Preaching Ezra–Nehemiah’s Religious Minority-Group Narratives for Post-Christendom Congregations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As North America moves from Christendom to post-Christendom, the church needs resources that foster spiritual strength. Ezra–Nehemiah has a role to play here because the original audience was a religious minority-group, as is the evangelical church in North America. What exactly, however, are the challenges that Christians experience today in their interface with the non-Christian majority culture? This dissertation seeks to answer that question for the benefit of contemporary preachers of Ezra–Nehemiah. This research project proceeded in three phases. First, literature-based research was used to prepare three sermons from Ezra–Nehemiah. Chapter 2 describes narrative analysis of Ezra 4–6; Neh 1–6; and Neh 9–10. For the sake of the development of Christian sermons, Chapter 3 draws links from these texts to the New Testament. Chapter 4 describes the process of developing sermons, one from each of the three passages. In the second phase of this project, I preached these sermons at eight different churches across the Northeast US and Eastern Canada. The preached sermon then functioned as a springboard for discussion in a focus group interview, one per church, populated by people who had listened to the sermon. I asked congregants in what ways they found their interface with the non-Christian world to be challenging. Chapter 5 presents my analysis of the focus group data. In the third phase of the project, described in Chapters 6 and 7, I integrated the exegesis of Ezra–Nehemiah and the focus group analysis in order to derive recommendations for pastors regarding preaching biblical minority-group literature to Christians living in the post-Christendom West. One significant conclusion is a call for fearlessness and courage, derived from a robust personal relationship with the God who makes himself known in Christ and by the Spirit.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".