Church Partnership Research Articles

Factors shaping Black caregivers’ interest and participation in a university–church partnership program for youth mental health.

Factors shaping Black caregivers’ interest and participation in a university–church partnership program for youth mental health.

Supplemental Material for Factors Shaping Black Caregivers’ Interest and Participation in a University–Church Partnership Program for Youth Mental Health

Supplemental Material for Factors Shaping Black Caregivers’ Interest and Participation in a University–Church Partnership Program for Youth Mental Health

Faith Community Nursing & Church Partnership.

Faith Community Nursing & Church Partnership.

Church partnership to tackle suicide crisis among Black youth

Observing the increasing suicide rates among Black youth more than any other racial or ethnic group, according to a recent congressional report, a new program is aiming to partner with churches in suicide prevention efforts targeting this population.

University–church partnerships: A mechanism to enhance relationship health

Romantic relationship distress leads to decreased satisfaction and dissolution. While therapy is effective for helping distressed couples, it is often inaccessible due to cost, time, and childcare barriers. Churches are often able to offer lower-cost services and provide childcare. In partnership with a network of local churches, university staff trained lay leaders to deliver an evidence-based relationship education program and collected data from 97 couples to evaluate pre- to post-workshop changes in couple functioning. Multilevel modeling was used to examine changes from pre- to post-workshop and thematic analysis was used to analyze open-ended feedback responses. Results showed improvements in communication, relationship satisfaction, commitment, and intimacy safety, with the largest effect found for communication. Participants also reported improved communication skills were one of the most beneficial parts of the program. Through the partnership with a university, churches can offer and rigorously evaluate evidence-based programs to strengthen couple relationships in their communities.

Private Benefit Doctrine Precludes Exemption

A nonprofit corporation was formed to train, support, and serve males in a community in the core standards and beliefs of a particular brand. It will conduct online and one‐on‐one mentoring, after‐school programs, school and church partnerships, community sports events, and community service missions.

A faith-based mind-body intervention to improve psychosocial well-being among rural adults.

Churches are well positioned to promote better mental health outcomes in underserved populations, including rural adults. Mind-body (MB) practices improve psychological well-being yet are not widely adopted among faith-based groups due to conflicting religious or practice beliefs. Thus, "Harmony & Health" (HH) was developed as a culturally adapted MB intervention to improve psychosocial health in urban churchgoers and was adapted and implemented in a rural church. The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of HH to reduce psychosocial distress in rural churchgoers. HH capitalized on an existing church partnership to recruit overweight or obese (body mass index [BMI] ≥25.0 kg/m2) and insufficiently active adults (≥18 years old). Eligible adults participated in an 8 week MB intervention and completed self-reported measures of perceived stress, depressive symptoms, anxiety, and positive and negative affect at baseline and postintervention. Participants (mean [M] age = 49.1 ± 14.0 years) were mostly women (84.8%), non-Hispanic white (47.8%) or African American (45.7%), high socioeconomic status (65.2% completed ≥bachelor degree and 37.2% reported an annual household income ≥$80,000), and obese (M BMI = 32.6 ± 5.8 kg/m2). Participants reported lower perceived stress (t = -2.399, p = .022), fewer depressive symptoms (t = -3.547, p = .001), and lower negative affect (t = -2.440, p = .020) at postintervention. Findings suggest that HH was feasible, acceptable, and effective at reducing psychosocial distress in rural churchgoers in the short-term. HH reflects an innovative approach to intertwining spirituality and MB practices to improve physical and psychological health in rural adults, and findings lend to our understanding of community-based approaches to improve mental health outcomes in underserved populations.

The Pauline collection, church partnerships, and the mission of the church in the 21st century

In three, and perhaps four, of Paul’s letters he speaks of the collection he is trying to raise to send financial assistance back to the impoverished church in Jerusalem. Biblical scholars have speculated for years regarding Paul’s motivation and purpose behind this collection. While many have been suggested, this article will focus on the collection as an expression of church solidarity between different regions. It will not only summarize significant recent research on the subject, but move beyond the historical and exegetical questions to inquire about the missiological significance of the collection for today’s church. What does this ancient fund-raising effort say about how the church in the 21st century should think about missions and church solidarity?

