A collaboration between researchers

Reflecting back now, it is this sense of the two Centres’ commitment to serving Christian life through their work which presents itself as most significant. In both cases, there were, of course, academic requirements to fulfill, and institutional pressures which required response; but overwhelmingly, the researchers involved were each shaped by a sense of personal vocation in relation to the practices with which we worked. As a Passionist priest, Dr. James Sweeney had long experience of working in Christian ministry with those considered to be ‘on the margins’, and had developed a strong research interest in questions of justice and Catholic Social Teaching.¹⁰ His monastic training and priestly ministry, combined with a theological and sociology of religion academic training, shaped his way of thinking about the research and engaging with our practitioner co-researchers. In a similar way, Dr. Helen Cameron’s committed living of Christian faith within a Salvation Army context, integrated with her academic expertise in practical theology and empirical study of church and faith practice, brought to the team clear and strong insights about social realities and a deep concern for justice, politics and faith together with expertise and experience in designing research based on empirical methods.¹¹

The similarities between these two core members of the research team also served to highlight certain differences, as the Salvationist and Catholic ways of Christian faith challenged and illuminated each other. The gifts and struggles here will become clearer as the exploration of our research deepens. The ecumenical dynamic of the team is, in fact, a central feature of the research, and brings to the forefront the significance of conversational,

The ARCS project 19 multi-voiced theological reflection on the data. It was added to by the appointment of Ms. Catherine Duce (now Revd.) as our Research Assistant, following on from Dr. Deborah Bhatti, who assisted the early parts of the project. Cath’s deeply Anglican formation and commitment, shaped intellectually by a background in geography and theology, as well as by a commitment to ecumenical engagement with Catholics, brought their own gifts of attentiveness and understanding to the data and the ensuing conversations.¹² In both our Research Assistants, we were blessed to have younger perspectives, from early career theologians who had a close engagement with church life, Catholic and Anglican, as well as considerable spiritual maturity and vocational sense.

I cannot reflect on questions of positionality and reflexivity on behalf of these colleagues of mine; we each have our own stories and personal experiences.¹³ In shifting here, however, to the first-person singular, I will begin to identify not only my own academic and faith provenance, as I have done concerning other team members, but also to speak more personally about the experience and processes of the research, suggesting their formative place in my thinking, believing and practice. I contributed to the team from an orthodox, though not uncritical, Catholic faith shaped by studies in theology and specifically Catholic theology, all carried out in largely Anglican academic environments. At the same time, any academic career I might have pretensions to had been shaped by significant family commitments and by a strong sense of vocation to pastoral service in my church -a vocational sense not easily framed within the organisational life of the Roman Catholic Church. This all meant that I shared, in a different way again, something of the pastoral commitment and personal vocation lived through an academic professional life seen in the other core members of the team; but in fact, our similarities and differences cut across our relationships in different ways. I am now conscious of how it was not only my common Catholic faith and practice that opened up a ‘familial’ conversation with Jim (James Sweeney) but also my definitively lay status that opened up another kind of kindred connection with Helen. It became clear, as we faithfully attended with pastoral concern and care to our data from the church practices in front of us, that our ecclesial positionalities were complex and variously interconnected. Not only did our different confessions - Catholic, Salvationist and Anglican - situate us differently in relation to this close ecclesial work but also our ‘church location’ as cleric or lay, male or female, married or single, parent or childless, came into play - often taking us off guard with the awareness of being so differently located. In the substantive chapters of this book (chapters 5-11), something of the role played by these team realities can be glimpsed.¹⁴