Collaborative Practical Theology

Front matter

Collaborative Practical Theology

Sa ey Sots

BRILL

PART 1 The Valorisation of Practical Theology

1 Valorising Practical Theology Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research 15

1 2

Oo ON Q

We... All... Benefit! 15

Knowledge Valorisation, Collaborative Research, Stakeholder Orientation and Lifelong Learning in a Global Context 18 Collaborative Research in Practical Theology 26

Empirical Theology 28

The Structure of Practical Theological Research and the Problem of Implementation 31

Knowledge Transfer Activities in Practical Theology 33 Independent Academic Practical Theological Research? 39 The Researcher and the Researched 43

Two-Way Flows of Knowledge 46

Seven Instructive Curriculum Reforms 50

1 2

University of Leiden: an Attempt to Establish a Chair in Practical Theology 51

Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch, University of Vienna: Preventing Routines 55

Friedrich Schleiermacher, Humboldt University: Shaping an Academic Spirit 58

William Harper, University of Chicago: Shaping the Culture of the Nation 62

Anton Boisen, Clinical Pastoral Education: Co-operative Inquiry 64 The Network for African Congregational Theology: Radical Contextualisation 67

Protestant Theological University (PThU): Internship, Learning Empirical Research 71

VIII CONTENTS 9 Conclusion 73

Lifelong Learning in Communities of Practice 74

2 Continuing Ministerial Education in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century 75

3 Continuing Education in Recent Decades 80 The Continuing Need for Continuing Education 85

4 The Scope of Practical Theology Practices, Addressees, and Relation to Theology and the Social Sciences 90 1 Introduction 90 2 Practical Theology from the 1800s to the 1960s: Church-Oriented Practical Theology 91 3 Practical Theology since the 1960s: Broadening the Domain 96 4 Practical Theology since the 1980s: the Empirical Turn 100 5 Practices of the Church and Practices of the World 106 5.1 %Internationalization 108 5.2 The Big Four Dimensions of Religious Commitment Are Falling Apart 108 5.3 Theological Reflection 13 Practical Theology and Theology 16 Systematic Theology in Need of Practical Theology 120 Practical Theology and the Social Sciences 123 Conclusion 128

Oo ON Dm

PART 2 Collaborative Research Approaches and Methods in Practical Theology

5 Know-Why, Know-How and Know-What The Crisis of Routines and the Practitioner's Needs for Knowledge and Skills 133 1 Introduction 133 2 The Concept of Practice, Crises of Routines and Professional Communities of Practice 135 3 Crises of Routines in Churchly Practices 141

CONTENTS IX oO

Consequences for Knowledge Transfer in Contemporary Practical Theology 143

Practical Theology: a Science of Crisis? 146

The Information Needs of Professional Practitioners 150 Conclusion 154

Rationales for Collaborative Approaches 156

AN an fw N FF

The Missio Dei Rationale 158

The Emerging Community Rationale 161

The Epistemological Rationale 165

The Innovation and Professionalisation Rationale 170 The Postcolonial Rationale 173

The Utility Rationale 177

7 Doing Research in Community A Multiplicity of Collaborative Research Practices 185

12 13

Collaborative Research: an Example 187

Relational Approaches: Some General Characteristics 190

Action Research (AR) 196

Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Participatory Research

Theological Action Research (TAR) 213

Collaborative Ethnography (CE) 215

Change Laboratory (CL) 221

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) 223

Narrative Inquiry (N1) and Collaborative Narrative Inquiry

Professional Learning Community (PLC), Research Community (RC),

Knowledge Workplace (kw) and Action Research Community

Citizen Science (CS) 233

Some Collaborative Methods 239

13.1 Expert Meeting, Expert Panel, Expert Consultation, Thematic Expert Group (TEG) and Thematic Expert Assembly (TEA) 240

13.2 Focus Groups 242

13.3 Performative Action (PA) and Participative Exercise (PE) 248

CONTENTS

Collaborative Research in Practical Theology: Nuances and Limitations Constraints to Participation 252 oO ON anu fp WwW DY FF p O

Reliability or ‘Good Reasons for the Ivory Tower’ 253 Nuancing Collaboration 261

Different Types and Roles of Stakeholders 263 Asymmetry and Power 271

Remedies against Power Mechanisms 274

Limits and Constraints to Participation 279

Mutual Beneficial Collaboration? 284

The Dynamics in Research Groups 287

Taking the Initiative: Practitioners Doing Collaborative Research

Communities of Practice Becoming Research Communities 291

N oof WwW bY

Practitioners Becoming Research-Informed 294 The Knowledge of the Community 302 Teachers Doing Researchin Community 306 Chaplains Doing Research in Community 312 Ministers Doing Research in Community 317 Conclusion 323

