Evangelicals have an unquestionable heritage for involvement in the world and its social problems and the Bible provides a basis for a liberative gospel. For the God of the Bible is not only a God of love and peace, but also of justice and he is therefore on the side of the poor, oppressed and suffering. He has given us a spirit of engagement with the world as salt and light and not escapism. As we give serious consideration to the challenges of liberation theologies, we need to hear the voice of him who calls his people in every age to go out into the lost and lonely world (as he did), in order to live and love, to witness and serve like him and for him and that is what African Evangelicalism is all about. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M. Th. (Systematic Theology)

Cette recherche investigue d’un point de vue clinique le processus d’adhésion à la religion protestante évangélique (plus spécialement sa version pentecôtiste). En France, ce fait religieux gagne de l’ampleur et se développe depuis peu chez des populations issues de la migration. Historiquement, l’évangélisme s’installe dans des milieux défavorisés socialement et se montre assez polymorphique, s’adaptant aux singularités culturelles et subjectives des groupes. C’est un phénomène transculturel qui s’appuie sur des notions chrétiennes comme la conversion et les dons du Saint-Esprit (glossolalie, prophétie, guérison avec les mains, etc.). Afin d’étudier le travail psychique impliqué, nous avons discuté avec les sciences sociales, lesquelles s’inquiètent dès leur fondation des phénomènes religieux et de leurs composants psychologiques. L’exploration de la bibliographie sur la réforme protestante et l’évangélisme nous signale l’importance de la conversion, les formules « naître de nouveau » ou « devenir une autre personne » étant souvent répétées par les évangéliques. Cette conversion est envisagée par nous comme une technique religieuse de re-création biographique. Suivant notre disposition clinique psychanalytique, les problématiques dessinées s’accompagnent de lectures de la psychopathologie et de la psychanalyse sur la religion et la religiosité : le jalon fondamental étant que l’objet religieux s’ancre dans les fondations de la vie psychique. À partir d’entretiens cliniques avec des sujets convertis (certains ayant fait recours à des soins psychosociaux), nous explorons leur activité discursive et narrative avec les théories et méthodes issues de la narrativité et de la phénoménologie herméneutique. Nous concluons sur la pertinence de penser à une psychopathologie du fait religieux : il s’agit d’une disposition éthique et épistémologique du clinicien et du besoin d’hospitalité de cet objet religieux, ceci étant présent dans le pathos et dans le travail de chaque sujet sur soi dans le langage. / This research investigates, from a clinical perspective, the processes of adhesion to evangelical Protestant religions (that of Pentecostal Christians in particular). In France, this religious fact is growing and developing among immigrant populations. Historically, Evangelicalism installs itself in socially disadvantaged backgrounds and shows the polymorphic and adaptive capacity to espouse cultural singularities and accord itself to the subjectivity processes of different groups. It’s a transcultural phenomenon that relies on Christian notions such as conversion and gifts of the Holy Spirit (glossolalia, prophecy, cure with the hands, etc.). In order to study the psychic work involved in adhesion to evangelical Protestantism, we first consider the social sciences, which since their foundation have explored religious phenomenon and their psychological components. The bibliographical exploration about the Protestant Reformation and Evangelism underlines the importance of conversion, to which expressions such as “born again” or “become another person” are frequently repeated by evangelicals. We consider conversion as a religious technique of biographical re-creation. Then, from a psychodynamic (psychoanalytical) standpoint, we review psychopathology and psychoanalytic literature in their views of religion and religiosity: the fundamental milestone is that the religious object is anchored in the foundations of the psychic life. We have interviewed converted persons (some of them had been treated by psychosocial professionals) so as to analyze their narratives and discursive activities with methods and theories from hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative psychology. We conclude our discussion by addressing the relevance of reflecting about the psychopathology of the religious fact, which we identify as an ethical and epistemological disposition for the clinician. Concurrently, this research suggests a need for more hospitality towards this religious object, which is present in the pathos and in the psychic work of the construction of the “self” in language.

