{"id":1822,"date":"2013-03-01T19:20:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T00:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2015-10-13T12:48:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T16:48:52","slug":"observing-the-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2013\/03\/01\/observing-the-church\/","title":{"rendered":"Observing the Church in the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Ammermann, Observing the Church<\/a><\/h5>\n
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When I accepted a new position at Boston University in 2003, I was told that there was a place in the curriculum they would like me to fill. Since I was their new sociologist, they wanted me to introduce students to what social theories have to say about religion and the role of the church. That’s not unlike what Candler School of Theology had me doing in the 1980s and what sociologists in seminaries had often been asked to do. In the earliest days, seminary sociologists often had a social gospel agenda (how to help Christians address the social needs of the world), mixed with an organizational management portfolio (how to apply scientific theories for successful church growth). But in the 1960s and beyond, the primary narrative thread of what sociologists were telling religious leaders went something like this: “Once upon a time, the church had ultimate authority in the world and wove a sacred canopy under which all of life had a taken-for-granted order. Then the Enlightenment made religious belief problematic, and Protestant individualism made each person her own religious authority. The best the Church can hope for now is proclaiming very contingent beliefs, establishing its value as a moral teacher and community citizen, and perhaps attempting to be an agent of social liberation.” Theologians, I might add, believed us, and much of liberal theology seemed to focus on how to make belief plausible to secular ears. By the time I left Emory in 1995, that secularization story was no longer one I was willing to tell. It was certainly not one I wanted to pick up again eight years later.<\/p>\n

The kind of social science I wanted to introduce to seminarians was one honed by my eight years of teaching in Hartford Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program and doing research on local congregations. I had become convinced that amazing everyday religious work was happening in those local congregations, but also convinced that leading change could be a minefield that few seminarians were ready to traverse. Leading a vital congregation able to respond adaptively to today’s constant challenges would require skills of cultural discernment\u2014both to understand the way the congregation itself was knit together and to understand the potential place of that congregation in an “ecology” of people and institutions and needs in the world it inhabits.<\/p>\n

One of the things I learned in teaching Doctor of Ministry students is that this kind of learning happens most effectively when there are real questions at stake in a real place. It happened best for those students who were also working ministers with enough experience in their congregations to know some of the issues, but who also could benefit from a new and disciplined examination of them. Seminarians rarely have that kind of longer-term engagement in a place, but most of them have or can establish some sort of ongoing connection, so that’s how this new class would be grounded. Each student would identify a place of ministry as their observation and conversation point for the semester. Every assignment would require taking the life of that place into account. The course would allow students to practice skills of pastoral observation and learn to identify the social and cultural dynamics within which ministry is practiced.<\/p>\n

Learning in this class, then, was intended to take place in the interaction of three forms of knowledge. First is precisely this grounded observational knowledge of a particular place. Second is the wisdom that comes through analysis of the findings of other research in other places and times. And third is the conceptual and theological work of finding ways to think and talk about what we see in the social world. This last, “theoretical” work would draw on both the theories of sociologists about the nature of the social world and the theories of theologians who have thought about what the life of the church in the world is and can be.<\/p>\n

Gaining Observational Knowledge<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Knowledge that comes to us directly from our own senses requires, of course, learning some specific ethnographic skills for listening, focusing, and organizing what we see. Observing is not simply a matter of hanging out for a while and then making pronouncements. Ethnography involves the discipline of thinking about who we listen to and why and what events and interactions may be most revealing of cultural patterns. It teaches us to take notes and be patient. It teaches us to be aware of the unspoken assumptions as much as of the spoken edicts. It invites going into the spaces we usually ignore and talking to people who are not on the top of the social register. Ethnography invites treating religious communities as if one is, on one hand, a stranger seeing what everyone else has come to take for granted, and, on the other hand, an intimate friend trusted with the stories of “who we are” and the tales of past crises that have shaped the present. Ethnography depends on being intentional about that “in-between” stance and self-reflective about the real human engagement out of which knowledge emerges.<\/p>\n

In the context of a semester’s class, one can only begin to learn how ethnography might shape one’s pastoral practice. No student can produce a full-blown account of the culture of a place in four months\u2014during which this will, by no means, be that student’s full-time occupation. Assignments in this sort of class, of necessity, must be more like appetizers than a full meal. One of the difficulties of teaching the course was helping students to manage the practicalities of planning and executing a range of “real life” assignments. Unlike books in the library, individuals and groups are not predictably where they are supposed to be, readily available to be pulled off the shelf at the last moment. Still, the benefit of grounded learning seems to me to justify the difficulties. Each assignment served both the pedagogical purpose of practicing an observational skill and the substantive purpose of discovering the deep embedding of religious life in the social world. The specific data gathering assignments I designed are included in the appendix to this essay. The observational skills for each of them depended on background reading from\u00a0Studying Congregations: A New Handbook<\/em>,1<\/u>\u00a0as well as in-class discussion and preparation.<\/p>\n

Because there were choices built into most of the assignments, students ended up practicing a fairly broad array of observational techniques.<\/p>\n