Bibliography 325 Index 368

Introduction

Collaborative Practical Theology documents and analyses research on Christian practices conducted by academic practical theologians in collaboration with practitioners of different kinds all around the world. These practitioners may be professional practitioners or practitioners in unpaid positions who work in churches, hospitals, schools, armed forces, penitentiary institutions or religious organisations. This includes ministers, chaplains or spiritual caregivers, professional pastoral workers, teachers, deacons, youth ministers, parish evangelists, and all sorts of volunteers — in fact, anyone who is addressed by the research. This can also include practitioners-to-be such as experienced ministry students, graduate, post-graduate and doctoral students in theological education who learn to do empirical research. The book is also about involving everyday believers in the research process, be it as collectors of data or as co-researchers. It may serve as a useful tool for experienced academic practical theologians and researchers who are seeking new perspectives and methodologies. It can help them to revisit and revise their usual research approaches. The book has a distinct focus on valorisation and collaborative work, but is also an introduction to some instructive curriculum revisions in theology as well as to the discipline of academic practical theology. From the perspective of valorisation, we will narrate the origins of practical theology, its early history, and in particular its scope (the range of practices that constitute its research domain). We will also describe the relationship of practical theology to theology and its relationship, and that of its subdisciplines, to the social sciences.

If you read this book, you will experience participating in a global research community. As a student taking steps towards conducting empirical research in your Bachelor, Master, PhD, DMin, professional doctorate or MDIV-program, you will become part of that community. As a practical theologian, you will already have experienced this community with colleagues in seminars, conferences, journals and both offline and online gatherings. As a practitioner, participating in a research project or conducting it in collaboration with other practitioners in a community of practice, you may come to consider yourself a stakeholder or even a co-researcher. As an everyday believer, you may hope to be invited to contribute to a research project, for example, by taking pictures or by interviewing people who participate in Christian practices. In terms of researching the practices of world-wide Christianity in an extensive range of contexts and settings, a team of stakeholders of all kinds of practitioners can be invited to collaborate by academic practical theologians and students in

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

practical theology. Alternatively, vice versa, practitioners can invite practical theologians or students to conduct research with them, thus turning research into a truly communal enterprise. I envisage a ‘communal’ or ‘relational’ turn in the process of collaborative research on Christian practices. The book will offer six rationales for setting up joint investigation groups with different ‘communities of practice’.

I believe that the outcomes of the research ought to have an added value beyond the academic domain. To put it another way, the valorisation of research in and on behalf of Christian practices, leading to better understood, valuable, improved and new practices should be in the minds and hearts of researchers, practitioners, students and everyday believers from the outset of research projects. Knowledge needs to be useful for understanding and solving problems and for addressing societal, ecclesial and institutional concerns. Knowledge also needs to be contextual. For this purpose, and for the purpose of facilitating research as a communal enterprise, this book will introduce you to relational approaches and a wide range of collaborative, relational research strategies such as: action research (AR), participatory action research (PAR), appreciative inquiry (A1), collaborative ethnography (CE), research communities consisting of researchers and practitioners and forms of what is currently called citizen science (cs). These research strategies, along with collaborative methods such as focus groups, performative action and expert panels that we will introduce to you, hold the potential for considering the experiences, beliefs, norms and values, spirituality, theological reflections, practitioner theories, vernacular knowledge and indigenous ways of knowing that are embedded in Christian practices. These approaches also have a clear eye for the promise that God may be acting and speaking in and through these practices. It is in these practices that the Christian faith is mediated, enacted and nurtured.

Relational, collaborative approaches were not invented today. They have a history in the social sciences and humanities with all kinds of communities in different countries all over the world. However, throughout this book you will see that I often take examples from my own Western-European, or even Dutch context. This may cause you to wonder whether, if I conceive practical theology in its Northern, largely Protestant context, this “might be another instance of the imposition of colonialist ideology on the southern hemisphere?”! If this is the case, I may be enforcing ‘my’ favoured and advocated participatory methodology on the South. I take this question seriously, for, as we learn from

1 Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “A tale of two cities’: The evolution of the International Academy of Practical Theology,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73, no. 4 (2017): 7. DOI: 10.4102/hts.v73i4.4718.

