Two contemporary theological approaches to the church in North America : a comparison between the ecclesiologies of the Project Team for Congregational Studies and the Gospel and Our Culture Network
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Western culture in South Africa is going through the rapids of boisterous change. The church is influenced by all of this and is desperately groping for an appropriate response. The approaches of both the Project Team for Congregational Studies (PTCS) and that of the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) have caught the attention of Western theologians and church leaders in South Africa. Both groups propose a contextual theology for the USA (and Canada in the case of the GOCN). My thesis is that the approach of the PTCS may be complementary to that of the GOCN on condition that its presuppositions are analyzed and compared to assess whether they are congruent with that of the GOCN's ecclessiology. In those respects that they are not compatible, a dialectic hermeneutic between them is called for. I first analyze the two movements in terms of their being contextual theologies in North America and then compare them according to two analytical questions: (1) what the current context of the church in North America is and how are we to discern it, and what the mission of the church in the present context is, (2) what prevents the church from fulfilling its mission and what will enable it to accomplish it. Under the first question, I assert that both these groups are contextual theologies that start with contextual analysis. I look at their different interpretations of the United States/North American context and church. This led me to scrutinize their different use and assessment of the social sciences. I furthermore deal with their different views concerning the identity of the church, mission and the relation between church and mission. Under the second analytical question, I compare their views on how change is to be promoted in the church. Subsequently, I reflect upon the resent work of one South African author that makes a contribution in the field of practical theological ecclesiology. I conclude that the ecclesiologies of the PTCS and the GOCN are in tension with each other due to different presuppositions. This is a creative tension with the possibility of the PTCS approach enriching that of the GOCN.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".