A Critical Review of the Compulsory Schooling Reform in England and its Lasting Implications for Today

This article aims to examine the implicit and explicit motivations behind the compulsory schooling reform in England as well as its unintended and long–term effects by analysing publicly available policy documents and key scholarly literature. The analysis indicates that even though the 19th century’s schooling project appeared to focus on pursuing some explicit goals, such as creating more qualified and educated labour force and citizens with religious and moral values, in reality it hides several implicit targets, such as controlling the working–class and maintaining the class segregation. Moreover, this article points out the unintended effects of the compulsory schooling reform, including low attendance in schools, low quality of education, increasing demand for higher education and Church resistance, as well as its long–term effects existing in today’s English education system, namely the continuing class segregation and evolving state and Church partnership.

Feasibility and acceptability of a faith-based mind-body intervention among African American adults.

Physical activity reduces cancer risk, yet African American adults remain insufficiently active, contributing to cancer health disparities. Harmony & Health (HH) was developed as a culturally adapted mind-body intervention to promote physical activity, psychosocial well-being, and quality of life among a church-based sample of overweight/obese, insufficiently active African American adults. Men and women were recruited to the study through an existing church partnership. Eligible participants (N = 50) were randomized to a movement-based mind-body intervention (n = 26) or waitlist control (n = 24). Participants in the intervention attended 16 mind-body sessions over 8 weeks and completed a physical assessment, questionnaires on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and psychosocial factors, and accelerometry at baseline (T1), post-intervention (T2), and 6 week follow-up (T3). Eighty percent of participants (94% women, M age = 49.7 ± 9.4 years, M body mass index = 32.8 ± 5.2 kg/m2) completed the study, and 61.5% of intervention participants attended ≥10 mind-body sessions. Participants self-reported doing 78.8 ± 102.9 (median = 40.7, range: 0-470.7) min/day of MVPA and did 27.1 ± 20.7 (median = 22.0, range: 0-100.5) min/day of accelerometer-measured MVPA at baseline. Trends suggest that mind-body participants self-reported greater improvements in physical activity and psychosocial well-being from baseline to post-intervention than waitlist control participants. HH is feasible and acceptable among African American adults. Trends suggest that the mind-body intervention led to improvements in physical activity and psychosocial outcomes. This study extends the literature on the use of mind-body practices to promote physical and psychological health and reduce cancer disparities in African American adults.

The church and its shadow: the ambiguous role of church partnerships in World Vision’s development practice

There has been a resurgent interest in the role of religion in international development work over the last decade. While churches are being engaged as local development partners in implementing development programs there is little research on the efficacy of doing so. This paper argues that there can be strong advantages of partnering with churches as local, permanent, geographically-dispersed, persuasive, community-based organizations. At the same time, however, there are significant risks for donors and other stakeholders, creating ambivalence about the suitability of some church partners. This paper draws on the experience of World Vision in eight settings. It explores the risks and benefits of partnering with churches, and argues that church engagement overall is important for developing communities, the sector, the church itself, and for shaping the concept of ‘development.’

Remembering the children: decolonizing community-based restorative justice for Indian Residential Schools

This article argues for community-based justice to confront the atrocities of residential schools in Canada. After considering the strengths of community-based restorative justice (CBRJ) in relation to state-sponsored transitional justice responses, I examine a case study of the Remembering the Children Society (RCS), an Indigenous church partnership, that has worked to commemorate children who lost their lives at the Red Deer Industrial School. The RCS engages in a decolonizing form of CBRJ by placing primacy on Indigenous cultures through (1) feasts and ceremonies, (2) freeing the spirits of children who died, (3) the centrality of elders, and (4) Aboriginal spirituality and world views on ‘working together’. The centrality of cultures contributes to decolonization through (1) cultural resistance in the face of assimilation, (2) the healing power of cultural resurgence, (3) the development of mutually honoring partnerships, and (4) the telling of decolonizing truths. In conclusion, I consider the broader impacts of the RCS in helping transform official narratives about residential schools.

Productive power in the Papua New Guinea church partnership programme

This article analyses the strategy of partnership governing the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program (CPP). Using a governmentality lens that sees power as having a productive aspect, it focuses on how the technologies of financial management and planning, monitoring, and evaluation (PME) are taken up by the churches. Fieldwork research reveals how, in conforming to the discipline of these technologies to fulfil the partnership requirements, skilful and pragmatic individuals utilise the same technologies to empower their churches to enact their theology on development. For partnerships to work, the space must be created for such productive power to flourish.

