Local Faith Communities Research Articles

Working with religious leaders and faith communities to advance culturally informed strategies to address violence against women

abstractSouth Africa (SA), a country with a long history of colonialism and apartheid is faced with the enormous problem of gender-based violence against women in intimate relationships and public spaces because of the intricacies of white supremacy and patriarchy. Research indicates that South African women live in one of the most religious – yet most violent - societies in the world. Around 90% of its population ascribe to religious practice. Studies indicate that one in four women find themselves in abusive relationships. Research also points out that while many victims/ survivors use faith as a coping mechanism and that they often approach their religious leaders and faith communities for help, perpetrators use easily misinterpreted scriptures, religious teachings and cultural practices to support abusive behaviour. Feminist theologians and practitioners note that although the rights discourse is an essential democratic value (in a post-apartheid South Africa), it is not in itself an effective intervention strategy in contexts where religion (embedded in culture) is a social determinant of hierarchical gender power-relations. Skewed gender-power relations are justified by suggesting that hierarchical gender power-relations are ‘ordered’ by God. The idea that gender equality is incompatible with traditional family values is also promoted within some conservative faith communities. The South African Faith and Family Institute (SAFFI), a multi-faith non-profit organisation was established in 2008 to address the faith dimensions of violence against women (VAW) and to be a resource to religious leaders and faith communities in advancing culturally informed strategies and interventions that promote equal and more loving relationships between intimate partners. This article will reflect on SAFFI’s work in the hope that it contributes to the broader pool of new thinking and debate on women’s rights and gender equality as it relates to local faith communities in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Do Faith Communities Have a Role in Addressing Childhood Obesity?

Pediatric obesity is a multifaceted phenomenon. A partnership with faith-based communities to address the issue has been suggested. The purpose of this study was to describe the cultural beliefs of faith community leaders regarding childhood obesity and to examine attitudes about their role in addressing the issue. A qualitative descriptive design informed by ethnographic methods and triangulation of multiple data sources was utilized to assess the cultural beliefs of faith community leaders. A purposive sample of 13 leaders (nine females, four males) from seven multicultural and multigenerational local faith communities participated in the study. No more than three participants from any one faith community were enrolled in the study. Twenty-first century lifestyle challenges, accountability of behaviors (a dichotomy that fluctuated between individual responsibility to community and/or social responsibility), and the need for intentionality emerged as themes from the data. Faith community leaders envisioned a role for faith communities in addressing childhood obesity. Findings support the ongoing development of population based health promotion programs through faith community engagement. The findings provide a foundation for nurses partnering with faith communities on health promotion programs targeting childhood obesity to address family health issues in a holistic way.

<i>Ubuntu</i> is homeless: An urban theological reflection

This article is reading ubuntu in the light of homelessness in the cities and towns of South Africa. It suggests that ubuntu itself is homeless and displaced as a way of being human together. Instead of the mediation of dignity and justice through an ubuntu-solidarity, street homeless people and others living vulnerably and in precarious circumstances are violated and excluded through a displacement of ubuntu-values. It also suggests a growing disconnect between the philosophy of ubuntu and its actual embodiment in the local urban political economy, local faith communities and local universities. Acknowledging the aspirational edge of ubuntu, the article then concludes to envision going beyond mere abstractions in the said spheres � the political economy, faith communities and local universities � in order to seek for concrete expressions of ubuntu-solidarity, asserting and mediating respect, dignity and justice.

Local Faith Communities and the Promotion of Resilience in Contexts of Humanitarian Crisis

The potential role of local faith communities (LFCs) in promoting resilience in contexts of humanitarian crisis has, despite recent policy interest, been a neglected area of study. This article reports on a structured review of evidence regarding such contributions based on an analysis of 302 publications and reports, supplemented by 11 written submissions from humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and 10 stakeholder interviews. Analysis is structured with respect to three major humanitarian processes—disaster risk reduction; emergency response; and facilitating transitional and durable solutions—relevant to the promotion of resilience in populations that are displaced, at risk of displacement or refugee-impacted. Major themes emerging from the analysis concern: the diversity of stakeholder perspectives on the presence and influence of LFCs on local humanitarian response; the resources—material and non-material—potentially made available through LFCs to crisis-affected communities; and the opportunities—and substantive challenges—for greater LFC partnership with humanitarian organizations.

