II Contextual themes
Rationale for Part II
Having described the approach, context and purposes of the research work from which this book’s argument arises, the move is now made toward a more detailed and substantive consideration of the findings and their ecclesi-ological implications. To this end, parts II and III intersperse ‘Accounts of Practice’ (A-G) with chapters of analysis and discussion. As described at the start of this book, this design was felt to be important in order to keep all four theological voices to the fore of the work and avoid the danger of appearing to set aside practices once the ‘real work’ of analysis begins. (See the ‘A Word to the Reader’ above.)
Part II is concerned with the contexts of our co-researchers’ practices -both geographical (chapter 5) and organisational (chapter 6). These chapters reflect the basic locating of the ARCS work, recognising that when ecclesiology seeks to integrate ecclesial living, it must of necessity honour the particularity and contextual specificity of those practices. Practical ecclesiology is necessarily contextual and inter-disciplinary, and these chapters enable our theological action research methods and attentiveness to the four voices of theology to illuminate the practical-and-ecclesiological significance of context, in their shaping, challenging and enabling of faith-full action. Indeed, the four voices of theology are, themselves, contextually shaped: the operant and espoused voices are entering into a conversation about a particular set of practices that are embedded in a time and place; the normative voice, whilst drawing upon the historic tradition, relies for its effect upon the understanding of normativity held by the practitioners, and the practices of authority and influence undertaken by those who have power in the practice setting; the formal voice, despite its frequent modern pretensions to abstraction and generalised truth-telling, always arises in a particular context, and the role played by academic voices in the life of the church is affected by the relationship between church and academy that varies across denominations, geography and time.
In writing these chapters - and those of part III - I struggled particularly with structure: should the chapters each begin with learning from the
Accounts of Practice and move to theorization (risking the overly descriptive emphasis of much practical ecclesiology)? Or should a summary of the theme from the literature be given first and then the data learning discussed (risking the ‘flattening’ of the practice-data into a pre-established theoretical framework)? Whilst instinctively tending to the first position rather than the latter, in what follows, I have tried, as far as possible, to work ‘from the middle of things’ in a way not only inspired by the understanding of theology offered by Rowan Williams1 but also true to what has been said about the theological position embodied by the commitment to theology ‘in four voices’.2
Throughout chapters 5-11, references are made in the text to the Accounts of Practice and their disclosures through identifying these by letter, number and source (e.g., A2, Joseph = Account of Practice A, disclosure 2, quote from Joseph). In terms of methodology, what follows is not so much an account of action research as such, but rather reflections on the learning achieved and identified through the meta-reflection on the range of theological action research processes in which the ARCS team were engaged, as represented in Accounts of Practice.
Notes
1 See Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000). This position has recently been highlighted within practical theology by Pete Ward, Introducing Practical Theology: Mission, Ministry, and the Life of the Church (Baker Academic, 2017): 11-12.
Account of practice A: London Jesuit Volunteers
Project time frame: October 2009-September 2010
