The Congregation as Retreat Center and Intentional Community: Pastoral Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from narrative interviews with eight Protestant pastors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper explores community-building under the conditions of late modernity through the lenses of individualization and sensemaking. Exploring pastoral approaches to what Ulrich Beck calls “institutionalized individualism”, this paper argues that pastoral sensemaking manages polarities between the societal demand for self-construction and the human need to belong, between an individual’s freedom to make a life (or god) of their own and the fact that such work requires a community. Pastoral leaders manage this polarity through sensemaking strategies that strengthen and clarify the central values and practices of the congregation while also managing the boundaries of the congregation, envisioning the congregation as a retreat center in some cases and as an intentional community in others. In an age of individualization, pastoral leadership requires the dexterity to move between dynamic collective and individual identities, making processes of belonging a collaborative sensemaking effort in which boundaries are drawn, enacted, erased, and redrawn in new ways.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".