The end of leadership?: The shift of power in local congregations

In a qualitative study recently carried out by the author amongst ministers in a Circuit of Dutch Reformed Congregations in a suburban context in the Western Cape, South Africa, respondents were asked whether they sensed a ‘shift of view’ concerning the role of leadership during the past 20 years in their respective congregations. The research results paint a picture of ‘the end of leadership’ at least in some form. One can also sense a ‘shift of power’ over the past two decades in these local congregations, indicating the changing dynamics of leadership. There seems to be a shift of power from the individual leader to the team, the group and the network. The aim of this paper is, firstly, to present some of the empirical results and then to reflect on the underlying reasons for this shift of power by giving a description of some broader philosophical and sociological perspectives influencing this state of affairs. This will be followed by a description of, and reflection on, theological developments on the Trinity and power that might help to understand the ‘end of leadership’ in some ways. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the role of power and leadership processes at work in local faith communities.

Prostate Cancer Support Groups in a Local Faith Community

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Faith community as a centre of liberationist praxis in the city

Theologians speak of the silence of churches’ prophetic voice in the ‘new’ South Africa, whilst the country features amongst the socio-economically most unequal countries in the world, and the urban areas in particular continue to be characterised by segregation. In this context I ask: where is liberation theology? I spell out my reading of some of the recent voices in the liberationist discourse. In dialogue with these scholars I, firstly, argue for the faith community to be made a conscious centre of liberationist debates and praxis. Secondly, I do this by suggesting two theoretical building blocks (i.e. critical deconstruction and radical friendship) for local faith communities that wish to grow in a liberationist fashion.

Meeting the religious needs of residents with dementia

This article considers practical strategies to help nurses working in care homes meet the religious needs of people with dementia, including attending services in homes or churches, supporting them in private prayer and at the end of life. It also considers the characteristics of person-centred care for such residents and how the Mental Capacity Act 2005 may be called on to support religious needs as dementia advances. To achieve good practice in all these aspects, staff in care homes should work in partnership with local faith communities and ensure they are aware of residents' life histories and preferences, including their faith practices. The focus of the article is on meeting the needs of Christian residents. For residents from other faith groups living in care homes not affiliated to their faith, the same general approach to meeting religious needs could be adopted as a starting point.

P40 A hospice chaplaincy approach to community outreach: Building end of life groups within faith communities

IntroductionThis innovative piece of Hospice Chaplaincy outreach is in its infancy. It is a listening project concentrating on multi faith communities in a richly diverse multi ethnic, multicultural inner city...

Holy Havoc: Chaplains as First Responders in Healing Spiritual Abuse

Spiritual abuse occurs when an authority figure causes harm to a person in the name of God or a faith community, thereby diminishing that person's sense of self. Spiritual abuse crosses religious boundaries and may be subtle or overt, mild or traumatic. As chaplains function outside the local faith community and provide support without an agenda toward a singular theological persuasion, they are well suited to serve as “first responders.” Following established theories of abuse recovery, chaplains' interventions may help individuals to move beyond unhealthy religious encounters toward a deeper, healthier spirituality.

Die assimilasie van lidmate in die plaaslike geloofsgemeenskap

The assimilation of church members into the local faith community In this article, the assimilation of members into the faith community is discussed. When a church has found its identity in being a ‘missional faith community’, the outcome is growth. Growth cannot take place if the church is unable to assimilate new members into church life. People are only assimilated into the faith community when they are interconnected through relationships, and experience a fundamental sense of belonging. This article discusses aspects of membership assimilation, namely intention, active participation, and culture. A model is proposed whereby leaders can evaluate the functional worth of people for the faith community at any level of assimilation. This model can also assist leaders in creating processes to assimilate members more effectively.

Missional church and local constraints: A Dutch perspective

The missional church concept promises to guide local churches in the direction of a new identity and mission. It is a response to a sense of ecclesiological and congregational urgency that is felt all over the world. In Africa, North America and Europe, churches and local faith communities have been challenged by the changes in the religious state of affairs since the 1960s. Whether we still call it �secularisation� or rephrase it as �differentiated transformation�, the face of religion is changing globally. In many parts of the world, this raises a feeling of crisis that gives way to the redef nition of the mission and purpose of the church. �Missional church�, however, is a precarious concept. Nobody disagrees with the intention but can it be more than an inspiring vision? In order to realise this vision, a multi-layered and multi-dimensional analysis of �culture� is essential. We should move the analysis beyond the philosophical interpretation of relatively abstract and evasive macro-level processes, such as �modernity� and �post-modernity�. The future of the missional church depends on a differentiated and empirical, informed perspective on culture. For this purpose, this article proposes the concept of ecology: A system of diverse populations, including populations of congregations and faith communities, that interacts with these populations and with their specific environments. Preparing a missional congregation for the future should be accompanied with a thorough empirical investigation into the ecology of the congregation. We should be thinking intensively about and looking for vital ecologies.