Pierre Bourdieu (as quoted by practical theologian Jaco Dreyer in a reflection on reflexivity), there are three types of inevitable biases: my social location (masculinity, whiteness, age, etc.), but also my position in the academic field and my intellectualist bias.? These biases are all likely to play a role. In particular, the fact that I have access to financial, educational and cultural resources may lead me to overlook the fact that many people in this world, including both colleagues and practitioners in Latin America, Asia and Africa do not have the same kind of access to resources that I have. I may also overlook the perspectives of people of colour, people of other ethnicities, women, young people, Christians of other than Protestant denominations and people living in the southern hemisphere. My intellectualist bias may imply that I am favouring scientific epistemologies and the search for understanding (i.e. a convincing interpretation) over other epistemologies and the search for practical solutions to concrete problems. Still, and perhaps also in response to the three biases, I believe that relational, collaborative research approaches are promising for practical theology in all sorts of communities, including those with a shortage of resources. Collaborative practical theology does not and should not simply extract information from people, but rather should learn from and collaborate with people in order to be relevant for people. The value of this type of research has been demonstrated over the last few decades in the wide application of action research and participatory action research (actually invented in the southern hemisphere!). In fact, other collaborative research approaches, such as collaborative ethnography, appreciative inquiry and citizen science, are also promising and their true potential is yet to be discovered. I also hold high expectations regarding collaborative methods, such as expert panels (including experience-based expertise), focus groups and performative action. In the fields of agriculture, health care, education and organisation development in Latin America, Africa and Asia these approaches and methods are becoming increasingly common because it turns out that participatory approaches significantly strengthen a practitioner's capacities.3

2 Jaco S. Dreyer, “Knowledge, Subjectivity, (De)Coloniality, and the Conundrum of Reflexivity, in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie Miller McLemore (Leiden: Brill, 2016): 99.

3 Examples abound, for example see Moses Tetui et al., “A participatory action research approach to strengthening health managers’ capacity at district level in Eastern Uganda,’ Health Research Policy and Systems (2017): 15 (Suppl. 2): 40, 52. DOI: 10.1186/s12961-017-0273. The use of a PAR approach strengthened local health managers’ capacities, which then led to better resource utilisation and enhanced chances regarding the continuity of the health improvements.

I present six different rationales for the use of collaborative research approaches and methods. Yet, it is not that these research approaches and methods are advocated for uncritically. There are still convincing reasons for ‘moments in the ivory tower’, or even for a phase in which practitioners should not interfere in the analytical labour of the researcher. Researchers want to acquire understanding, knowledge, concepts, theories, and, if possible, even explanations. In my view, stakeholders should play a role in this process; not in all phases, but in different phases of the research. We will dig into this idea extensively in Chapter 8. I should also say that additional information on how to conduct a specific research project with a particular collaborative strategy or method can be found in methodological handbooks and journal articles. Some of the footnotes provided in this text and the bibliography may be of use to you.

In the subtitle of this book, it states that collaborative practical theology is concerned with Christian practices. As I will describe in the chapter on the history and current state of the art in practical theology, I know of other practices, secular and religious, that are examined by practical theologians. However, in my approach, I follow the Norwegian philosopher of religion, Jan-Olav Henriksen, in his description of Christian practices. In line with his argument, I focus on practices that are in part defined by, and provided with orientation from, the story of Jesus Christ. The Jesus story is “most likely the best candidate for helping us to define the distinct character of Christianity.’

Christianity is constituted by a chain of memory that links back to and uses the Jesus story, as this story is mediated to individuals via the Christian community. [...] Practices that mediate the memory of the past simultaneously articulate the implications of the Jesus story for the future. Memory is, in Christian practice, thus not a nostalgic return to the past. It is used actively in different practices to open up the present and the future in a constant negotiation process that expresses its orientation towards the future. The Jesus story thereby is the semiotic reservoir that enables Christians to understand their own lives and practices as distinctly Christian.®

Henriksen calls Christianity a “cluster of practices that taken together manifests a distinct historically and contextually shaped mode of being in the

4 Johan-Olav Henriksen, Christianity as Distinct Practices. A Complicated Relationship (London, UK / New Delhi, India / New York, ny / Sydney, Australia: Bloomsbury, 2019): 92. 5 Henriksen, Christianity as Distinct Practices, g2ff.

world.’ In line with this, I expect that the book you are reading — and of course the research that is hopefully enabled by it — is not only relevant for Christian practices that occur within ecclesial institutions, but also for those which occur on the margins of those institutions, in para-church settings or in issue-focused organizations, in which Christian identity is invoked. Furthermore, Christian practices cannot and should not be separated from everyday practices. Rather there is an interplay between Christian practices and what John Swinton and Harriet Mowat call, ‘the practices of the world’. As Christian theologians, we consider ourselves competent enough to reflect theologically on God, human beings and the world. We can apply and explicate concepts from the Christian tradition to interpret and understand what is going on in the world.

