Christianity Commons^™

Behind The Numbers: A Traditional Church Faces A New America, Larry Vogel

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

The dissertation examines membership data for The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) from the mid-1970s to the present. It considers the analysis of LCMS decline by two scholars, George Hawley and Ryan MacPherson, who independently proposed that LCMS membership decline was internal in causation due to diminished birthrates and fewer young families. While acknowledging the reality of such internal decline, this dissertation argues that the lack of external growth is a greater cause for LCMS decline. Its lack of external growth is due primarily to the racial and ethnic homogeneity of the LCMS and its failure effectively to evangelize the increasingly …

There Is A Place For You And Your Little Ones: Homiletics And Liturgy In View Of Pregnancy Loss, Joseph Michael Baumgarten

Doctor of Ministry Major Applied Project

Baumgarten, Joseph M. There is a Place for You and Your Little Ones: Homiletics and Liturgy in View of Pregnancy Loss. Doctor of Ministry. Major Applied Project, Concordia Seminary, 2022. 81 pp.

Pregnancy loss and the grief that follows is more common than most people think. However, there is a gap in resources, discussion, and care for those who have experienced such losses. This is true in wider culture as well as in the church. While there are a few resources available, they are limited. This project addresses the church’s ability to provide proper recognition of pregnancy loss, the validation …

Hospitality: Areas That Are Effective In Creating A Desire For A Visitor To Connect To Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Brent M. Hartwig

Doctor of Ministry Major Applied Project

This major applied project explores hospitality offered by the local congregation. Biblical hospitality is implicitly and explicitly commanded in scripture. Balancing the Missio Dei and two kinds of righteousness will keep us on the straight and narrow theologically when pursuing hospitality.

When churches offer hospitality, we are feeding, clothing, visiting, providing, and welcoming our neighbor. Our Redeemer wants to continue serving the community as a family-oriented, mission focused, hospitable congregation. We are doing the feeding, clothing, and providing through many efforts in the community. We are active with the local homeless shelter and crisis center. For the MAP, we wanted …

Liturgical Practices For Full Participation: Creating Opportunities For Engagement In Corporate Worship For People Living With Intellectual Disabilities At The Mooroolbark Salvation Army, Catherine Jane Spiller

Doctor of Ministry Theses

The Mooroolbark Salvation Army is a place of welcome and acceptance for people with disabilities. However, people with intellectual disabilities often have limited opportunities for engagement in corporate worship. The act of worship is a practice everyone should be able to participate in, but barriers often limit engagement for people with disabilities. This project thesis explored and sought to address these barriers and create opportunities for full participation for people with intellectual disabilities. A small diverse group of people from the Mooroolbark Salvation Army came together for ten weeks commencing in February 2022 to consider how to attend to engagement …

Missional Renewal In A Large And Established Suburban Western Church, Michael Stevens

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This thesis addresses the topic of missional renewal at Clovercrest Baptist Church (CBC), specifically focusing on participating in the mission of God through simple, memorable, and reproducible missional practices. The identified problem is a lack of process or framework for enhancing participation in God’s mission and churchwide missional renewal at CBC, a large suburban Western church. The purpose of this project intervention is to develop a resource guide of missional practices that facilitate participation in the mission of God at CBC towards missional renewal. This intervention is guided by the theological foundation that God is a God of mission. He …

Executing Vision: Operationalizing The Vision Statement Of Logos Preparatory Academy In Sugar Land, Texas, Jason Henderson

Doctor of Ministry Theses

This thesis addresses the problem of finding a way to operationalize the vision statement of Logos Preparatory Academy. Logos Preparatory Academy (Logos Prep) is a school of around six hundred students located in Sugar Land, Texas. After interviewing some of the school founders and student leadership and examining documents from the founding of the school, it became evident Logos Prep is a school in need of a more efficient and effective way to execute the vision statement of “Families and students making an impact for Christ” through the goals set forth in their Portrait of a Graduate. Using the works …

The Worship Planning Team As Conversation Partners, Calvin Symposium On Worship, Barbara D. Miller

Symposium on Worship Archive

No abstract provided.

