Thesis (M. Th.)--Catholic Theological Union, 1985. / Bibliography: leaf 70.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Harding Graduate School of Religion, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-122).

Thesis (M.A.)--Lancaster Bible College, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-39).

Diss.--Bielefeld Universität, 1995. / Notes bibliogr.

Thesis (M. Div.)--International School of Theology, 1989. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-167).

<p> While having a calling can produce great results, in recent studies on calling the key to reaping the rewards has been closely linked to being able to live out the call. For pastors in particular, &ldquo;The Call&rdquo; is fundamental to their lives and work. Most enter the ministry because of a deep sense of calling from God. A pastor&rsquo;s relationship with God is also key in this experience and was hypothesized to be a factor in the calling model for this career subgroup. The goal of this study was to explore how pastors experience calling in their lives and work; specifically, the relation between belief in their calling, fulfillment of that calling, life satisfaction, and how satisfaction in their relationship with God might interplay throughout the process. After accounting for missing data and outliers, the study sample consisted of 144 pastors enrolled in an online leadership development tool. Participants ranged in age from 23 to 98, 80% identified as male, and 98.6% were Protestant. Regression analyses were performed using the PROCESS macro in SPSS to estimate a moderated mediation (Model 58). The proposed mediated relationship was significant, with calling fulfillment mediating the relationship between calling belief and life satisfaction for pastors in this sample (<i> R</i>² = 0.215, <i>F</i>(2, 141) = 19.274, <i> p</i> &lt; .001). The proposed moderating role of satisfaction in relationship with God was not a significant predictor at either proposed stage. Overall, these results reveal that for pastors, the key in the relationship from calling to life satisfaction is living out the calling.</p><p>

By many accounts North American Protestant pastors are in crisis. Some would suggest that this crisis is due to the increasing hardships brought about by the end of Christendom in the West. However, placing pastors in a narrative of mounting marginalization and victimization does not explain the vibrant and dynamic nature of pastoral ministry in other times and in other global contexts that are less than optimal. Instead, this project argues that pastoral identity suffers, at the hands of modern metaphors for ministry, because those metaphors fail to cultivate the pastor's ability to behold Beauty. To say this is to make the bold claim that the crisis facing pastoral identity is at its heart a crisis of aesthetics; buy which h I mean, the ability of pastors to apprehend, thorough the senses, the beauty of God and God's world revealed supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ This project is organized in three parts: Beauty, Gift, and Metaphor. The first section traces the loss of Beauty in the world and in the parish. It explores what difference this has made to pastoral ministry as it relates to the pursuit of the two other transcendentals, Truth and Goodness. Second, with the lost ability to behold the Beauty of the Lord comes an anemic understanding of pastoral ministry as charism or Gift. The result is a loss of joy (Nehemiah 8:10). Lastly, the third section argues that recovery of a vigorous pastoral identity and ministry requires (1) an honest evaluation of the modern metaphors exerting influence on clergy, (2) a grounding back in the ancient biblical and extra-biblical metaphors that have sustained pastors, and (3) the exploration of new metaphors for ministry that can aid the renewal of the pastor's ability to behold the beauty of the Lord.

<p> The author presents the lack of deliverance ministry in the Evangelical church world as being incongruent with biblical, theological and historical underpinnings and, as such, forms a significant hindrance to its effective mission. To demonstrate the efficacy of deliverance, the author surveyed 46 Christian leaders on 98 possible effects of their personal deliverance experience. The author concluded that deliverance renders significant and broad positive effects in the individual leader and makes numerous recommendations pertaining to the inclusion of deliverance in ongoing church ministry, discipleship strategies and global mission.</p><p>

ABSTRACT The Meaning of Being: The Challenges of Existential Psychology for Biblical Counseling Frederick Nobuya Rodeheaver In fulfillment for the degree Doctor of Philosophy The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 2017 Chair: Dr. Jeremy Pierre The thesis of this dissertation is that any anthropology that guides pastoral counseling must account for the totality of the human experience, including an individual’s subjective experience of his or her life. Existential psychology, while captive to its own faulty assumptions, has made this kind of anthropological subjectivity a primary focus and thus becomes a helpful dialog partner to the biblical counseling movement in its continued trajectory of theoretical and methodological refinement. This dissertation concludes that while the insights of existential psychology are helpful to biblical counseling, due to its naturalistic assumptions their own therapeutic foci are more comprehensively answered from a theological framework, specifically in the doctrines of the imago Dei, and Christology. The study concludes with practical applications of existential psychology’s insights in the counseling relationship after they have been recast into a Christological context. Chapter 2 examines existential psychology in detail with particular emphasis on its key distinctive; a focus on existence instead of essence. The chapter concludes with a discussion explaining the failure of existential psychology to be the corrective to human understanding that its proponents hoped it to be. Chapter 3 investigates the three unique foci that existential psychology stresses to capture or understand personal subjectivity; the pursuit of authenticity, the problem of anxiety and the question of authority & autonomy. Chapter 4 recasts the very issues of chapter 3 in a Christological context based upon the imago Dei and its corollary doctrine the imago Christi. This recasting provides a surer foundation to the very issues that existential psychology emphasizes and provides the theological link to the therapeutic advantage that is found in existential psychology’s insight and techniques. Chapter 5 provides the practical application of the insights and discoveries of chapters 2 through 4 to the counseling relationship between the biblical counselor and counselee. Chapter 6 summarizes the main arguments of the dissertation and provides recommendations for future research.

<p> This study aims to examine the rhetoric used by evangelical leaders to promote their organizations and to gain the support of Millennials. Multiple YouTube videos depicting different forms of public appeals are analyzed for four evangelical leaders: Ravi Zacharias, Timothy Keller, Jeremy Courtney, and Shane Claiborne. Cluster analysis is the primary methodology for examination of the rhetoric of both the individual speaker and the organization each represents. Additionally, ideographs of these leaders are pinpointed in the course of the analysis and compared to concepts related to social justice, a value commonly associated with Millennials. The implications of types of appeals, language choices, and common ideographs for evangelical, Christian identities are discussed and examined along a historical continuum. This analysis finds the four individuals in the study primarily utilize emotional appeals and Burke&rsquo;s identification to gain support from both the individual and the collective as they expand the potentiality for what qualifies as American evangelicalism. Whereas Zacharias and Courtney aim their appeals primarily at Millennial individuals seeking to fulfill existential needs, Keller and Claiborne address Millennials as a group seeking to re-imagine (or rediscover) evangelicalism as inclusive and theologically sophisticated. Finally, this research concludes with an assessment of new evangelicalism, the limitations of this study, and suggestions for future research.</p><p>