Thesis advisor: James O'Toole / This project tells the unlikely story of how evangelical efforts to get and stay on television helped to transform evangelicals from nonpolitical outsiders to vocal political insiders. Over the course of fifty years evangelicals utilized new technology and built a vast media infrastructure, culminating in the creation of a cultural empire that took evangelicalism from a fringe religion to a top tier cultural and political force. The path for evangelicals was necessarily political, but not inevitably partisan. When evangelical broadcasters first tried to get on television, evangelicalism was an immature movement opposed by liberal and mainline denominations, and unknown by much of America. Getting on the air was therefore an uphill battle, but these early challenges were formative. Initial efforts spurred evangelicals to organize, which led to the formation of the National Religious Broadcasters and expanded evangelical networks. Over time, they built relationships with government officials and built their own network of technical and political knowledge to ensure that religious broadcasting was successful. They increasingly gained access to airtime, and as their power increased, their message of faith evolved into a message of faith paired with politics. Soon these beliefs were asserted and reaffirmed over the airways, directly into households across America. This powerful messaging tool allowed evangelicals to raise their profiles and their influence, taking them from late-night paid programming ministers to prime time commenters on the issues that mattered most in America. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The aim of this work, Missional Focus, Form and Function are Redefining American Christianity, is to capture and express a cohesive account of a developing missional church movement in the United States and its influence across the American religious landscape resulting from an intentional emphasis on context (focus), and how that focus informs ministry form and function. The transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century witnessed significant changes in ministry philosophy and practice not seen since the founding of the nation, and presents evidence substantiating that a redefinition of American Christianity is taking place. Achieving the aim of this work necessarily includes not only a recounting and interpretation of current shifts across activities of the Church in the United States in its broadest sense, but also the incorporation of other important and contributing influences such as historical elements and their contribution to the development and formation of American Christianity, specifically the relationship between religion and populist efforts to achieve national liberty, as well as the rise of secularism, and the entrance into the Post-Christendom era. Unquestionably, an important influence is that of contemporary voices speaking to the need for change in American Christianity and helping to redefine Christianity in the United States along missional concepts. Significant voices speaking into the greater international missional conversation and influencing missional efforts in the United States include Ryan K. Bolger, Neil Cole, Eddie Gibbs, Darrell Guder, Alan Hirsch, CJP Niemandt, Alan Roxburgh, Ed Stetzer, Craig Van Gelder, and others. Churches employing the term missional to describe their understanding, conceptualization, and approach to ministry are an additional and essential influence. Using unique forms demonstrating a non-traditional focus that result in a variety of functions atypical for American churches, these ministries are adding to the evidence of a redefinition process already in motion. Among the five ministries included in this work are two noteworthy examples of churches pursuing missional ministry: the Life in Deep Ellum ministry in Dallas, Texas, and Tampa Underground, a network of micro churches in Tampa, Florida. The activities of these and other churches demonstrate the relationship between focus, form, and function as embodied in a missional approach to ministry. Certainly, change is evident across the landscape of American Christianity, but how extensive and far-reaching must be determined. The goal of this work is not simply to confirm or dispute a redefinition of American Christianity as a result of missional church activity, but also in a broad and more overall fashion, to contribute to the larger dialogue addressing missional ministry in the United States, encouraging a greater understanding and embracing of missional ministry in American churches, and an energetic and effective pursuit of missional Christianity and church ministry in the United States. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Science of Religion and Missiology / PhD / Unrestricted

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This research compares the similarities and differences in the official documents and proceedings of the Commission for World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) in Athens 2005 and the Lausanne Movement held in Cape Town in 2010. The former has always exhibited a missiology strong in issues of social justice while the latter has for a long time been consistent in identifying mission as evangelism. The close of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th saw the emergence of the social gospel, which came about as a result of the historical critical approach to biblical texts. Fundamentalists, arose as a reactionary phenomenon to the social gospel, while emphasizing fundamentals of the Christian doctrines and a strict premillennial eschatology which resisted social involvement in favour of salvation of souls.