In line with Mary McClintock Fulkerson, the research that I envision in this book does not seek to arrive at an unattainable idealised practice, or even an ‘objective’ analysis.” Rather, an inquiry should be able to display ambiguities and should be attentive to the worldly, messy and situational character of Christian practices. This implies an openness to the richness of lived experience, lived faith and lived spirituality. Research approaches such as those described in this book privilege the verbal and non-verbal expressions of concerns and troubles, the telling of life stories, and are thereby committed to the agency and empowerment of all who are involved in or the research.

What makes research on Christian practices ‘practical theology’? We see how psychologists, social psychologists, cultural anthropologists and sociologists analyse Christian practices using their own concepts and theories, and these theories are also used in practical theology. However, in practical theology also theological concepts are used in data gathering, description, interpretation, normative evaluation, strategy development and implementation. Drawing on Immink,® practical theology in collaborative research, and perhaps most outspokenly in these approaches, intends to do justice to lived faith and lived spirituality in terms of the God-experiences, ‘God-knowledge;, ‘God-talk’ and ‘God-walk’, values, beliefs, ideals and commitments that are involved in these practices. In my view, practical theology intends to do justice to what I would call the responsive character of these practices. Christian spirituality is part and parcel of these practices or, as Elisabeth Hense writes:

6 Henriksen, Christianity as Distinct Practices, 1.

7 Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption. Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 7.

8 F. Gerrit Immink, “Theological Analysis of Religious Practices,” International Journal of Practical Theology 18, no. 1 (2014): 129.

Christians believe that the power that brings us fullness, richness and depth lies beyond us in external sources. They do not reach fullness through their own human strength but through the grace of God. This does not mean, however, that Christians passively accept their fate. They believe they can cooperate with divine grace by opening themselves up to God’s presence and preparing themselves for receiving divine gifts. What is more, they immerse themselves in divine nearness.’

In these practices, practitioners and everyday believers feel addressed by God in Jesus Christ, who chooses them, speaks to them, inspires them, calls upon them to act, makes demands on them, promises to be with them, enables them to cross boundaries and build bridges, sends them into the world and evokes and renews their faith, love and hope. These practices nurture, mediate and actualise what Johann Baptist Metz called the ‘dangerous memory’ of Jesus.!° It is a ‘dangerous memory’ of freedom in the ‘systems’ of our society, and it is also a ‘memory for the future’.

In its concern for the understanding, improvement and renewal of Christian practices, I consider collaborative practical theology — as a conglomerate of research approaches — to be a distinct way of participating in the Missio Dei; participating in the dance of the Triune God. The writer of the Narnia novels, C. S. Lewis, wrote: “The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this threepersonal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way around) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his [or her] place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.” In line with that approach, this book that you are about to read and use, offers a foundation for a field in which research is not viewed as a solo-activity conducted on behalf of the people of God, but rather with the people of God regardless of colour, gender-diversity or age. In providing this foundation for collaborative practical theology, I hope to serve the people of God and invite them into the dance of research... for the benefit of the world.

9 Elisabeth Hense, “Current Forms of Christian Spirituality,’ in Present-day Spiritualities. Contrasts and Overlaps, eds. Elisabeth Hense, Frans Jespers and Peter Nissen (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 43. Hense distinguishes six categories of Christian spiritual practices: devotional, creative, physical, reflective, guidance practices and the practice of virtues. Hense, “Current Forms,” 45-55.

10 Foran introduction to Metz, see cf. J. Matthew Ashley, “Johann Baptist Metz,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004): 241-255.