Missionary Perspectives on the Effectiveness of Current Member Care Practices

This qualitative study examined current member care practices from the perspective of 13 former missionaries using a semi-structured interview. Seven male and six female missionaries, ranging in age from 46 to 76, were asked to share their experiences of serving on the field as well as their experiences of member care practices throughout their missionary life-cycles. Thus, participants shared their experiences of training to work in the field, of serving in the field, of preparing to return to their home country, and of re-entering their home country. The data was analyzed using a grounded theory qualitative coding process. The results of this study identified several important components of effective member care practices: (a) agency attunement to missionary needs, (b) agency provision for missionary needs, (c) invested church partnership, (d) the impact of relationships, (e) missionaries’ self-care, and (f) consistency of care across the missionary life-cycle. A discussion of these findings is offered as well as recommendations for improving member care practices among mission-sending agencies, organizations, and churches.

Struggling with ‘this gender relations thing’ in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program

Gender equality and women's empowerment has become a cornerstone for successful development. Religious teachings and practices, like ‘traditional culture’, are often viewed as contributing to gender inequality and oppression. The increased engagement by donor agencies with religious organisations prompts questions about how religion, gender and development intersect in particular places, and the implications this intersection has for the transnational ‘gender agenda’ of development agencies. This article focuses on the dialogue about gender in the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program. Analysing the struggles taking place, it argues that the processes that shaped local Christianities are also at work in the churches' translations of the ‘gender agenda’. These churches are gradually emerging as agents for gender justice as they develop their own approaches to gender work that support the churches' mission to ‘live the Gospel’ in their practice of holistic integral human development. However, to progress further, in recognising the necessity for men to lead the struggle for gender justice, the dialogue must focus on the personal transformation of men in relation to their understanding of masculinities and gendered power dynamics. From this foundation, structural and political change can be advanced.

Buffalo Boy testifies: decolonising visual testimony in a colonial-settler society

Introduction In this article, I will examine two visual projects by the artist Adrian Stimson: an installation entitled Old Sun (2008) and a performance-art event entitled Buffalo Boy's Confessional: Indulgence (2007). These works reveal and give shape to a particular chapter in Canada's history of colonialism: the long and unfinished story of the residential school system. This colonial system of schooling was founded and operated through a state- church partnership for more than a century until the final school closures in 1986. 1 In its attempts to 'kill the Indian in the child', the residential school subjected Indigenous children to a Euro-Canadian curriculum designed to obliterate generations of Aboriginal culture. This type of assimilative educational practice is clearly identified in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) as cultural genocide.2 In my focus on Stimson's two projects of visual testimony, I consider the questions: how can contemporary installation and performance art illuminate and interrogate the multifaceted ways in which settler colonialism inflicts trauma - in the past and present? What is the affective and critical force of Stimson's visual acts of witnessing and how do they engage the spectator? What decolonising testimonies and pedagogies can his projects perform in the 'now' of the art event (and beyond)? On 11 June 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada made a long-awaited public apology to the country's Indigenous peoples for the pain, suffering and hurt inflicted on them by the residential system of schooling. Responding to the apology from the floor of the House of Commons, Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, opened his remarks by remembering and honouring 'all of the generations who had never heard an apology, never received compensation, yet courageously fought assimilation so that Aboriginal people could witness this day'.3 Noting that the Government of Canada had taken full responsibihty for the racist pohcy that created the residential school, Fontaine stated: For the generations that will follow us, we bear witness today in this House, that our survival as First Nations peoples in this land is affirmed fore ver... Ne ver again will this House consider us the 'Indian problem' just for being who we are. Never again will the awesome power of government attempt to destroy us, to obhterate our cultures and languages from this land - the land we have occupied since time immemorial. Never again will there be an attempt 'to kill the Indian in the child'... Brave survivors, through the telling of our painful stories, have stripped white supremacy of its authority and legitimacy.4 In concluding, Fontaine notes that Indigenous people are - and always have been - an indispensable part of the Canadian identity. He then issued a challenge to all peoples Uving in Canada: 'We must not falter in our duty now: emboldened by this spectacle of history, it is possible to end our racial nightmare together.'5 Two years before this day of apology in the House of Commons, a court -ordered Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) was reached between Survivors, churches and the Canadian Government. This agreement has five major components: a Common Experience Payment (CEP) providing a lumpsum payment to former residential school students; an Independent Assessment Process (IAP) providing compensation for students who suffered serious sexual, physical or psychological abuse; funding to support the creation of memorials and community heaUng initiatives; and a five-year Truth and ReconciUation Commission (TRC).6 As the cornerstone of the Settlement Agreement, the independent body of the TRC will focus on Ustening to the oral testimony of Survivors and former employees of the residential school system. Survivor testimony - the 'truths' of the previously silenced speaking subject - is central to the work of the TRC. …