Six Strategies to Help Young Adolescents at the Tipping Point in Urban Middle Schools

Here in Washington, we talk a lot about the need for change - changing our priorities or the way we do business. For children, however, change can be frightening, and the middle school years are a time of dramatic change for them. Young adolescents are grappling with confusing and often difficult changes in their emotions, their bodies, their schools, their schedules, and the social and academic expectations placed upon them. Middle school administrators, teachers, and support staff face unique challenges, and to succeed, these professionals need help and support from parents and community leaders as well as the government. Unfortunately, government has not always lived up to its end of the bargain. When President Bush signed No Child Left Behind, burdening the middle grades with new high expectations for accountability and assessment, the Bush Administration and Congress promised to provide the funding schools and teachers would need to make the program successful. That promise was not kept. We do need change in Washington - change in the way we think about our middle schools and in what we can do to help meet the high expectations we have set - and change in the high expectations we want young adolescents to set for themselves. My interest in middle school education began as attorney general of the state of Rhode Island. I was elected to that position after having served as Rhode Island's United States attorney. As U.S. attorney, I prosecuted bank robbers, polluters, corrupt public officials, those accused of fraud, drug dealers, and other traditional adult criminals. But when I was elected state attorney general, something changed - I was prosecuting children. In fact, nearly 2,000 juvenile cases came across my desk each year involving everything from drug offenses and gang-related activity to so-called status offenses, like truancy and running away from home, that are not crimes for adults. As I tried to understand what was behind these cases, what had gone wrong in these young peoples' lives, a common tipping point seemed to be failure in middle school. It was middle school where these kids started to get seriously off track. At the same time, these young adolescents also appeared still open to positive influences. At that age, students are still children, and dedicated teachers can instill in them the importance of education. High school seemed too late; the bad habits like truancy had already taken hold. We also found that one of the best predictors of middle school failure was truancy, often catastrophic truancy - 60, 90, or 100 days of unexcused absence from school. Studies show that youth who are chronically truant are more likely to use drugs, become delinquent, and drop out of school - data that bears out what we were seeing in Rhode Island (Henry & Huizinga, 2007). So, in an effort to build the proverbial fence at the top of the hill instead of waiting for the wrecks at the bottom, my office tried to intervene. We started with truancy enforcement. We discovered that local police officers mistakenly thought they could not pick up kids for truancy. Working with the police department and the local faith community, we established a program for officers to take truant young people back to their schools. This approach worked in theory, as the schools and the police department came together to implement the project. But at the grassroots level, teachers objected. Faced with overcrowded classrooms, reluctant to deal with students brought back to school by a police escort, unwilling to take time away from the children who did show up to class trying to learn, teachers sent a clear signal back to police officers (Find a police officer who does not have a teacher somewhere in the family!) that these kids were a disrupture presence in the schools. The fence we were trying to build, it seemed, was still too far down the hill. We realized that dealing with the entire city of Providence was probably too ambitious. …

A National Examination of Partnerships Among Local Health Departments and Faith Communities in the United States

Local health departments (LHDs) can play a major role in partnering with faith-based organizations to enhance the overall health status of the public. This study examines the frequency that LHDs and faith-based partnerships occur, types of activities performed as reported by LHDs, and population and functional characteristics associated with these partnerships. Secondary data analysis of the 2005 National Profile of LHDs study (Profile), developed by the National Association of County & City Health Officials, was conducted on a stratified random sample of 517 LHDs receiving the core questionnaire and a module with questions about partnership and collaboration. Results indicated that 361 LHDs (83.1%) reported partnership activities occurring with faith-based organizations. At least one partnership activity was performed, with the overall most commonly reported activity as exchanging information (66.6%) across small, medium, and large LHDs. Size of jurisdiction, was positively associated with any partnership activity, higher median number of partnership activities, and higher percentage of high-level partnerships (ie providing financial resources or taking the leadership role). Further studies should consider types of programs and services produced by LHDs and faith-based partnerships, additional factors that impact partnership activities, and differences in partnership activities existing by racial and ethnic characteristics of LHD jurisdictions.

Faith Community’s Role in Responding to Disasters

Driving rain and howling wind assaulted the city. Their homes gone, cold and weary, they found refuge in the safety of the shelter. Volunteers had prepared a hot meal that sustained them. In the shelter, some sleep, others share stories of shattered homes. Tomorrow they will again face their struggles; tonight they are grateful for this brief respite. Readers contemplating the topic of disaster response may have found in the vignette above a description of a disaster shelter. In fact, it is meant to portray a homeless shelter on a typical rainy night in California. Faith-based groups such as mosques, synagogues, and churches dedicate volunteers, facilities, and other resources to shelter and feed the homeless everyday. This is one example of the essential role that faith communities play in disaster response. In this article, we will describe a number of ways that faith-based organizations and local faith communities are involved in responding to disasters. While organizations often adapt their missions to meet the needs of disaster survivors, 1 the social services provided by faith communities in times of disaster are often the same social services faith communities provide all the time.