11 C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, Ny: Harper One, 2002): 95.

In line with postcolonial and feminist methodologists, self-reflexive transparency is a necessary predicament of the researcher, and so this introduction is not complete without some biographical information. I have always loved studying in groups. Perhaps my first experience of learning from the knowledge, skills and attitudes of others, and of being able to contribute to the development of the knowledge, skills and attitudes of others, came from my mathematics class while at secondary school in the town of Drachten, in the province of Friesland. In this class, when I was thirteen years old, our teacher formed teams of students who had to study chapters in the math book together. To our surprise, these teams were allowed to work at their own pace. We decided which sums and assignments we needed to complete, we discussed the homework together and we set the dates of our examinations. The teacher would walk around and could be called upon for help at any time. If needed, he would sit down with a team, explain what was necessary and then would move on to another team. Within each team, the students that understood a specific calculation or concept had to teach the others that did not yet understand it. I still remember how, through explaining concepts, the ‘teaching students’ learned as well and came to an even better understanding than before. At my young age, that proved to be a formative experience.

Twelve years later, I was working on my internship during the final two years of my theology studies in Leiden. It was conducted along with four other students in a new housing area, with lots of sand and dozens of houses being built. There would be no minister for the emerging congregation in this area. As a team of ministers-to-be, we did everything that a minister does: preaching, pastoral care, catechesis, bible-study groups etc. One of the primary challenges was: how do we edify a community? What can we do to create bonds? At the time, our professor in practical theology was Frederik Onslow (Ted) van Gennep. He had come up with the idea of the team of students and was also our supervisor. In response to the challenge of community formation I can still hear him say: “As soon as possible we have to go on the lake with a rickety boat.” That was not a metaphor of the church, but rather he literally meant that it is by going on fieldtrips together, that bonds are forged. I learned a lot from the collaborative internship.

In 1987, I became minister in an amazingly beautiful remote countryside, in two small villages, Ransdorp and Holysloot just north of Amsterdam. From the start, I participated in the so-called ‘circle’ (Dutch: ring), regular gatherings of the ministers in the area. In 1991, we decided to hold monthly meetings on Mondays, and always started our meetings with the Scriptural texts of the upcoming Sunday worship service in order to stir our creativity and shape our thoughts. It was not that we conducted empirical research together, but I did learn from the research literacy of my colleagues. All of them did thorough research for their sermons and there was always a colleague who informed us about the research content of his or her sabbatical. Over the years, I came to experience the ‘circle’ as a learning community. We shared our knowledge and skills regarding our practices, including our failures. We learned a lot from our respective practice theories. In 1995, when I left the two villages and became fulltime minister in a small town in the same area called Monnickendam, I was pleased that I could continue to be a member of this wonderful group of colleagues. The membership lasted until the spring of 1999, when I became lecturer at Utrecht University.

My dissertation was defended in public at Leiden University in April 1998 and was supervised by philosopher of religion Han Adriaanse and practical theologian Gijsbert Dingemans. In it I tried to analyse the entire oeuvre of the social philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, in order to ground practical theology as research conducted on behalf of, and in partnership with, faith communities. I wrote:

In its normative phase, practical theology empirically and hermeneutically analyses norms and values in order to apply them in cooperation with the participants to their previously mapped situation. Far too often practical theology has formulated directives for action that have been imposed without direct contact with those who demanded the directives in the first place or with those for whom they were intended. Yet, one cannot decide for others what is right for them. Practical theology has to become an entirely communal enterprise, otherwise the participants will not learn to solve their problems. As Habermas states in his famous sentence: “In Enlightenment processes there can only be participants.” Their participation will be both necessary and, I presume, realisable when indeed they are the ones who have been asking for a clarification or an improvement of their own praxis.!”

A few years later, in the year 2000, I was working as lecturer in one of the sub-disciplines of practical theology, namely practical ecclesiology, at what was at that time called the Theological Academic Institute (a forerunner of the Protestant Theological University and part of the Faculty of Theology of

12 Henk de Roest, Communicative Identity. Habermas’ Perspectives of Discourse as a Support for Practical Theology (Kampen: Kok, 1998): 39. The quote from Habermas is from: Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971): 45. In German: “In Aufkldrungsprozesse gibt es nur Beteiligte?

the University of Utrecht). It was then that I read in an alumni-report of the University that a large majority of alumni from all the disciplines considered the competence to collaborate to be the least developed during their studies. I therefore decided to change the assignments of the course I was teaching in order to include teamwork while doing empirical research. I asked my students to form small teams in which, after sessions presenting a theoretical conceptual framework and after a thorough briefing, they had to conduct interviewing and some participant observation. We hoped to get a picture of what was going on in evangelical parish development and the possible tensions caused by this in mainline congregations. After the research, different team-presentations filled class sessions, and one of the other teams was asked to give feedback on the presentation. Afterwards, team-reports were written in order to prevent a vaporisation of the experience. Each report was to be a consensus of the team and students discovered that ample discussion was necessary to reach a consensus. The report was also presented to and discussed with the local church councils and the leadership of an evangelical alliance, within the PCN, that wanted to promote evangelical parish development. The aims of this meeting were to make the research experience conscious by explaining the research to others and by enabling the leadership to also learn from it. In 2001, I wrote my first academic article on the new design of the course.8

