Ecclesial Practices Unit
Imagining the Future Church
The Ecclesial Practices Unit invites papers that use empirical research to spark fresh imagination for the future/s of the church—or to interrogate assumed future/s that have outlived their usefulness, pointing instead toward more generative possibilities. Empirical work, with its attention to lived stories and embodied practices—old and new, rooted and far-flung—can reveal the very capacities communities need to imagine futures that refuse both despair and shallow optimism. We invite scholars to share research that offers sensory richness and vivid texture, that tells stories to enliven and embolden our shared ecclesial imagination.
The Ecclesial Practices Unit invites papers that use ethnographic methods, broadly defined, and focus on the potential for qualitative theological methods to access the embodied, emotional, and affective dimensions of imagination. We express particular interest in submissions that employ creative qualitative methods and engage a broad range of Christian practices within church contexts—encompassing both traditional ecclesial communities and emerging interpretations of what it might mean to be ‘church’.
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
- What will belonging look like in the future church? What paradigms of belonging are emerging as the shape of church shifts? What mistakes and failures in futuring can cause alienation? What might be the role of technology in the practice of creating church communities of belonging?
- Can embodied experiences serve as loci for imagination of the future/s? How do the present and immediate future challenge or make possible imagining the future? How can looking back to look forward fire the imagination? What are methods for archival listening alongside ethnographic listening?
- Where will future ecclesial practices unfold? What can rural congregations teach us about adaptive possibilities, given that urban contexts are often the focus of imagination about the future? Could explorations of the closing of congregations shed light on how congregations are finding new ways of adapting for the future? What is the role of physical spaces, of digital spaces, of gathering and connecting in the future? What parachurch work and partnerships anticipate the future?
Ecclesial Practices provides a collaborative space at the intersection of ethnographic and other qualitative approaches and theological approaches to the study of ecclesial practices. This might include churches, other (new, emerging, para-church, and virtual) communities, and lived faith in daily life. International in scope, the unit encourages research contributing to a deeper understanding of “church in practice” in a global context, including decolonization and postcolonial theologies. The unit encourages ongoing research in the following areas: • Empirical and theological approaches to the study of ecclesial communities (churches, congregations, and emerging communities), especially as interdisciplinary efforts to understand lived faith and practice extending from them • Studies of specific ecclesial activities, e.g. music, liturgy, arts, social justice, youth work, preaching, pastoral care, rites of passage, community organizing • Studies of global contexts of lived faith in relation to ecclesial communities, for example, decolonizing and postcolonial theory and theology • Discussions of congregational growth and decline, new church movements, and ecclesial experiments connected to shared practices in a worldly church • Explorations of Christian doctrine in relation to the potential implications of empirical and qualitative research on ecclesial communities and lived faith for discerning, defining, and challenging standard theological genres such as systematics and doctrine, as well as inviting new ways to understand normative logics • Discussions of methodological issues with regard to qualitative research on theological topics, especially related to ecclesial communities and lived faith • Discussions (both substantive and methodological) of the implications of new technologies and digital cultures for ecclesial communities and lived faith