The Common Good,Pluralism and the Small Church

Abstract

This paper discusses the understanding of “Common Good” that has been used by the Church of England, especially over the last five years. It suggests that its implicit universalism and identification of Christian morality with the ethical norms for the nation is premised on an understanding of the role of the Church which is no longer realistic. After a brief discussion of the latest statistics for church attendance and a comparison with other national churches in Northern Europe, I suggest that the Church of England is a “small church” and even that Christians constitute a religious minority. This means that the pursuit of the “Common Good” as defined by the church may simply be a piece of nostalgic longing for the time of the “big church.” The recent exclusions for the churches on same-sex marriage legislation indicate that the gap between most of the churches and the wider society. Rather than defining the common good, I suggest that in a pluralist society the churches which recognize their limited role will need to build alliances and common causes with other groups, both religious and secular.     

Scab Ministers,Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago

Throughout 1894, Chicago's churches were as divided by class as the nation itself. During the Pullman strike and boycott, the city's leading Protestant and Catholic authorities hewed to an ideology of contract freedom that precluded support for the American Railway Union. Meanwhile, a handful of young Protestant ministers championed the strikers, echoing the criticisms of those working-class Protestants who had long decried the established churches’ ties to capital. This latter bloc expressed its frustration not merely with words but also through uprisings within local churches and even by founding a church of its own. In light of these findings, the author argues that a grassroots social Christianity preceded an elite Social Gospel; and furthermore, that the participation of working-class persons in the contests over the shape of modern Christianity demands a rethinking of the boundaries of both religious and working-class history.     

Unravelling Church Land: Transformations in the Relations between Church,State and Community in Uganda

Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to church land in contemporary Uganda draw on: 1) notions of belonging to the land; 2) views about the nature of churches as communities; 3) discontent regarding whether customary land owners gave churches user rights or ownership; and 4) assessment of the churches’ success in ensuring that the land works for the common good. The article develops a novel approach to analysing the changing meaning of the landholdings of religious institutions, thus extending ongoing discussions about land, politics, development and religion in Africa.     

城市宗教景观的空间布局及演化——以1842年以来的广州基督教教堂为例

景观研究一直为国外文化地理学界所重视。作为宗教景观重要组成部分之一的教堂历来也是宗教地理研究的重点。教堂在城市中的时空演化可以直接反映城市宗教景观的形成与扩散机制。对广州基督教教堂历史时期空间布局的研究表明:从1842年开始,广州基督教教堂从十三行和南关一带逐渐向外拓展;建国前,原老城区、汉民路(今北京路)和河南(珠江南岸)北部已成为教堂集中区;在1960年代的教堂大联合之后,广州教堂的分布表现出收缩之势。教堂的空间布局主要受内在交通区位和人口因素的影响,同时,政治因素、城区经济发展水平、城市空间形态、宗教景观的空间集聚和竞争、城区环境等外部条件也对其有一定制约或促进作用。而当今的社会信息化与文化全球化,也对城市基督教教堂的空间格局发展提出了许多新的问题。     

The Limits of Mastery: Slaveholders,Slaves, and Baptist Church Discipline

Existing scholarship describes early southern evangelical churches as racially radical institutions that, as the eighteenth century surrendered to the nineteenth, capitulated to slavery, implementing accommodations intended to make them more attractive to respectable, slaveholding churchgoers. This essay argues that that transition was never as complete as suggested. Based on a set of 65 Baptist church minutes from congregations located in 4 different southern states, it shows how evangelical churches continued to exercise a degree of authority over slave-owning members and their treatment of bondpeople from the late eighteenth century through the end of slavery itself.     

