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Mission As Virtuous Practice: A Theology Of Mission Through The Lens Of Virtue Ethics, Michael Niebauer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work uses theological virtue ethics as a guide both for critiquing various models of Christian mission and for constructing a model of mission that adequately addresses these criticisms. The first section of the dissertation (chapters one, two, and three) is devoted to an assessment of three major models of mission, which I have labeled mission as the missio Dei, mission as growth, and mission as dialogue. This assessment generates three recurring issues within the field of missiology that have remained largely unresolved: the problems of distinction, agency, and persuasion. The second half of the dissertation (chapters four, five, …

A Praxis Of Oral Homiletics: Preaching From The Heart, Weiwen Tu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christian preaching has been a central and significant custom to the practitioners of biblically confessional and creedal communities in worship, evangelization, and discipleship. Yet modern preachers confront two challenges presented by the New Homiletic and the media environment. Undue favor toward narrative-based form, audience-oriented eventfulness at the expense of biblical authority, and shifting media that alter the preacher’s identity and incapacitate the preacher’s orality have led to a dissonant handling of form and content and thus a profound decline in the quality of the Christian pulpit.

This project grows out of an attempt to integrate an Augustinian hermeneutic and homiletic, …