Page 250 was not included becasue it was a blank sheet. / <p>Relying on original research and breaking with the dominant interpretations offered so far by historians, this thesis argues that the United Church of Canada maintained an evangelical institutional identity between the 1930s and 1960s despite the fact that its leaders did not hold evangelical beliefs. For a variety of reasons, these leaders found it expedient to promote institutional practices of evangelism, moral reform, and Christian education that embodied evangelical characteristics and therefore projected an evangelical image of the church to its members and the public. At the same time, they personally rejected key evangelical beliefs, a fact that was reflected in the intentional omission of these beliefs from successive official theological statements of the church, although frankly non-evangelical sentiments were rarely found in such statements. This leadership paradigm, which coupled non-evangelical beliefs and evangelical institutional practices, endured into the 1960s.</p> <p>The tensions inherent between the non-evangelical beliefs held by church leaders and their promotion of evangelical institutional practices made it increasingly difficult for leaders to maintain this paradigm from the 1950s onward. Finally, a series of long-term and short-term catalysts both inside and outside the denomination which converged in the mid-l 960s caused church leaders to abandon the evangelical institutional practices of evangelism, moral reform and Christian education that had defined the church in preceding decades, and simultaneously to state openly their "liberal," non-evangelical beliefs. The result of this major shift, and the ensuing public controversy, was the collapse of the old paradigm and the public redefinition of the United Church as an unambiguously non-evangelical institution. Based on new research into the institutional activities of the United Church after 1930, this conclusion challenges traditional interpretations that have either overlooked the continuing evangelical practices of Canada's largest Protestant denomination or overestimated the extent of its commitment to evangelicalism in this period.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

This dissertation argues that female piety and mission practices shaped the Evangelical Protestantism and the missionary movement that emerged from the Réveil [Revival] in nineteenth century France. It shows that women through their writings, their philanthropic initiatives, and their focus on education and social renewal on behalf of children laid the foundation for French Protestant mission and outreach. This study fills a gap in Anglophone scholarship on the role of women in French Protestant mission history and the history of the nineteenth century Evangelical Revival in France. After the Reformation, Protestant women preserved the Huguenot cultural identity of Protestants both at home and abroad. This continuity was manifested in the nineteenth century when the countries of the Huguenot Refuge sent missionaries of the Evangelical Revival back into France. The ethos of Jan Hus’ Dcerka [The Daughter] present in the work of French Protestant women in philanthropy, education, and social renewal demonstrates the continuity in piety and outreach from the Reformation to the nineteenth century. After the founding of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in 1822, the Paris Mission women’s committee, led by Albertine de Broglie and Émilie Mallet, played a crucial role in promoting missions by mediating regional and class differences between Protestants. Late eighteenth century female initiatives on behalf of vulnerable women and children laid the foundation for the work of missions because, through them, women developed networks that served the goals of philanthropy, fundraising, and infant education. Infant school education, pioneered in the Lesotho Mission by Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland, was essential to women’s mission practice. The infant school pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, with its religious teaching, the centrality of the female role, and the emphasis on kindness was the key component in the work of the Lesotho Mission. In the 1830s, the arrival of missionary wives launched the work of the Lesotho Mission and energized French Protestant faith. In the 1840s, women once again sparked spiritual renewal with the creation of deaconess communities in Paris and Strasburg that served as models of Christian unity and self-sacrificial service. Overall, women’s piety and outreach were sources of revitalization in the Reformed Church and influenced early Evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth century France. Women’s mission practices that focused on works of mercy, education, and the nurturing of Christian families served as catalysts for renewal.

As Latin American evangelical theologians awoke to dependency on the North in the post-war period, they set the trajectory for a new contextual brand of evangelical Christianity. Ecuadorian Protestant theologian C. René Padilla (b. 1932) coined the term misión integral (integral mission), which first appeared on a public stage in Lausanne at the influential International Congress on World Evangelization of 1974—signalling both the rise of leadership from the Global South and a wider turn toward holistic mission within the global Protestant evangelical community. The concept of misión integral is an understanding of Christian mission that synthesizes the pursuit of justice with the offer of salvation. Padilla utilized the kingdom of God as the central theological motif in this synthesis. The thesis explores the dynamic interplay between Padilla and the global evangelical networks that formed, developed, and diffused misión integral. This first critical study of Padilla is structured thematically in order to provide a more detailed focus on each stage of this process. Earlier studies have largely framed misión integral as responding to Catholic theologies of liberation, beginning in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In contrast, I demonstrate that the origins of misión integral are found within a cluster of political and social forces reshaping post-war Latin America: rural-urban migration flows, the resulting complications of urbanization, and the rapid expansion of the universities, where Marxist ideas of revolutionary change presented a growing appeal to students. When Padilla became convinced of the inadequacy of his received North American evangelical theology of mission to meet such challenges, he began a search for theological materials with which he could address the Latin American context. In doing so, he sought to widen the parameters of an evangelical understanding of Christian mission. Padilla’s response was not purely Latin American nor driven by exclusively Latin American concerns. However, Padilla’s theology developed through a multidirectional and international conversation with a wide variety of interlocutors. Padilla became a metaphorical sponge—appropriating new theological perspectives from his undergraduate and graduate studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, his doctoral work in New Testament at the University of Manchester, the Presbyterian missionary-statesman, John A. Mackay, and the holistic tradition of American women missionaries through his closest colleague and wife Catharine Feser Padilla. This thesis explores these multidirectional conversations that shaped the concept of integral mission, and in doing so provides a corrective to current historiography. The process of developing the contours of integral mission would continue over the next two decades in a further series of transnational theological conversations. Particularly important were those Padilla conducted with the Peruvian Baptist Samuel Escobar and the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (Latin American Theological Fraternity), the British Anglican John R. W. Stott and the global evangelical movement, and the Argentine Methodist José Míguez Bonino and the ecumenical movement. Padilla’s theological networks cut both ways— influencing him and diffusing his influence to a wider Christian constituency. In focusing on these interlocutors, this thesis provides an assessment of the nature of Padilla’s influence upon the growing acceptance of integral mission within global evangelicalism. Today, the language of integral mission is being increasingly adopted by evangelical mission and relief organizations, evangelical political activists, official congress declarations, and Protestant ecclesial movements around the world.

