Cultivating Inter-Congregational Trust in a City Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a work of practical ecclesiology with a focus on city Church unity from a Free Church perspective. It is a practice-led initiative which aims to distill theological insights from the experience of working with the TrueCity network of congregations in Hamilton, Ontario. It argues that congregations play a crucial role in how God deepens and enriches Church unity and that the relational space between congregations is a crucial locus where this happens through the development of intercongregational trust. This is at the heart of the process of Church reconciliation. The problem this dissertation addresses is how to best understand the way in which enriched unity developed between the congregations that have been part of the TrueCity network. The trust that has developed between these congregations has made Church unity a more tangible reality. The foundations for a theology of Church reconciliation are put forward highlighting the priority Church unity is given in the New Testament; looking at how Church unity is understood to be in process; laying out how the nature of the unity God intends is differentiated; and observing God’s call to join with him in his reconciling work, a key frontier of which is reconciliation within the Church. Through using a critical realist grounded theory methodology, a five-phase boundary spanning process theory is put forward which explains how intercongregational trust develops by prioritizing practices which embed trust in congregational cultures. When such inter-congregational trust is cultivated, the calling to pursue Church reconciliation is engaged. Understanding this boundary spanning process equips congregations to better join with the Spirit’s work of pursuing Church reconciliation in specific locales so that a more robust catholicity comes to characterize the Church in those places. One in which differentiated unity continually broadens the wholeness and deepens the fullness of the Church in a city.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".