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The call experience of Southern Baptist ministers and its dynamic influence on their vocation

This dissertation examines the call experience of various religious leaders as recorded in literature, and compares these to the call experiences of contemporary Southern Baptist ministers. / The analysis and comparison will be accomplished through application of a five-stage paradigm taken from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Roger Walsh's Spirit of Shamanism. / Chapter One describes and compares the call experience of the shaman, the biblical prophet, and reformational literature on the call to ministry. Campbell's paradigm is applied to the specific ethnography of Black Elk as a shaman, the biblical accounts of Moses as a prophet, and the autobiographical material of Peter Young as an 18th Century minister. / Chapter Two presents a brief history of the Baptists. The historical data focuses on the development, and growth of the Colonial Baptists, the Southern Baptists, and the Florida Baptists. / Chapter Three develops further the methodology and research context of this study. It presents biographical data on the research group, and historical data on Wakulla County and the Southern Baptist churches of Wakulla County. In addition, Chapter Three provides information on the method of gathering data through ethnographic interviews. / Chapter Four presents the interview data and analyzes it in terms of the first two stages of Campbell's paradigm. These two stages incorporate the early childhood and life experiences, and the awakening and call to adventure of the ministers through their conversion and call experiences. / Chapter Five examines the ethnographic interview material for the final three stages of Campbell's paradigm dealing with religious vocation. These three stages incorporate discipline and training, culmination of the quest, and reintegration and return. / Finally, in Chapter Six the religious call experiences of the shaman, the biblical prophet, and the minister are compared within the context of Campbell's paradigm. This comparison will seek to examine how the call experiences and ministries are modeled by their respective cultural contexts. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2416. / Major Professor: Bruce T. Grindal. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76655
ContributorsPope, Jeptha Wyatt, Jr., Florida State University
Source SetsFlorida State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
Format197 p.
RightsOn campus use only.
RelationDissertation Abstracts International

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