themselves and that demonstrate the potential such concepts hold for deceiving the world-viewing person or community and for facilitating deleterious uses of social power. The scale of this thinking and the unquestioned normativity of the world-viewing subject, I maintain, are functions of the racial logic (viz. whiteness) that pervades power structures in the modern West. When the highly-specified world-view of this or that white evangelical is allowed to pass as the logical extension of the Bible—synced up with God’s intended order for creation and merely identifying the moral structures of reality itself—the powerful world-viewer evades responsibility for what are, in fact, their own judgments. Furthermore, the typical way of framing these matters as epistemological in nature participates in a more fundamental problem: denying humans’ creatureliness and, thus, rejecting the manner of knowing and relating that is appropriate to humans as God’s creatures. Ultimately, in conversation with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I submit that proper, creaturely knowing is characterized by a sociality that encourages us to renounce our false world-view security and to hear the word of God in Christ calling us to discover others and ourselves in encounters powered by God’s gift of faith