This dissertation demonstrates how the Emmanuel Gospel Center, a parachurch organization in Boston, built an urban evangelical coalition out of the city’s postwar migrant communities. Efforts to resist government-directed urban renewal and a missionary posture toward the city drove the organization’s initially all-white staff into ministry partnerships with minority Protestant leaders. The Emmanuel Gospel Center brought these diverse communities together through the organization’s consistent promotion of collaborative city-wide ministry endeavors. Partnership with Boston’s growing migrant population then extended the organization’s ministries overseas. The study argues that white urban evangelicals created and promoted enduring cross-cultural and global religious networks within the United States. Douglas Hall and Judy Hall, who arrived at the Emmanuel Gospel Center in 1964, changed the organization from a fundamentalist preaching station into an evangelical “mission society” that prioritized collaboration with migrant churches. The couple’s missionary approach fit the tenuous neo-evangelical situation in the inner city created by middle-class flight to the suburbs. Protesting urban renewal with their Puerto Rican neighbors in the late 1960s saved the Emmanuel Gospel Center, turned the Halls into community organizers, and transformed their neighborhood into the heart of the city’s Puerto Rican community. In the 1970s, the Halls built ministry networks with African-American and Puerto Rican Protestant leaders. Boston’s multicultural evangelical coalition became institutionalized with the founding of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s urban educational program in 1976. The study argues that intercultural collaboration produced a coalition that was ethnically diverse, poor and working-class, and increasingly pentecostal. Furthermore, through the Emmanuel Gospel Center, neo-evangelicals formed an integral part of this coalition. In the 1980’s, the Emmanuel Gospel Center built partnerships with Haitian ministers. These connections drew the organization’s ministries into the Haitian diaspora beyond Boston while promoting unity within the city’s often divided Haitian Protestant community. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on evangelicalism by arguing that postwar coalition-building on the local, urban level provides an alternative reading of the movement compared with studies that highlight regional or national associations. Analysis of the Emmanuel Gospel Center demonstrates that American evangelicalism developed within a transnational and interconnected Caribbean context. For the field of World Christianity, the study shows how midcentury African-American and Puerto Rican migrations laid the foundation for multiethnic Protestant networks among late twentieth-century urban immigrant communities.

White evangelical culture is investigated here regarding the ways that its fundamental theological beliefs propagate and maintain patriarchal assumptions surrounding women. These beliefs further function to legitimate men’s sexual abuse of women and girls. While official theological evangelical beliefs may seem benign, and perhaps commendable to some, a closer examination suggests the mobilization of those beliefs create the foundation for enslavement and destruction of women. The fundamental beliefs undergirding evangelicalism propagate internalized oppression through patriarchal colonialism of women’s bodies, minds, and souls. Tactics of spiritual rape within White evangelical purity culture enact violence, control, and manipulation to appropriate and profit from the sacred power within the spirit of another. My analysis of #ChurchToo tweets demonstrates how formerly-evangelical women exorcize internalized patriarchal identities by reversing patriarchal myths, reclaiming, renaming and becoming Holy Haggard Hags who enact Righteous Fury through the Rage of Dreadful Women. Through the process of renaming and reclaiming, the confiscated and distorted power of the four Great Hags of Our Hidden History are recovered. The Myth of Evil Eve becomes “Ezer Kěnegdô,” Bathsheba the Innocent Lamb dethrones King David, Jezebel returns as a Confident, Clever, and Powerful Woman and her Spirit exorcises Satan’s Agents and Devouring Wolves, and Tamar the Trickster reappears as a Prophetess, with gifts to symbolize the collective power of sisterhood. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

No abstract available / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2013 / Biblical and Religious Studies / Unrestricted

Over the last three decades, social justice-oriented evangelical Christians of various political stripes have become increasingly concerned about the problem of human trafficking. This issue has brought together Christians concerned about pornography and sex addiction, the social effects of immigration policy, and the exploitation of the poor in a globalized world. Widespread evangelical interest in the problem of human trafficking – particularly sex trafficking – has created an entire industry of non-profit service providers, foundations, advocacy organizations, missions, and parachurch ministries devoted to “ending modern slavery.” Their advocacy has spread beyond overtly religious spaces, and the movement to end human trafficking has become one of the most significant religious and humanitarian movements of the twenty-first century. Why has “ending modern slavery” become a special calling for American evangelical Christians, and what does this tell us about evangelical humanitarianism? How do everyday Christians – from non-profit CEOs and legal advocates to lay volunteers and social workers – conceptualize human trafficking as a distinct category of human exploitation, come to feel a particular calling toward anti-trafficking work, and imagine possible solutions to this humanitarian and moral crisis? My project centers on an ethnographic study of a faith-based, anti-trafficking non-profit organization in New York City, Restore NYC, and intervenes in broader political and academic conversations about the nature of American evangelicalism; the neoliberalism of faith-based humanitarianism; and gender, affect, and genre in the “rescue industry.” I use ethnography, archival research, and popular media analysis to explicate the motivations, tactics, ideology, and theology of the contemporary anti-trafficking movement, while positioning it within the longer history of evangelical humanitarianism.