Going the extra mile: the impact of theological orientation and other congregational factors on the drive times of growing and declining church attendees

ABSTRACT

This study is part of a larger research project that collected and analysed data from 22 Mainline Protestant churches in Canada, 13 declining and 9 growing. Nearly 30 clergy and over 2000 church attendees were surveyed. Survey questions from the previous research explored the demographic and religious characteristics of these churches. In this paper, we analyse and compare the travel distance of the declining church and growing church attendees and then explore which characteristics of the attendees, clergy, and the church correlate with longer attendee drive times to worship. Through regression analysis, we conclude that theological conservatism of attendees, contemporary worship style, and greater emphasis on youth programming are predictors of longer drive times for attendees; while greater age of attendees is associated with a shorter commute to church.     

Ordained Ministry in Maori Christianity, 1853–1900

From 1853 an ordained clergy emerged in the Protestant (but not the Catholic) churches founded by missionary organisations in New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ordained indigenous ministers succeeded and largely superseded an earlier large force of lay "teachers." Although the Maori churches might in other circumstances have been seen as progressing towards self–reliance and autonomy, the colonial context of the second half of the nineteenth century confined them and their clergy to a restricted place in the ecclesiastical life of New Zealand. The transition from "teachers" to "ministers" in the Church Missionary Society (Anglican) and Wesleyan missions is examined, and a study is made of the place of indigenous ministers in the Maori Anglican and Wesleyan churches, the Mormon church, and the Maori religious movements such as Ringatu.     

En-Rogel,and the Brook that Overflowed

Abstract

Our investigation of the Stratum IB building indicates that the apse on the southern wall was a later addition to a pre-existing 'Galilean type' synagogue, as field plans from Dothan's 1962 excavation testify. In fact, the three main doors to this building were in the southern wall. Contrary to the excavator's final publication, the central apse was not an integral part of the original plan. Some time after the southern wall was broken down and this apse was added, the Stratum IB building underwent further renovations. This subsequent change occurred when a small apse with a pool fed by a water-cistern was built in the southern end of the western courtyard. As these additional features are not found in synagogues, but are typical of baptisteries in churches, they might indicate that this apsed synagogue was transformed into a church.     

Australian Seventh-day Adventism and World War One: A Different Path

The Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church in Australia differed from most Christian churches in its response to World War One, openly condemning the war as an evil to be avoided while attempting to remain focused on its evangelistic mission. This article explores the philosophy of the SDAs that allowed them to stand apart from the bulk of the churches, and the evolving nuanced path forward negotiated between the ideals of the church and the needs of the government. The success of the SDA church in maintaining its spiritual focus broadens our understanding of the relationship between churches and state in Australia in World War One, and adds a level of subtlety in understanding the government's response to a church that had an ambivalent response to the state's war goals.     

The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches

The decade of the 1960s in North America and Europe is generally seen by historians and sociologists as a time of sudden and unexpected religious upheaval. But was this the case in Australia? This article examines the changes in belief and behaviour within Australia’s major churches during the ‘remembered sixties’ from c. 1964 to c. 1972, in relation to the cultural and social context, and the extent to which these amounted to a religious turnaround or crisis. Areas examined include the impact of radical theology, symbolized by the book Honest to God, and the ‘new morality’; the changes in Australian Catholicism initiated by the Second Vatican Council; the debate among Catholics over birth control and the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae; the decline in weekly church attendance, Sunday school enrolments and the membership of church youth organizations; the ‘crisis’ in the ordained ministry; changing attitudes in the churches towards social issues; and the responses of the churches to the Vietnam War. The religious unsettlement that occurred in Australia during this period was very similar to North America and Europe, though there were distinctive local emphases. The central issues in debate were common to all major denominations: the relevance and authority of traditional institutions and formulations of belief.     

Laymen and church reform around the year 1000: the case of Otto-William,count of Burgundy

The frequently-expressed idea that the church reform of the eleventh century was only possible when churches were removed from lay control is a product of the perceptions of the late rather than the early eleventh century. In fact, church reform in France began long before papal directives had begun to remove laymen from ecclesiastical affairs, at a time when most churches were controlled by the local nobility. The example of Otto-William, count of Burgundy at the beginning of the eleventh century, is illustrative of the seeming paradox that, around the year 1000, an ambitious territorial prince could also be considered, by his ecclesiastic contemporaries, as a model patron of reform. The paradox is resolved in the understanding that the early eleventh century saw no incompatibility between lay control of churches and church reform. Rather, ecclesiastical reformers needed laymen to give them churches and land and to protect them; laymen needed reformed monks, men of undoubted sanctity, to pray for their sinful souls. As the case of Otto-William indicates, ecclesiastical reformers and territorial princes were not necessarily enemies but were often allies.     

