PhD student, Department of Systematic Theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Aarhus

Project: "The church in a secular and pluralist society."

The ecclesiology of John H. Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas and James Wm. McClendon, Jr.: A missiological study of the relationship between church and society.

Motivation

The Western society is undergoing rapid change, which brings the role of religion in society under debate. This also impacts the Christian church. Therefore, new ecclesiological and missiological reflection is required. In this situation the tradition of the radical reformation and Anabaptism and its recent inheritors seems to have an important contribution to bring.

Subject and Thesis

The study seeks to answer the following questions:

• How do the three authors describe and argue for the church as ”contrast society”?
• How do they describe the mission of the church?
• How well do they manage to combine these matters?
• How can their combination of these matters contribute to the ecclesiological reflections in newer theology of mission?

The thesis is:

It can be argued that voluntaristic congregational communities have significant missiological potential in a secular pluralist society (in comparison with established folkchurches).