In 1930, Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia, assuming the title of Haile Selassie I. This coronation had an impact on African-Caribbean people who began to identify the Emperor of Ethiopia as a symbolic figure for African consciousness, redemption and unity. RastafarI emerged as a socio-political and anti-colonial movement of the Caribbean, and then later progressively expanded as a trans-cultural and religious phenomenon across the world. RastafarI is a new religious movement which traces its roots to Ethiopia, but it is also a liberative-resistant movement for people who live in subalternity and still face the effects of colonialism. This study has three goals. The first and primary one is to develop reflection. How is RastafarI connected to Ethiopia? Ethiopia with its cultural and religious traditions, symbols and rituals is the perfect place for a new deification of King-God (human-divine) for RastafarI. The second is to rehabilitate RastafarI to its original vision as an Afrocentric, liberative and postcolonial movement of the Caribbean. A third related goal is to identify the theme of emancipation and gender through the key figure of a female leader, the Queen of Sheba, who had a significant impact on Ethiopian and Rasta self-consciousness (autocoscienza).

This thesis aims to investigate the growth of the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Korea, which has grown to be the largest single church in the world, and has attracted the attention of many scholars. Accordingly, much work has been done to find the reasons for its growth. However, most of them are one-sided in investigating the institutional factors of the church. These are limited and inadequate in terms of methodological appropriateness. This thesis grasps the intrinsic reasons for the growth of the church by overcoming such methodological problems. This study considers Han, the Korean people’s distinctive feeling, as the contextual factor and the Pentecostal experience of the Yoido Full Gospel Church as the institutional factor. This study investigates the growth of the church through these two factors. It shows that Han is associated with specific church growth concepts through the Pentecostal experience of the church. It also reveals that there are significant factors and processes by which Han is associated with church growth. As a result, as new findings this thesis shows how pentecostalism, a particular sect of Christianity, adapts concretely to the Korean context. It suggests some practical methods and strategies of mission for Korean Protestantism and beyond.

This thesis is a piece of practitioner research located in the context of the author’s practice as Tutor in Pastoral Studies at Regent’s Park College. It is written from the context of change, both from denominational reviews, university restructuring and government funding and from wider changes in theological education and arises from a sense of dissatisfaction that recent debates have tended to separate out a discussion about the preparation for ministry from an understanding of ministry itself. The thesis explores ideas of ministry and leadership, arguing that, in the face of the challenge posed by leadership language and thought, a historic and contemporary Baptist understanding of ministry is best understood through a dialectical model of ministry, a habitus, rather than through a habitus of leadership. It then charts the history of preparation for ministry among Baptists and explores the contemporary developments in language and suggests that formation is the most appropriate and helpful description of the process.

The Second Vatican Council set out a new vision of the ecclesial relationship between ordained and lay people in the Roman Catholic Church within its understanding of the church as the people of God. This is an important issue for the church’s self-understanding and mission; it also has practical implications for the Catholic Church in Scotland as it faces a sharp decline in vocations to the ordained priesthood, raising questions about the relative roles of priests and lay people. Dioceses are developing plans for closing and merging parishes based on projected numbers of priests, in an effort to maintain traditional patterns of church life. This study explored a different approach, based on the development of a partnership between ordained and lay people which reflects the theology of Vatican II. To investigate this possibility, the study drew on research carried out in two Scottish dioceses between 1998 and 2000. It found evidence that a new partnership between priests and people was developing in some parish communities, but it also found that diocesan commitments to collaborative working between ordained and lay were not reflected in the church’s practice and structures. These tensions between commitment and practice, which undermined efforts to create a new partnership, were analysed with the help of Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, a strategy for ecumenical engagement which addresses tensions in the church’s performance of its vocation by a critical appraisal of its own tradition and openness to the insights of others. By bringing together the experience of those who took part in the archived research with the theology of Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning, the elements of a new ecclesial partnership between ordained and lay were identified. They open up the possibility of a different kind of future for the Catholic Church in Scotland.