In the field of liturgical theology, there is a common understanding that the prescriptive theological claims of theologians do not often match the descriptive, lived reality of worshippers. Put differently, there is a gap between the “primary” theological activity of worship and the formal “secondary” theology of the academic liturgical theologian. Within this interstice lie the liturgical-theological articulations of “ordinary,” non-specialist worshippers. This project argues that liturgical theology has not focused upon the human subject to a sufficient standard and proposes the method of liturgical biography as a descriptive and analytically rich avenue to construct liturgical theologies. Liturgical biography utilizes longitudinal oral interviews and personal journal entries, supported by ethnographic fieldwork, to describe the lived reality of the “ordinary” primary theologian (the worshipper) engaging in worship and liturgical-theological reflection. In addition to a methodological proposal, this project offers and analyzes the liturgical biographies of two worshippers who attend the New York City campus of Hillsong Church, a global Pentecostal megachurch-turned-denomination. Chapter One discusses the theoretical underpinning to liturgical biography, incorporating the concept of the rhizome developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Liturgical biography is needed because worship is too rhizomatically complex for the universalizing and prescriptive claims of liturgical theology. Chapter Two provides a working history and liturgical theology of Hillsong Church rendered from Hillsong’s primary sources (i.e., books, sermons, song lyrics, blogs). Chapters Three and Four examine the personal histories and liturgical-theological claims of these two “primary theologians” who attend Hillsong New York City, whose claims are then placed in conversation with liturgical-theological interlocutors and other allied fields of discourse. These chapters are “co-constructed” insofar as the primary theologians’ voices take the lead, but the researcher employs the thematization and organization of the materials. Their liturgical theologies demonstrate the “gap” between primary and secondary theology, elucidate the rhizomatic complexity of worship, and offer unique contributions to liturgical theology, especially by giving voice to the underrepresented perspectives of Pentecostals and Evangelicals. Chapter Five concludes the project by arguing in favor of liturgical biography as a viable method for liturgical theology and further theorizes its ecumenical import. / 2021-07-25T00:00:00Z

This dissertation develops a narrative homiletic for race-conscious preaching using a mutual critical correlation method. It argues that the evangelical embrace of a color-blind ideology homiletically, hermeneutically, and situationally limits the proclamation of the gospel in the age of racialization. Paul Ricoeur’s conception of the entrapping use of narrative is employed to understand the deep resistance many white evangelical Christians have toward racial consciousness. Constructively, Ricoeur’s ethical understanding of narrative and his model of threefold mimesis offer an alternative preaching paradigm rooted in mutual critical correlation and an understanding of the gospel in context developed in conversation with liberationist theology. The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity provides additional frames for understanding that matters of difference are not obstacles to overcome in preaching but are essential to deepening understandings of God and the gospel. This dissertation employs interdisciplinary methods rooted in practical theology that integrate Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s sociology on color-blindness, narrative phenomenology, empirical research on the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and homiletics. The first chapter describes the evangelical embrace of color-blindness and its expository homiletical method. It understands evangelicalism as a constructed identity and outlines the need for a hermeneutic of situations in evangelical homiletics. Chapter two reviews narrative homiletics proposals, the homiletics literature on race and preaching, and evangelical expository preaching. The third chapter makes a theological turn to understand how evangelical theology aligns with the color-blind ideology. It turns to the liberationist theology of James Cone and a theology of broken symbols through Robert Cummings Neville, before outlining the mutual critical correlation model of David Tracy. This integrates homiletical theology with homiletical methodology, especially by understanding pre-figuring roles that aspects of identity bring to interpretation. The fourth chapter develops narrative critical correlation homiletics through the referential capacity of the gospel, rather than the sense of a biblical text. It argues that an ethical use of Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis can mediate a dialogue between text, context, situation, and identity in naming God and the gospel. The final chapter contains sermons and sermon analysis as a way of illustrating how sermonic methods and intercultural competence impact preaching. / 2026-01-23T00:00:00Z

The majority of critics interested in the religious elements of Flannery O'Connor's fiction argue that her texts illustrate her professed Catholic faith. For many of these scholars, the author's nonfiction figures predominately in their interpretations of her fiction. This thesis highlights the presence of Evangelical theology in O'Connor's short fiction by utilizing an approach that is underrepresented in scholarly examinations of her works: reading O'Connor's texts without considering the author's personal beliefs. Through this approach, the Evangelical dimensions of O'Connor's short stories become apparent. This thesis contends that each of the six short stories discussed exemplifies Evangelical theology as they emphasize the fallen nature of humanity, depict the action of grace as transformative, and suggest that willful cooperation is not necessary to salvation. By demonstrating that O'Connor's short fiction reproduces Evangelical theology, this thesis aims to provide scholars with a basis for reconsidering the relationship of her works to the literary tradition of the largely Protestant South.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Religion)--Vanderbilt University, May 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.