It was also in 2001, that I became professor of practical theology at Leiden University. In my inaugural lecture,” I focused on how the communication of the gospel, in a performative way, has led — and still leads (!) — to both new emerging Christian communities, that is ecclesiogenesis, and to the renewal of faith communities. In the following years, community formation has been my main research area. I became a member of the Ecclesiological Investigations Research Network and the International Consortium for the Study of Congregations, the latter with colleagues from the usa, Norway, Great Brittain, Sweden, Denmark and South Africa. In 2007, the Protestant Theological University (PThU) was founded with initially three locations, but with an understanding that from 2012 there would be two locations. In 2012, the PThU moved from Leiden, Utrecht and Kampen to Amsterdam and Groningen, and I started to teach practical theology in Groningen. Since 2016, we

13 Henk de Roest, “Theorie en praktijk in de praktische ecclesiologie,’ Praktische Theologie. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Pastorale Wetenschappen, 28, no. 2 (2001): 144-153.

14 Henk de Roest, Van de aanspraak naar de anderen. Over geloofscommunicatie en gemeenschapsvorming (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2002). See: https://openaccess -leidenuiv.nl/handle/1887/5284.

have organised a practical theology seminar including both the lecturers and PhD-students (currently on a weekly basis), in which empirical or conceptual research is presented, shared and critically evaluated. Every year with our PhD-students, we participate in a PhD-research meeting (German: Doktorand*innenkolloquium) that is organised with colleagues Uta Pohl-Patalong, from the Christian Albrecht Universitat in Kiel, Germany, and Ralph Kunz and Thomas Schlag from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and their respective PhD-students. Since 201, I have participated in the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network, with annual conferences in Durham (Uk). Also, in 201, I contacted colleagues worldwide, and started an extensive inquiry into the possibility of a new, peer-reviewed, internationally acclaimed journal in the field of practical ecclesiology and congregational studies, with a focus on qualitative and ethnographic methodology. In 2012, I visited Pete Ward, at the time teaching at King’s College London, and Paul Fiddes, teaching at Regent's Park College, Oxford. At a meeting in Oxford, we decided to connect the journal that I proposed with the E&E Network and together we wrote an extensive rationale and ‘recruited’ members of the editorial and advisory boards. In 2013, Brill publishing house decided to publish the journal Ecclesial Practices. Journal of Ecclesiology and Ethnography of which the first issue was published in 2014. Throughout this book you will find references to the research community collaborating in the research program ‘Practices’ of the PThU in Amsterdam and Groningen.

I would like to thank the Board of the PThU, which enabled me to take a three-month research leave in the spring of 2017. It was then that I wrote the first texts for this book. I am grateful to our student-assistants of the past years, Arie-Pieter Schep, Bregje Anna Faasse and Manoah Dangremond, the first two for collecting some articles on citizen science and action research and the third for composing the bibliography, based upon all the references in the footnotes. I extend my gratitude to Joyce Rondaij for helping me finalise the title and sub-title of this book. The original title was ‘Doing Practical Theology in Community’. Thank you also to my colleagues at the Protestant Theological University in Groningen, namely Theo Pleizier, Anne-Claire Mulder, Marten van der Meulen, Erica Meijers and Martin Walton, and the PhD-students of our practical theology seminar, namely Jacobine Gelderloos- Commandeur, Marinka Verburg, Rosaliene Israel, Matthias Kaljouw, Berdine van den Toren-Lekkerkerker, Youngsub Won, Jan Minnema, Pieter van Winden, Karen Zwijze-Koning and Niels den Toom, for reading and providing feedback on two chapters and for giving me encouragement. I also want to express my gratitude to two of my earlier PhD-students: Christiane van den Berg-Seifert and Veerle Rooze. Thanks to them I got to know about Pranee Liamputting’s healing methodology. I saw it in practice in Christiane’s research on sexual abuse in pastoral care and realised the value of relational approaches that I became acquainted with through supervising Veerle’s research on emerging religious communities in new housing areas.