Leadership Development In The African American Church, Barbara S. Houston

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

If the Church successfully fulfills its mission, it must have skilled and effective lay leadership. This research intends to examine the Christian organization's enhancement through discipleship and leadership development. Leadership development and discipleship are vital to every church organization. However, research shows that many historically African American denominations are challenged perhaps more than others to find and educate new religious leaders for their congregations (Johnson, 2017, kindle, loc. 179). What most African American pastors have discovered is that aging leadership is prominent in all denominations. The reality is that many African American churches are on life support; they are clinically …

Discipleship Methods For A Pluralistic Environment At Whiteville Correctional Facility, Adam Rimmer

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Volunteers within prisons are not accustomed to a prison’s pluralistic environment. Discipleship and relationship building with inmates in prisons have been strained because proper methods are not being incorporated into their chapel services. There is a need to understand inmates' diverse backgrounds and cultures to build more healthy relationships, lead them on the right path, and maintain a successful prison ministry. The goal of this project was to teach volunteers intercultural discipleship methods at Whiteville Correctional Facility. The first phase of the research methods involved doing a pre-interview with each participant that would serve as a control to gauge where …

Grounded Theory Study On The Perceived Relationship Between Classical Leadership Theories Education And Christian Ministry Leader's Success, Yannique Thomas

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

A central aim of the research study was for colleges and universities that prepare Christian ministry leaders for ministry in the twenty-first century to include classical leadership theories education in order to meet the growing demand for equipping Christian ministry leaders of the future for success (Kessler & Kretszchmar, 2015). The research findings overwhelmingly suggested that there is a direct link between classical leadership theories education and Christian ministry leaders’ success. All of the characteristics, skills, talents, and attributes identified through receiving classical leadership theories education shifts the emphasis away from what the Christian ministry leader knows in his head …

One Church’S Apathy Toward Fulfilling The Great Commission, David Thomas Williamson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Philippians 1:9-11 records Paul’s prayer containing four assessments believers can use to measure their progress toward spiritual maturity. These areas include a love that flows, a mind that knows, a character that shows, and a fruit that grows. The purpose of all these qualities is to demonstrate God’s glory. Where spiritual maturity is absent, apathy and complacency abound, and this dilemma must be overcome before a church can effectively pursue and sustain a viable focus on church revitalization. Because theological academia has not effectively focused on the partnership between spiritual maturity and church revitalization, this DMIN research project will address …

Gender Identity And The Impact On The Mental Health Crisis, Melissa Nicole Herbolsheimer

Masters Theses

Adolescents' mental health has been at the forefront of counseling for many years. As adolescents endure the physical and hormonal changes that occur during the formative years from 10-19, many feel confused and uncomfortable in their bodies. Throughout the decades, adolescents, specifically girls, searched for a way to ease the feelings experienced during that time. As a result, many issues have been prevalent among adolescent girls, such as eating disorders, cutting, suicidal ideations, sexual activity, and gender dysphoria. Utilizing studies completed by mental health professionals, this thesis seeks to identify the impact this acceptance and freedom to choose one’s gender …

Experiential Truth In Contemporary Worship Environments: The Role Of Late Twentieth And Early Twenty-First Century Worship Music In The Spiritual Formation Of Millennials, Clifford Ernest Lambert Ii

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Over the past forty years, the American Church has gone to great lengths to make corporate worship culturally attractive for the purpose of evangelizing the Millennial population. Their main emphasis in accomplishing this has been to shift their approach to culturally relevant modes of presentation.  The main components of this shift have included the style, presentation aesthetic, and lyrical content of corporate worship music.  However, immediately following these methodological shifts has been a disillusionment with the flaws of attractional ministry, leading many to a biblically compromised faith and the espousal of progressive theologies.  A distrust of authority paired with postmodern …

Growing In Global Perspectives: A Book Conversation Of Reading The Bible Around The World, Hannah Landman, Jaelyn Dragt, Eoghan Holdahl, Joya Schreurs, Susan Wang

Student Work

"... God uses the oppressed to represent Jesus, the Savior, in [the Good Neighbor] story."