Convictions,Loyalties and the Secular State

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between communal religious identity and the secular, liberal state. It addresses the concern that religious allegiance undermines an individual's or group's political loyalty. The liberal secular state is threatened when a religious community participates in public discussion because this challenges the positioning of religious belief as personal and private. Currently this issue is brought into sharp focus by the identities of Muslim people although it is by no means restricted to this religious group. The early Christians negotiated the difficulties of loyalty to the empire and worship of the one true God as uniquely divine. The work of William Cavanaugh and Maleiha Malik is utilized to argue that religious communities can participate in public discussions in secular liberal states while living by narratives not shared by these polities. In fact religious communities can deepen the moral discussions of liberal secular states by bringing to its instrumental rationalism convictions established on alternate beliefs and narratives about the human condition. The recognition of the public role of religions need not induce panic in the liberal secular state and may secure religious communities sufficiently to allow mature, critical debate and discussion of their loyalties.     

In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses: Women Preachers and the Redefinition of Gender Roles in the Churches in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth-century struggle for women's rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize both their presence and their message. A more critical reading of contemporary reports would suggest that the way in which female evangelists were reported should be seen as intrinsic to the attempt by church leaders to contain and control women's expanding role. The success of their endeavours rendered female evangelists largely invisible but the lengths to which they went to discount the challenge the female evangelists mounted to conventional constructions of gender, provide evidence of its power.     

Domesticating the church: the reuse of urban churches as loft living in the post-secular city

In recent years, numerous mainline Christian denominations throughout Canada have sold their places of worship in the real estate market in response to declines in religious membership and participation. At the same time, a growing demand for creative residential spaces by a group of the new middle class encourages the redevelopment of churches into upscale lofts, a practice connected to but divergent from the post-industrial loft living made popular in cities like New York. In this paper, I explore how the production and consumption of churches as lofts represents a novel terrain of private urban redevelopment. Church lofts are an emergent form of housing and the latest frontier in the remaking of material, cultural and religious landscapes in the post-secular city – a context where novel forms of secularity take shape alongside new expressions of religion. With an empirical focus on Toronto, I investigate how ‘redundant’ worship spaces are appropriated and transformed into private domestic spaces of commodified religion and heritage. Rebuilt as unique but exclusive places to live, church lofts are part of a secular upscaling of the central city, a process that increasingly remakes the city as a place of capital reinvestment, middle-class colonization and socio-secular upgrading.     

Parishes under Pressure ‐ The Church of England in South Buckinghamshire 1913–1939

Secularisation, or the reducing social significance of religion in the twentieth century, has been widely researched in terms of “demand” factors, but less so on the “supply‐side,” considering the contributory effects of the strategies and actions of religious organisations themselves. This article explores these strategies in a group of Anglican churches in South Buckinghamshire in the period leading up to the Second World War, as industrial and population development shifted proportionally to the southeast. This rapid growth and accompanying demographic change posed major challenges to the Church of England, subjecting the parish system to severe pressure. The availability, allocation, and suitability of clergy were a constant concern. The very basis of the Church of England's “offer” to the average citizen — of being the established, national church, there for everyone — seemed under threat: in some places, there was simply no church to “belong” to. Money was in short supply — perhaps both a cause and a symptom of other problems. A general issue was how to reach young people, but a specific concern was the funding of church schools. More widely, the church seemed to be losing touch with the changing cultural and moral landscape in which it operated.     

