Mighty Stories Dangerous Rituals

Shaping our journey into the Divine This moving and enlightening book presents us with a compelling vision of what can happen when we take the opportunity to connect stories and rituals--a vision of individuals and communities transformed through a deeper sense of connection to our loved ones, our communities, and God. Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley reveal how when stories and rituals work together, they have the potential to be both mighty and dangerous--mighty in their ability to lift us up and help us make these connections beyond ourselves and dangerous in challenging us to learn to live with complexity and contradiction. They show how much more meaningful a baptism, wedding, or funeral can be when liturgy is made to include and recognize the personal stories of those involved. Suddenly, these familiar life-cycle rituals are infused with new life as participants become connected in a narrative web linking past and present, human and divine. Newly created rituals can also help us connect our stories to the divine story, giving meaning to what we experience and bringing us closer to God. Ministers, worship leaders, and pastoral caregivers can use this approach to storytelling and ritual to find ways to bring together worship and pastoral care.

This book addresses the vital role of public Christian worship in adolescent spiritual formation and shows how important youth ministry and worship ministry are to each other. Despite numerous research projects, books, articles, and resources that have been published about teenagers and about worship in recent years, the relationship between the two has been addressed only peripherally if not altogether overlooked. Drawing on his extensive experience in worship ministry and youth ministry, Eric Mathis offers insights into the worship practices of teenagers, corrects common misperceptions about worship, and critically examines four prominent worship models in current practice. Mathis invites youth pastors, worship leaders, ministerial students, and congregations to elevate the voices of young people in the worshiping community and enhance worship for all ages. The book includes a foreword by Kenda Creasy Dean.

Pastoral care has been traditionally understood as pastoral acts administered to individuals or small groups by an ordained or lay religious practitioner. As congregations in the twenty-first century begin to reclaim the missional nature of church, this view must be broadened to include care and concern for the needs of the larger community. A missional perspective of pastoral care embraces the notion that all of Gods peoplenot just trained professionalsare called to partner in the healing and redemption of the world. In Beyond Church Walls, Rick Rouse sets out to articulate precisely what such an approach to pastoral care looks likeand the substantial impact it can have on congregations and communities. A skilled teacher and pastor with deep experience in real communities, Rouse leads readers through the changing realities of the twenty-first century and to new ways for missional churches to succeed in offering pastoral care for the whole community.

Caregiving practices in churches often center around listening and giving counsel, making referrals, and creating support groups for specific needs. In Caring Liturgies, Susan Marie Smith proposes that Christian ritual is both a method and a means for helping people through liminal times of transition and uncertainty, even vulnerability and fear. This volume teaches readers to recognize the ritual needs of fellow Christians and thus create post-baptismal rites of passage and healing that might strengthen and support them in the fulfillment of their ministries. The book extends the usefulness of denominational "occasional services" books and other resources by suggesting ways to build a rite around a central symbolic action, pointing out issues of ritual honesty and ethics, and identifying skills and attributes necessary to preparing and leading a rite. Numerous narrative examples help to flesh out the principles and illustrate the key argument: that rituals are necessary means to enable human growth and maturity, both through times of suffering and times of transition, and that ritual-making leaders are central to the ongoing health of the church.

"What makes us open to mystery, to glimpses of the Transcendent in our daily lives? The power of the imagination, according to Sandra Levy - a power that has been seriously depleted in today's postmodern culture. To address and redress this deficit, Levy explores how the imagination expresses itself - through ritual, music, poetry, art, story - and focuses on specific practices that can exercise and enrich our spiritual capacity, thus opening us up to divine encounter. Imagination and the Journey of Faith will speak to all readers, whether religious believers or not, who wish to strengthen and deepen the imaginative power of their spiritual lives."--BOOK JACKET.

With the dominance of psychotherapeutic theories and methods in the field of pastoral theology, the typical pastoral encounter has been understood to be a private conference in which a pastor addresses a sufferer’s thoughts and emotions. What results is a kind of dualism that is contrary to a historically Christian affirmation of—and concern for—the body. The phenomenon of moral injury further problematizes this model of pastoral care in part due to a greater awareness that trauma is imprinted as much in the body as in the mind. Re-embodying Pastoral Theology uses the problem of moral injury in veterans to propose a pastoral theology that recognizes ritual as the means by which the Christian community addresses the body in pastoral care. In advancing this new approach to “ritual care,” the author draws from the fields of psychology, ritual studies, liturgical studies, and historical theology, as well as the experiences of veterans throughout history. This book endeavors to re-think the Christian approach to moral injury and re-embody the field of pastoral theology.

This book provides theoretical background and pastoral strategies for pastors, lay leaders, and congregation members to foster a restoration of the human dignity imputed by God and the good community God desires. It addresses issues in pastoral care and pays particular attention to Korean and Korean American contexts. Some of the specific issues addressed include wisdom for common life (Chung Yong) as a theological and pastoral task, tension between Confucianism and feminism, care of the abused and abusers in intimate violence, ageism and elderly care, racism and cultural identity of Korean youth, sexual ethics among Korean young adults, and depression and addiction among Korean American youth and young adults. All of the contributors have a strong background in clinical and/or pastoral practices in addition to theoretical expertise.

Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice invites you to open your eyes, ears and hearts to your congregation. By listening to their stories you will not only find out who they are but help them to better claim whose they are. By studying the "texts" of your community, Mary Clark Moschella helps you to understand their "contexts." Moschella will inspire you through actual cases to be more prophetic and priestly in ministry. Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice will, in a step-by-step fashion, help you and your congregation to embrace change and celebrate transformation. This revised second edition incorporates new scholarship on qualitative methods in ethnographic research and their spreading application in seminaries, universities, and divinity schools. As Moschella writes in her reflection on the book fourteen years after the publication of the first edition: "The teaching and practice of qualitative research methods help shape new generations of religious professionals in respectful modes of disciplined inquiry, enabling practitioners to learn about and from the communities they serve." The revised edition includes two appendices by Steve Taylor and Ryan Juskus, respectively, that travel the trail of research blazed by the first edition of this book.