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October 15 - November 9, 2019
in order for scholarship about the church to be most helpful to the church — gathered in community and scattered in daily life — rapprochement between empirical and theological understandings of the church ought to be encouraged in such a way that the actual life of the church is attended to, thought through theologically, and thereby strengthened (one hopes) for more faithful witness.
Some theologians have critiqued the way such empirical research polices the boundaries of its work to keep out theological ideas.4 They have, in response, sought to describe congregational worship in quite different terms. Yet they in their own way have dismissed or at least ignored actual congregations and the primary theology of the worshipers in favor of their own conversations with the great thinkers of the tradition and the present day.
Part of the liveliness of the discipline of ecclesiology today stems from an interaction between the desire to preserve the essential character of the church and the need that it adapt to new historical situations, between a normative concept of the church and the need that it become inculturated in the life of its members.
How does formal academic ecclesiology relate to congregational studies, and vice versa?
The two probes into this relationship yield remarkably similar conclusions concerning the mutual relevance and influence that each discipline should have on the other in advancing a more holistic understanding of church.
First, an ecclesiology from below not only begins with history but also continues to attend to the existential historical community that calls itself church.
1. The study of the church must attend simultaneously to the historical and theological character of the church.
church exists in a twofold relationship: it is simultaneously related to the world and to God. Because of this duality, the church must always be understood simultaneously in two languages: concrete historical language and theological language, sociological language and doctrinal language.
Schleiermacher expresses the tension for understanding the church this way: a merely theological interpretation of the church would be empty and unreal; a merely historical interpretation of the church would miss completely its inner reality or substance.6
The duality points to a dynamic interaction of nature and grace. The relationship of the church to God marks a line of power within the lives of the people who constitute the church and through them to the wider community itself.
Schleiermacher also describes these two interacting forces in the church with the perhaps misleading language of the “invisible” and “visible” church. He writes, “Thus the invisible church is the totality of the effects of the Spirit as a connected whole; but these effects, as connected with those lingering influences of the collective life of universal sinfulness which are never absent from any life that has been taken possession of by the divine Spirit, constitute the visible church.”
This distinction underscores that the church can never be reduced to a human organization and never romanticized with a theological language that leaves the organization behind. It
God acts in the world through creatures, human agents, and institutions.
Congregational studies analyzes on the ground the primary referent or subject matter of ecclesiology.
3. General ecclesiology, rather than field studies, determines the formal nature and mission of the church. This thesis states that congregational studies does not define the formal nature and mission of the church, because that nature and mission is constituted by God, confessed in faith, and analyzed by theology as it manifests itself in all the churches.
Roughly speaking, using a framework of hylomorphism, congregational studies describes the material object, while theology or ecclesiology specifies the formal dimension of the church.
Instead, the discipline of general or formal ecclesiology has a better purchase on the normative character of theology through its consultation with the many churches that include the congregations.
Congregational studies determines the credibility of the formal theological account of the church. This thesis states that congregational studies determines the credibility of a theological account of the church precisely by its concrete appeal to history, that is, by providing realism.
Theology’s language frequently prescribes ideals and thus often seems at odds with what appears on the ground.
Congregational studies thus serves as a kind of reality principle for formal ecclesiology, a test for whether the theological claims are credible.
In other words, allow the possibilities of actual communities to function as the measure for a realistic interpretation of the marks of the church. This exercise would show that unity can only be realistically predicated of a church that allows pluralism, that is, a unity that allows differences.
Churches cannot themselves be truly catholic without being open to other churches that are really different. Apostolicity will also have to recognize the pluralistic character of the church in the New Testament and the variety of different agencies that emerged in the earliest church for ensuring fidelity to tradition.16 Finally, holiness will have to be understood as being based on God’s grace which is at work within a congregation but in tension with the resistance to it that is called sin.
The two distinctive disciplines imply each other and interact dialectically, dynamically, and constructively. In an ecclesiology from below, congregational studies first directly examines from a primarily but not exclusively empirical perspective the object of ecclesiology, defining it concretely in its most elementary unit, the gathered community.
Finally, congregational studies chastens the normative claims of theology with real possibility, making them credible. In the end, this formula envisages a friendly and fruitful relationship between these two disciplines.
Practical theology implies that theology, as the church’s distinctive discourse, provides the appropriate way to open up the special ecclesial character of particular Christian assemblies. In other words, when we begin to sense the theological work of congregations, then we are seeing the church acting as church rather than as some other similarly sized and structured nonprofit organizations.
This means that congregational studies, as understood here, presumes an intersection between social research methods and the field of theology, a point that will be developed and refined in what follows.
On the other hand, the method advocated here relies on the field of theology, but with greater weight on primary theology found in congregational action (what Aidan Kavanagh once called “the church caught in the act of being most overtly itself”17) than on the secondary reflections and systems typical in the academy.18
What makes ethnographic tools so valuable in this regard is that they provide a discipline for closely and deeply attending to the empirical forms theology can take.