中古教廷财政收入动态考察

中世纪教皇的财政来源由属世与属灵两种收入构成。前者是教皇担当世俗封建宗主而获得的收入 ,主要反映教皇与教皇国的财政关系 ;后者是教皇充当天主教世界首脑而获得的收入 ,反映教皇与西欧各国教会的财政关系。通过对两种财源不同时期在教廷总收入中所占比重的量化分析 ,证明以教会大分裂为界 ,教皇的财源发生了从依赖于属灵收入到属世收入的转变。教廷属灵财权的萎缩为近代民族国家的兴起与宗教的改革铺平了道路     

Co-optation and Its Discontents: Seventh-Day Adventism in 1950s China

Most studies of Christianity in the early PRC have focused on the politicization of religious practices under the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, explaining how the Christian faith empowered people to resist the state’s atheistic propaganda. In fact, both Communist officials and Christians invoked ideas about transcendent power and moral purpose, blurring the boundary between secular and religious concerns. The state-sanctioned patriotic religions had greatly impacted the political and theological orientations of Chinese Christians in the Maoist era. This article looks at the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Shanghai, one of the first Protestant denominations to be denounced in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. When the state infiltrated the Adventist institutions, some of the pro-government Adventist leaders worked with the officials to bring the church closer to the socialist order. Most of the Adventists, however, resisted the state and organized themselves into a diffused network of house churches. This study highlights the fluid and complex political environment that the Adventists experienced, and the ways they interacted with the Maoist state. The reorientation of theological concerns, the new strategies for evangelization, and the growth of autonomous church networks enabled the Adventists to be a fast-growing religious movement.     

Joining the Evangelical Club: The Movement of the Wesleyan‐Holiness Churches in Australia Along the Church‐Sect Continuum

A number of North American Wesleyan‐Holiness denominations emerged in Australia, beginning in the years following the Second World War. Some of these churches moved from being despised and marginalized sects to established denominations while others remained small and isolated, experiencing little growth. Their story demonstrates that movement along the church‐sect continuum is by no means a smooth and inevitable one. Random processes may lower or raise religious tension within the group thus affecting its movement along the continuum. The strict behavioural standards in Wesleyan‐Holiness churches have gradually been lowered and the distinctive beliefs of these groups have been eroded. Wesleyan‐Holiness churches in Australia have grown primarily through “switchers” from other denominations more than from new convert growth, so that they have become more generically “Evangelical” and less distinctively “Holiness” in their beliefs and practices.     

Implementing the Regulation on Places of Worship in Indonesia: New Problems,Local Politics and Court Action

This article examines the local implementation of the national Joint Regulation 2006 on places of worship in Indonesia. It focuses on the case study of the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation, which became one of the first churches to successfully challenge the authority of a local leader to cancel its permit to build a church. I begin by exploring the history of the regulation of permits for places of worship in Indonesia and the various proposals for law reform that have been put forward since 1998. I then outline the provisions of the new Joint Regulation and highlight the ongoing problems for religious minorities at the local level because of the failure of local authorities to implement the national regulation. I will demonstrate how religious minorities are challenging the decisions of local authorities by complaining to independent watchdogs, taking court action and using the political process. In conclusion, I argue that the Protestant Christian Batak Congregation court case is part of a broader trend for local authorities to use conflict over places of worship as an opportunity for political gain in the highly competitive political atmosphere since the downfall of Suharto in 1998.     

Public religion and urban space in Europe

Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space demonstrate that many of the difficulties that European societies face in accommodating religious diversity stem from historically formed relationships between national political identities and religious identities. In many European cases, secularization did not entail a fundamental separation between religion and politics but the formal establishment of one single national church or two competing ones, but territorially based national churches. One of the consequences of these types of establishments is that certain religious traditions are generally described and experienced as fitting with the nation and others are not. The contributors to this special issue show in detail that the struggles of contemporary religious movements in Europe to become present in the public domain are related to commonly accepted understandings of where and how religion should manifest itself in the urban environment, based on the public life of religious traditions that are considered part of the nation.