In the Philippines, as in the US and UK and elsewhere, evangelical conversion is normally regarded as a ‘turning’ from a life ‘without Christ’ towards a life of ‘faith in Christ’. Traditionally, the potential convert is invited to ‘accept’ or ‘receive’ Christ as personal lord and saviour. Once a decision to ‘accept’ is indicated, the individual is considered ‘born again’ or ‘saved’, whereupon he or she is expected to manifest behavioural signs, such as participating actively in a ‘Bible-believing’ church, while adapting to its distinct ethos. This conversion, however, has not generally led to a commitment to issues of economic or social justice. In the years 1946-1986, Filipino evangelicals have tended to neglect the social question. This is consistently shown in their general silence during the 1972-81 martial law, the 1983 murder of Aquino and the 1986 people power revolution. Historically and theologically, this particularly conservative social disposition may have been influenced by a lopsided emphasis on aggressive evangelism and a general evasion of social questions, especially by US evangelical missionaries who carried the ‘baggage’ of the fundamentalist-modernist debate of the 1920s and 1930s. This theological orientation seems to have been perpetuated, one way or other, by their Filipino converts. That there are in the Philippines examples of previously socially-disengaged evangelical converts who eventually moved towards a socially-engaged path, however, seems to indicate the possibility of a theological re-orientation within this Christian tradition. This study tackles this particular ‘conversion’ or re-orientation within, not away from, the evangelical tradition, with the goal of shedding some light on the nature and possibility of a ‘second conversion’ towards a socially engaged posture. To explore this phenomenon of interest, the study identifies four different trajectories of change exemplified by particular theological pilgrimages travelled by Filipino evangelicals during their adult years. The first trajectory is about the development of a social conscience which benefited from an active involvement in an international evangelical student movement. The second represents a largely noncritical exposure made possible by a protracted career in medical missions that led to a similar awakening to social injustice. The third involves an evangelical who ended up accommodating Marxist social analysis. And the fourth concerns how an underprivileged evangelical managed to attain a second, more critical, perspective on poverty, leading to a commitment to combat economic injustice. These trajectories are explored through extensive interviews with each of the four subjects. Though necessarily limited in scope, the value of this study lies in its potential to gain some insights into factors that have the potential to ‘convert’ or ‘transform’ minds and ideological postures. It thus suggests that, at least in contexts of social and economic polarisation, the evangelical Protestant tradition may not be so inescapably tied to social and political conservatism as is often assumed. The study ends by drawing some wider conclusions about the possibility of a second conversion within the evangelical Protestant tradition.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-151).

The contents of this dissertation is about the authoritarianism presently found in Lutheran churches in general and in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN) in particular. In contradiction to the Roman Catholic Church, Luther advocated the participation of the laity in decision-making processes. However, strong offices of authority have been established in ELCIN and excessive powers have been granted constitutionally to the clergy against the laity, with the result that lay leaders are made to believe that the decision-making procedures belong to the higher authorities at all levels of the church. There is a lack of willingness among the higher authorities to motivate lay leaders to take up leadership responsibilities in their presence. The danger of this attitude is that most of the decisions made in the church are initiated by the clergy and are therefore not representative. The leadership style of ELCIN can be described as partially democratic and partially authoritarian. The authoritarian leadership style of ELCIN was not derived from the original Lutheran heritage. This situation is due largely to a combination of the leadership patterns of the Finnish missionaries and the prevailing Owambo traditional culture. Authoritarian attitudes remain an urgent challenge to ELCIN in particular, and to Lutheran churches in general. The formulation of a new concept of leadership in the church must embrace the collective participation of all male adult members of the community in decision-making processes as observed in positive elements of Owambo traditions and Luther's concept of the priesthood of all believers. This dissertation recommends that lay leaders must be allowed to chair decision-making bodies at all levels in the church and that clergy and lay leaders participate equally in these bodies. ELCIN theologians also have to formulate concepts which contextualise church leadership and dissociate it from foreign vessels of culture. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.