This research arose from my experiences as a curate in England’s Northwest seeking to embody God’s love in the pastoral care of men with addiction and mental health issues (dual diagnosis), reflecting a wider societal issue around the care of people with that combination of problems, and the under-recognised role of clergy as unofficial ‘front-line mental health workers’. This is a role that clergy get little training to discharge effectively, and so the research methodology employed was that of a Constructivist Grounded Theory as I’ve attempted to use insights from a variety of disciplines to act as a ‘scaffold’ in order to work out what clergy could meaningfully and consistently offer. Treatment for those with a dual diagnosis is difficult and often unsuccessful because it requires a collaborative relationship between patient and carer where often there may be a lack of acceptance that the issues exist. Insights were sought then from a related, but different field, namely midwifery and obstetrics, engaging with intrauterine death – where the mother may not have completely accepted the realities that they face. Interviews were conducted with clergy in the field, midwives and obstetricians. Accounts of the experiences of dual diagnosed individuals were sought through existing evidence in the public sphere to minimise the risk of harm for research subjects. Analysis of the research data revealed that pastoral care in those situations of complex bereavement are about embracing the tension between absence and presence, and helping people through that liminality, to reappropriate their grief and expectations of what life ‘should be’ to ‘how life is’ and ‘how life might be in the future’. The significance of the role of objects is explored with particular emphasis on ‘memory boxes’, and their nearest equivalents in the field of dual diagnosis. These insights are connected to the academic study of the Doctrine of the Trinity, particularly focussing on the work of Sarah Coakley, with a thorough exploration of the metaphor of dance that has evolved around the concept of ‘perichoresis’ with connections made between doctrine and modern insights from dance studies. The result is a renewed pastoral paradigm that is collaborative, dynamic, liminal, and with an acceptance that care is not simply about ‘being present’, but about resourcing people for ‘absence’ as well through a poiesis that emphasises the freedom of the cared for, whilst encouraging and seeking what will motivate them to enter into the liminal space, a movement through which will enable their greater flourishing. This paradigm has implications beyond those with a dual diagnosis, and can be extended into pastoral care in its widest sense.

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This thesis examines the contributions that emerging churches make to their parent communities’ understanding of church. As a work in practical theology, it is focuses on the theology that is deeply embedded within the everyday language, symbols, and practices of ordinary individuals and communities. Thus, the research in this thesis centres on two concrete emerging communities and employs qualitative methods to examine and analyse the actual practices, values, and beliefs of community participants—treating the data generated through the investigation of these emerging churches as theological material. The thesis is structured in six chapters, beginning in chapter one with a preliminary sketch of the wider emerging church phenomenon, a brief account of the researcher’s own earlier experiences with emerging communities, and an initial overview of the research already conducted on emerging church. Following this introduction, the thesis outlines the research methodology in chapter two, taking an approach to practical theology that moves beyond the prevalent models of correlation and recognizes the embodied nature of theology. Identified in this thesis as ‘theology in the vernacular’ or ‘local theologies’, this approach provides a mechanism for bringing two emerging churches into an impactful encounter with their parent communities’ understanding of church. This encounter unfolds through the remaining four chapters of the thesis. Chapter three provides the ecclesial context for this research by outlining the history and development of emerging church, and locating the two emerging communities within that narrative. Chapters four and five offer an in-depth portrayal and analysis of these two communities by depicting their ecclesial contexts and historical development, their weekly patterns, their physical and online spaces, their worship gatherings, the profiles and personal narratives of their participants, and the core practices of these communities. The findings from these separate sites of research are brought together in chapter six, where five key ecclesiological features are drawn from the common patterns present in these emerging churches. These are: (1) the prevalence of an ecclesial eclecticism, (2) the carving out of a space for theological discussion and intellectual enquiry, (3) a resolute fondness for their local cities, (4) the vital nature of the weekly gathering, and (5) a robustly verbal orientation in the worship gatherings. By bringing these five ecclesiological features into an encounter with the parent tradition of these emerging churches in chapter six, the contribution that these emerging churches are making to their parent communities understanding of church is explored. This thesis argues that these emerging communities are offering their parent communities two alternative ways of understanding church. The first is an understanding of church as a space for ecclesial borrowing and blending—which impacts on the formulation of a community’s ecclesial identity. The second is an understanding of church as a space for discussion, enquiry, and doubt—which impacts on the nature of belonging in ecclesial communities.

