In the light of the Mission-Shaped Church report (2004) and the foundation of the joint Anglican/Methodist Fresh Expressions Initiative (2005), churches were encouraged to seek ‘fresh expressions of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church’. The ecclesial reality of four case studies of new forms of worshipping communities across Methodist Churches in the Liverpool District was examined and analysed in relation to the official statements of the Methodist Church and the Fresh Expressions Initiative, questioning the rhetoric of “church for the unchurched”. Operating at the interface of ethnography and ecclesiology, this thesis employed ethnographic and negotiated research methods in order to establish why, in an age of declining church attendance, people are choosing to join groups that are doing church differently. From the evidence, I draw out characteristics of hospitality, participation and flexibility indicative of a grassroots experience of church. The thesis discovered, through detailed ethnographic research the ecclesial reality of these new Methodist groups, and presents previously unpublished evidence from grassroots participants. In listening to the voices of participants and their experience the research challenges the narrow understanding of a ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ and considers whether the ecclesial reality of the grassroots groups in this study bring a broader and more nuanced understanding of new ecclesial realities to the Methodist Church and the Fresh Expressions Initiative.

The dissertation is a study of the religious lives of Orthodox Christians in a semirural, coffee‐producing community on the shores of Lake Tana in northwest Ethiopia. Its thesis is that mediation in Ethiopian Orthodoxy – how things, substances, and people act as go‐betweens and enable connections between people and other people, the lived environment, saints, angels, and God – is characterised by an animating tension between commensality or shared substance, on the one hand, and hierarchical principles on the other. This tension pertains to long‐standing debates in the study of Christianity about the divide between the created world and the Kingdom of Heaven. Its archetype is the Eucharist, which entails full transubstantiation but is circumscribed by a series of purity regulations so rigorous as to make the Communion inaccessible to most people for most of their lives. These purity regulations, I argue, speak to an incommensurability between relations of human substance‐sharing, especially commensality and sexuality, and hierarchical relations between humans and divinity.