Promoting inclusion of persons with disabilities in faith communities: The faith inclusion forum

People with disabilities are much less likely to attend religious services than people without disabilities. This is largely due to barriers such as a lack of architectural, communication, or attitudinal accessibility to churches and other places of worship. This article describes one community's initial efforts to ensure that local faith communities are inclusive of people with disabilities in all aspects of the life of the church. From these efforts, a grassroots coalition, the Faith Inclusion Forum (FIF) has been developed. The article includes a description of the groundwork for the development of the FIF, how the FIF was formed, some of the early activities, and plans for the future. Lessons learned and implications for others working for this type of community change are discussed.

Do Expressions of Personal Faith Have a Place in Formal Ceremonies on Diverse Campuses?

Initial findings from the Spirituality in Higher Education project (2005), conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, indicate that many college students are increasingly interested in issues related to spirituality. This trend manifests itself in numerous ways among undergraduates, including their growing desire to search for meaning and purpose in life, to have an enhanced personal prayer life, and to pursue new ways to grow spiritually. Although private spirituality differs from public religious expression in important ways, the research project also finds students' behavior increasing in this latter area, as evidenced in their substantial service to others in need, greater involvement in local faith communities, and other similar activities. Altogether, these results suggest that faculty and administrators can expect to see increased activity related to spirituality and religious expression among students at their institutions.

REVITALIZING RELATIONSHIPS IN MISSION

The 1958 publication of Hendrik Kraemer's epoch-making book, From Missionfield to Independent Church,(1) marked a turning point in missionary strategy. Kraemer had made an extended visit to the mission churches of what was then the Dutch East Indies in the late 1930s and early 1940s, on the eve of the Japanese invasion of 1942 that put an end to the era of colonial mission in that nation. In Indonesia Kraemer had urged mission leaders to set aside paternalistic attitudes and allow independent churches to emerge in the place of the varied missions that were still led and financed by overseas boards and agencies. As a result of Kraemer's visits and the reports he presented, the Dutch and German missions in the Indies were at least partly prepared for the Japanese invasion that left the mission churches to stand on their own feet, through both the occupation and the revolutionary struggle that followed. The 1958 publication in English of Kraemer's reports produced a programme statement for mission churches in newly independent nations, and also in those colonial territories in which the aspiration for independence was growing stronger. The movement to independent in Africa, Asia and the Pacific has been one of the dramatic features of modern church history. It has occurred as churches that had been founded and nurtured in the missionary era came to assume more and more responsibility for their own life and work. Sometimes this happened in the wake of campaigns for national independence, while at others it happened well ahead of such movements - for example in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), where the first generation of political leaders after independence were largely drawn from clergy and from church institutions. They had already gained valuable experience there in guiding and administering newly autonomous churches or dioceses that had once been mission fields. I have argued elsewhere that mission-field to independent was not in itself the end of the story - it was not a complete process.(2) While there is no doubt at all about the strategic importance of Kraemer's vision for autonomous churches, what he and his contemporaries could not have anticipated was that these newly independent churches would make an early and often very costly commitment to ecumenical fellowship - in many cases before they were properly standing on their own feet. And this was not just a commitment to cooperation in shared activities, but a radical commitment to finding and establishing new, more inclusive, forms of being church; forms that take seriously the universal nature of the Christian calling and the catholicity of the body of Christ. In the post-war world, newly independent churches, often separated from each other by the confessional, cultural, political and linguistic divisions brought or fostered by their missionaries, moved very quickly to find appropriate forms of local and regional cooperation.(3) Cooperation between these local endeavours often evolved into the regional ecumenical bodies such as the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA) and the Pacific Council of Churches (PCC), so familiar to us today, and in some regions into comprehensive uniting churches such as the Church of South India (CSI) and the Church of North India (CNI). By a process - which is not as separate as we might sometimes think - there has also been a steady exploration and extension of ecumenical fellowship, and sometimes of intercommunion, between churches of widely differing origin, for example, between the world Anglican Communion through its Indian members and the ancient Mar Thoma Church of India.(4) We can speak now not simply of a process of development from to independent churches, but of a development from mission to oikoumene - from local faith communities, founded and nurtured by the labour and sacrifices of mission workers who have come from somewhere else, to locally autonomous church communities operating within international ecumenical networks. …