This thesis explores how metaphors of identity shape the practice of preaching and can encourage or limit attempts to witness to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. It asks the question: Is there an identity that will encourage a faithful homiletic practice by embracing the full range of human capacities and gifts without asking the preacher to rely on him- or herself? It suggests that the homiletic identity of THE PREACHER AS ARTIST can lead preachers to understand their task in relation to the life and ongoing ministry of Jesus Christ and so give space to divine and human action in the event of preaching the word of God. The argument begins with an account of the present cultural moment and the suggestion that preachers should consider an identity that takes the imagination seriously in light of shifting cultural assumptions and expectations. It then describes the significance of metaphor for identity before looking at two established homiletic identities, THE PREACHER AS TEACHER and THE PREACHER AS HERALD. Accounts of these two identities highlight the tension between divine and human agency in the task of preaching. The thesis then examines the metaphor of THE PREACHER AS ARTIST. This attempt to re-describe the identity of preachers draws on a theology of communion and the doctrine of the vicarious humanity of Christ to relocate the identity and practice of the preacher in the creative and ongoing ministry of Jesus. The metaphorical association of the preacher and artist understood within the artistic ministry of Jesus Christ frees the full range of human capacities, including the imagination. It connects preachers to the person and work of Jesus Christ, who took the raw materials of the human condition and offered them back to the Father in a redemptive and imaginative fashion through the Holy Spirit.

In spite of the realities of an increasingly post-ecclesial world, sacrament continues to appear as a theme in contemporary culture, often in places least expected. What it means to describe something – a text, ritual, experience, etc – as “sacramental” derives from the unique yet complex conception of sacrament as practiced (liturgy) and theorized (theology) within the Christian tradition. Indeed, whilst simultaneously upheld as the “constitutive” action and foundational sacrament of Christ's Body called church, the Eucharist has confounded the Christian faith throughout its history. Its symbolism points to the paradox of the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, and his sacrificial death on Calvary, which St. Paul describes as a stumbling-block (skandalon) and foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23). And yet this scandalous quality of sacramentality, not only illustrated by but enacted in the Eucharist, has not been sufficiently accounted for in the ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies of the Christian tradition. Following the image from the Fourth gospel of “the word made flesh,” this interdisciplinary study examines the scandal of sacramentality along the two-pronged thematic of the scandal of language (word) and the scandal of the body (flesh). While sacred theology can think through this scandal only at significant risk to its own stability, the fictional discourses of literature and the arts are free to explore this scandal in a manner that simultaneously augments and challenges notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and by extension, what it means to describe the Church as a “eucharistic community.” Our aim is less a reassertion of the vitality of traditional sacramental rituals even within contemporary culture and more an effort to understand why the notion of sacrament and sacramentality has held such staying power, despite significant cultural shifts and movement away from the traditional practices of the Christian faith. Why do novelists, artists, theologians, philosophers and religious communities continue to make use of and draw upon the language and evocation of ‘sacrament’? Our thesis is that it is precisely the scandalous, subversive power of the eucharistic mystery, the thematic and symbolic tensions and destabilizing effect inherent to sacramentality, that make it such a fertile trope for artists and writers, especially within a postmodern context preoccupied with the themes of language, embodiment, presence/absence, immanence/transcendence, and so on.