Ethnographic tools cannot do this alone, however; the field of theology is needed in two closely related ways. First, out of the many things to notice in a congregation, how do we know what counts as theological activity? To use an earlier example, ethnography is poorly equipped to distinguish when a budget makes a theological claim or when it is simply a budget. Congregational studies, therefore, looks to the field of theology to attend not only to its customary focus on doctrines and texts but also to the less familiar but equally complicated matter of the ordinary, concrete ways people do
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The study of congregations is both descriptive and prescriptive. In the brief history of congregational studies, a thesis like this amounts to stepping into a minefield. Some ardently defend that such research should be purely descriptive and hold no further stake in the matter. Again, we may rightly doubt whether this really happens so neatly. Frequently, simply conducting field research, let alone sharing that information with congregants, initiates a process of local reflection and assessment that soon becomes a catalyst for change.
more irenic approach might be mediated through the so-called Nicene marks of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity as noted in part 1.27 Whether this list or another, such marks express the integrity of the missio Dei in which any form of the church participates. Too often, congregations are judged by externally imposed standards (size, diversity, programs), which leaves most people feeling inadequate on some scale or another. By assessing local practices in terms of historic marks, however, the standards become internal to the character of every church as body of Christ.
For the field of theology, we have noted that a closer connection with congregational studies would grant the opportunity for a reality check, particularly in the area of ecclesiology. If we are interested in theology that stands in service to the church, then it is essential that it engage accurately and amply with the local realities, sorrows, and hopes of actual assemblies of the faithful.
First, at a basic level of operation, it assumes we really know what counts as a “credibility test” for theology. That
Second, at a deeper level of engagement, the effort to use descriptive material as part of an integrated and responsible theological reflection raises the perennial issue of the place for human experience or the empirical situation in the field of theology.
Turning to the ethnographic study of congregations, the broad claim in this part of the discussion has been that a closer relationship with theology brings the opportunity for attending more closely to the distinctive character of the church. The underlying concern here is to preclude any tendency toward a sociological or historicist reduction of the church only to its human scale. More than this, however, the aim is to appreciate more completely what faithful people claim to be doing when they gather as church. If we are not simply imposing a “bad faith” assumption on this claim from the
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How do we steer a course between the Scylla of uninvested description and the Charybdis of disempowering consultancy?
We conclude this second probe by stressing that, aside from the opportunities and challenges in both fields, the main reason congregational studies needs theology, and vice versa, concerns the benefit for actual congregations. The great strength of ethnographic methods is that they offer the tools for disciplined self-awareness, a critical consciousness for congregations in a descriptive vein. Enhancing this descriptive power, the great strength of theological studies is that it offers a way to reconnect with a wider tradition and discover genuine alternatives for action, a critical
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Theologians are cooperating with social scientists in the field, and they are themselves engaging in empirical research.
Including empirical perspectives puts new demands on theology in several ways.
On the one hand it raises the question of how this type of research should be included in theology.
Theologians should not limit themselves to learning from and working together with social scientists and others; they should also include empirical research in their own disciplinary work. The need for an “empirical theology” has forcefully been argued by the Dutch theologian Johannes A. van der Ven.2 According to this program, theology should include empirical methods in its repertoire of methods or perspectives, as it has already included those from other fields (e.g., historical science and philosophy). Theology itself...
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Including empirical perspectives in theology does not only raise methodological considerations, but also fundamental issues related to the understanding of theology, its object and its content. What is the object of theology, and is this object within the world of experience? This type of question becomes most acute when it comes to ecclesiology, that is, the theological understanding of the church. A basic question is the understanding of the relation between the church as an object of faith and as experienced reality. What is the relation between the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
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A much more recent contribution is presented by Nicholas M. Healy in his book Church, World and the Christian Life (2000). Healy’s book is a fundamental critique of the general tendency in modern ecclesiology of working with concepts and models of the church, rather than the concrete church as it is. In his own words: In general ecclesiology in our period has become highly systematic and theoretical, focused more upon discerning the right things to think about the church rather than oriented to the living, rather messy, confused and confusing body that the church actually is.5
Doing ecclesiology with the concrete church also means that ecclesiology is not oriented toward essence, but toward practice.
Ecclesiology should thus be developed into a “practical-prophetic ecclesiology” that “focuses theological attention upon the church’s confused and sometimes sinful daily life.”
The understanding of the real church as an empirical reality means that the church should be investigated with all available methods and perspectives, especially those offered by the social sciences (because the church is a social phenomenon!). Such research should be undertaken by the social sciences themselves (results from such research should be critically evaluated by theology), and by theology itself. Without the use of social-scientific methods and perspectives, theology tends to make use of ideologically formed stereotypes when describing the church, based on limited personal
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On the other hand, the active core group has a maintaining function vis-à-vis the folk church. It is maintaining the folk church through its active contribution to society and church life. The
however, often shares this function with a wider
merging currents
Finally, the evangelical roots of St. Aldates are seen in the style of singing. Although the music that the church uses is drawn from contemporary charismatic worship, it is interesting that nowhere in the songs is space made for “intimacy.”13 “Intimacy” here refers to quieter moments of reflection and prayer. Charismatic songs often have a structure of crescendo and diminuendo, and as the volume of the singing becomes much less people pray either in tongues or silently. The songs at St. Aldates, in contrast, are almost entirely “upbeat” in nature. They are therefore much closer to the kind of
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