The present study investigates the contribution of religious community involvement to adolescent development, including the processes of identity formation and moral development. Three key areas are explored: 1) the precursors of faith community membership; 2) the process by which a belief system is chosen; and 3) the ways in which religious belief is supported by a faith community once it is joined. Of specific interest are the ways in which religious community integration nurtures the evolution of religious belief, including through intergenerational support, religious peer groups, and a connection to the ritual and history of a faith tradition. In particular, the influence of peers is examined, both for its role in the initial establishment of a religious identity as well as its role in the maintenance and growth of religious belief. The current study utilizes a phenomenological approach to the qualitative data analysis of adolescent interviews with subjects ranging in age from 12-21 years, from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith communities, representing a religiously and ethnically diverse sample. The narratives of participants have been analyzed to allow for the distillation of themes across contexts. This phenomenological analytic framework allows for exploratory hypothesis generating on dimensions of developmental support derived from religious community.

ABSTRACT AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS' PERCEPTION OF BIBLICAL COMMUNITY WITHIN THE ENVIRONMENT OF DIGITAL MEDIA: A MIXED METHODS STUDY Matthew Alan Vander Wiele, Ed.D. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014 Chair: Dr. Troy W. Temple This study is an examination of teen perception regarding their understanding of biblical community within the environment of digital media. The study also examines the principles, essentials, or characteristics of biblical community regardless of environment. The researcher surveyed a sample of teens that attend classical, open enrollment, and closed enrollment Christian schools of various denominations as well as no denomination. A survey presenting a list of the essential principles of biblical community, regardless of environment, including questions for each objective was sent to the sample. The respondents were asked to participate in a quantitative Lickert-scale survey. An expert panel was utilized to validate and approve the principles of biblical community that were used in the student survey. The validation by the experts regarding the literature review was then used to form objective questions regarding the principles or characteristics of biblical community regardless of environment. Triangulation was utilized as the principles reviewed in the literature review, validated by the expert panel, were formulated into a survey to measure perception. The researcher analyzed the data in light of the principles or essentials of biblical community reviewed in the literature review and validated upon by the experts to demonstrate a need to better measure the effectiveness of biblical community within a particular environment. Also, the research demonstrated a need to educate parents and students alike as to what makes a community biblical. The benefit of the expert panel allowed for the findings to be validated in order to then create an instrument that measures student perception. The researcher sought to answer the question: Do teens, that attend Christian high schools, perceive their online relationships to facilitate the principles or essentials of biblical community? The more commonly asked questions concerning the effects of digital media on one's face-to-face relationships cannot adequately be answered until the above question is answered.

Paul's citation of an early baptismal tradition in Gal 3:28, 1 Cor 12:13 and Col 3:11 is as notable for its prominence in the Pauline corpus as it is for its ambiguity. A survey of the variety of views as to what Paul is denying and, conversely, affirming by this formula highlights the importance of identifying both the broad mythic vision into which Paul has set it as well as the social arrangements he advocates by means of it. This attention to how cultural symbols and stories correlate with social praxis is prompted by insights from the sociology of knowledge. This thesis argues that in each instance Paul deploys the formula to support his vision for social unity in his churches that are composed of members from various social strata and subcultures who in Christ gain a new social identity that they are to express as family-like solidarity. The predominance of kinship terminology and expectations in Paul's exhortations to ecclesial unity lead me to propose a model of ethnic identity construction as appropriate for assessing the role of the baptismal unity formula in its Pauline usage. A reading of each epistle in which the formula occurs demonstrates how the formula serves in each case to epitomize Paul's vision for social unity. Furthermore, the proposed model of ethnic identity formation serves to highlight how Paul warrants that social solidarity by appeal to the believers' fictive, genealogical connectedness and presumed shared origins and essence. Such contextualization of the formula within the social vision expressed in each epistle highlights how Paul patterns the believers' identity on Israel as reconfigured through the story of Christ Jesus' death and resurrection. This assessment of Pauline social identity formation depends on and contributes to apocalyptic understandings of Paul's gospel as well as the social emphasis of the so-called new perspective on Paul.