How might arts-based and imaginative practices function not simply as modes of representation, but as sites of theological reflection and ecclesial imagination? How might embodied experiences serve as loci for imagination of the future/s?
This session explores the methodological possibilities that emerge when ethnographic research engages creative and arts-based practices. Papers in this session examine how drawing, creative writing, and image-focused mixed-methods research function as methodological tools that both reveal and generate theological insight. By foregrounding methodological innovation, this conversation will highlight how ethnographic research can both document and generate new possibilities for understanding the future(s) of church.
How can social-scientific inquiry and systematic ecclesiology be brought into constructive dialogue? This paper explores the relationship between lived Ecclesial imagination and theological models of the Church by placing empirical research into conversation with classical ecclesiology. Drawing on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods—including a congregational survey and follow-up interviews in a Taiwanese church—the study identifies “the church as home” as a dominant lived Ecclesial image shaping belonging, care, worship, and communal identity. Engaging Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church as a theological framework, the paper argues that classical ecclesiology has tended to privilege institutional and corporate metaphors while under-theologizing domestic and relational dimensions of ecclesial life. The findings demonstrate how empirical research can function not merely as illustration but as a generative partner in ecclesiology, prompting the refinement of theological models by attending to operative ecclesial imaginaries within lived Christian communities.
The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified ongoing structures that continue to enforce oppression against Indigenous peoples across Canada and deform the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Scholars in the Americas describe these structures as coloniality and recognize their overt and subtle embeddedness within Western culture. As a part of a larger research project investigating coloniality in Canadian Anglican liturgy, this paper focuses on one ethnographic tool to reveal the subtle manifestations of coloniality: drawing. While the drawings were initially used as a starting point for interviews, they emerged as a source of data themselves, demonstrating the unconscious ways participants conceived of Anglican worship. This research analyzes selected drawings to demonstrate the ways in which they manifest domination, Eurocentric liturgical practices, and binary classifications, showing that coloniality remains a subtle and pervasive force in liturgical practice.
This paper explores ongoing research that examines the intersections of trauma, theology, and creative writing within the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (DTES). Grounded in trauma theory, ethnographic, and practical theological methods, this paper recognizes the ways in which collective and individual trauma impacts theological imagination and faith practices and explores the role that spirituality can play in survival and meaning-making post trauma. At the same time, it takes seriously the potential of creative writing—not merely as a method, but as a practice of resistance and healing. This research aims to understand how theological meaning emerges in and through trauma, and how creative writing functions as a site of theological reflection. Its aim is to bring more voices into theological conversations about trauma, and in doing so, open a wider scope of how theology is constructed, the settings that shape it, and whose voices are recognized and amplified.