Posting about the book Reading the Bible Around the World from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/growing-in-global-perspectives-a-book-conversation-of-reading-the-bible-around-the-world/

Growing In Global Perspectives: A Review Of Reading The Bible Around The World, Eoghan Holdahl, Jaelyn Dragt, Joya Schreurs, Susan Wang, Hannah Landman

Student Work

"Effects of colonization, refuge seeking, and persecution affect how communities interpret meaning in Scripture."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the book Reading the Bible Around the World from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/growing-in-global-perspectives-a-review-of-reading-the-bible-around-the-world/

Ordering Gospel Textuality In The Second Century, Jeremiah Coogan, Jacob A. Rodriguez

Jesuit School of Theology

This article interrogates how several second-century figures ordered a pluriform Gospel corpus. Focusing on approaches to Gospel plurality visible in the Epistula apostolorum, Tatian the Syrian, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Ammonius of Alexandria, we argue that a number of Christian readers—across the Roman Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Gaul and from Syria to Rome—employed similar approaches. Drawing on evidence for second-century reading practices, we demonstrate continuities in both textual practices and conceptual frameworks that illuminate Gospel reading and writing. These figures engaged Gospels in multiple dimensions—horizontal juxtaposition of parallel material and vertical coordination of narrative sequence—in order to map relationships between …

The Efficacy Of Shared Spiritual Practices Toward The Formation Of Families At Mayfair Church Of Christ In Huntsville, Alabama, Matthew P. Flynn

DMin Project Theses

This doctor of ministry project presents the results of a qualitative research study of the efficacy of shared spiritual practices in the formation of families at Mayfair Church of Christ in Huntsville, Alabama. Once a week for six weeks, I met with six Mayfair families with adolescents, where they were able to learn about and practice spiritual disciplines consistently together over the course of six weeks. The selected disciplines engaged different God-given human faculties intended to unite us with God and with each other. After each session, families were then invited to practice the discipline as a family throughout the …

Gathered Together: The Impact Of In-Person Experiences In A Virtual Age, Consuela Knox

DMin Project Theses

Following the height of a global health pandemic which required that individuals quarantine, in-person attendance at West Harpeth Church worship services has not reached the pre-pandemic level. The goal of this project was to enhance West Harpeth members’ theological understanding of the importance of in-person corporate gatherings as compared to virtual gatherings. The key research question was: Can awareness of the value of in-person corporate gatherings at West Harpeth, in comparison to virtual gatherings, be raised among members by them engaging in theological reflection? Related questions were: What are the benefits of inperson gatherings and of virtual gatherings? What would …

A Gentle Whisper: Restorying The Narrative Of Eleven Ministers To Create A Collective Voice In The Battle Against Burnout, Darrel Sears

DMin Project Theses

There has been much research poured into the subject of burnout over the last fifty years and how its effects take a toll on an employee’s emotional, physical, and mental health. Burnout is especially prevalent in helping professions like human services, nursing, social work, psychology, and criminal justice to name a few. Vocational ministry, also a helping profession, has received its fair share of attention pertaining to burnout. Countless hours and hard work concerning stress management, clergy outpatient therapy, emotional contagions, self-care practices, spiritual-care practices, and a slew of others have been studied. Yet, where does a minister or elder …

The Top Ten Challenges Facing Churches In 2023, Edward E. Moody Jr.

Great Commission Research Journal

This article summarizes the results of a study conducted by the Great Commission Research Network seeking to identify the top challenges facing churches in 2023. The results are similar to other recently conducted studies, emphasizing challenges related to evangelism and young adults.