Editorial

Our second issue of 2024 gathers articles that provide theological reflection on the contextual and relational features that order and enliven the life of faith. These articles reflect the ongoing internationalisation of Practical Theology, while also advancing a distinct form of theological inquiry that combines contextual reflection with theological engagement. For example, the contextual center(s) for these articles include at least four different continents, with reflections rooted in the particularity of religious life in Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and these articles share a similar feature: a theological negotiation of similarity and difference. The authors demonstrate a contextual awareness, theological dexterity, and social imagination that attends to the forms of connection and separation that mark the life of faith. They also demonstrate the importance of phronetic discernment, as wisdom is required to determine how best to respond to and engage the complex challenges that confront faith communities. Finally, each of these authors demonstrate how the work of theological inquiry—and service of a religious community—cannot be undertaken alone. For readers and researchers seeking to understand and inhabit faith communities, these articles provide pathways to see the complexity that marks faith communities, noting how a sense of fragility and possibility are interlocked in a community of faith, and to begin imagining the sites, structures, and sensibilities that nurture holy transformation.

The first article invites readers to consider the form(s) of care that are required to negotiate theological difference. Co-authored by Chris Clements and Peter Bush, the article begins by surfacing the inherent differences that can leave individuals, families, and faith communities divided. It proceeds to develop a line of theological reasoning that identifies an ethic of care as the guiding theological posture to negotiate difference. Difference is inherent to the life of faith and the work of ministry in its various forms, and these abiding differences can leave both parties in a relationship marked by strangeness. Yet, as Clements and Bush note, ‘To be a stranger in the right way is to embrace both differentiation and commitment’. Their collaborative article draws upon work from Volf, Augustine, and theories of Cultural Intelligence to demonstrate how an ethic of care, which may lead to friendship, can provide a structure of mutuality that can hold the strangeness theological differences require.

The next pair of articles provides complementary theological reflection about the relationship between the Anglican communion, contextualisation, and worship. Rasika Thilina Abeysinghe’s article explores the intertwining of faith and culture in Sri Lanka. Abeysinghe employs a qualitative research methodology that combine a study of liturgies with participant observation within Anglican congregations. This article follows a systematic research design to demonstrate the importance of culture in shaping worship, while also noting how additional research and religious training are needed to support the indigenisation and contextualisation of worship in Sri Lanka.

Andrew Dunlop’s article continues the theme that organises this issue by exploring the role of theological reflection and reflexivity in an Anglican diocese of Mauritius. Prompted by Dunlop’s experience teaching clergy and laity in Mauritius, this essay identifies four sources of theological reflection (e.g., position, culture, experience, and tradition) that provide sites to consider the forms of encounter and meaning making that order theological reflection. The complex negotiation of these four sources, as Dunlop notes, draws attention to the personal and collective hybridity that organises theological reflection and formation. These ‘in-between spaces are spaces of finding communal identity as well as individual identity’. Dunlop’s article will be especially helpful for those who teach theological research methodology or are interested in contextual approaches to mission and ministry.

The fourth article provides a bridge from the Anglican communion to the care for and negotiation of gender identity within communities of faith. Denis Walsh combines qualitative methods and interpretive phenomenology to explore how ‘Anglican vicars and church leaders understand and implement pastoral care of gay Christians’. Walsh conducted semi-structured interviews with purposeful samples of clergy who hold different views on sexual orientation, speaking with three who hold affirming views and three who hold non-affirming views. The findings and broader theological reflection provide living narratives for how individuals who hold different theological views regarding human sexuality understand and articulate an ethic of care that guides their pastoral ministry.

The fifth article comes from Elazar Ben-Lulu, who writes from Ariel University Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Ariel, Israel. Ben-Lulu explores the symbolic and spiritual significance of the foods found on two Passover Seder plates as symbols of inclusion for LGBTQ + individuals within the Jewish tradition. A textual analysis of resources produced by a U.S.-based organisation, Keshet, provides the empirical bases for the practical religious reflection Ben-Lulu peruses. Guided by studies of queerness, this article contributes to the broader theological reflection in this issue by generating ‘a discourse that interprets an environment shaped by life experiences influenced by gender, sexuality, and embodiment’, as Ben-Lulu concludes. For the field of practical theology more broadly, the placement of this article alongside others that are guided by the Christian tradition demonstrates the relevance of methods for theological reflection across faith traditions.

The sixth and final article began as an address at the Tyndale Fellowship’s Practical Theology group in 2023. Samuel Tranter explores the contribution of practical theology to evangelical thought and practice. Tranter notes the role of practical theology in providing a thick description of the problems that occasion theological reflection—what he calls ‘the bad and the ugly’—as well as the ‘luminous witness of a particular Christian community’—what he calls ‘the good’. In each instance, Tranter’s reflections are noteworthy because of the way they demonstrate sustained attention to the role of practical theology in religious teaching, research, formation, and imagination. Purposefully placed as a bookend to this series of theological negotiations of similarity and difference, Tranter’s work adds a new dimension to the comments that have been offered thus far in these pages: aesthetics. Amid a pockmarked religious landscape, that includes sites of homogeneity and heterogeneity, Tranter’s work reminds us that the wisdom, creativity, and care that is needed to negotiate differences of various kinds requires an aesthetic sensitivity, one that is able to see good and beauty, even in places that may be marked by strangeness or otherness.

As I write this editorial, I do so with recent memories of the annual meeting of the Editorial team and members of the Contact Pastoral Trust, which provides oversight and financial sponsorship for Practical Theology. The individuals that surround and support the journal allow our work to move from strength to strength. There is much to celebrate. For example, we are in the process of collecting abstracts and papers for a Special Issue devoted to Theology and AI, the annual BIAPT meeting will return to in person this summer at The Hayes Conference Centre, the annual issue on Adult Theological Education will be out later this year, and teaching and training in practical theology continues across the various communities that are engaged in the living praxis of practical theology. I invite you to consider how you can contribute to one or more of these aspects of our work.

At the same time, I am mindful of the unshakeable grief that carries individuals into this work, or that emerges as we seek to care for the individuals and communities we serve. I have the privilege to sit around the tables with religious leaders, educators, and innovators of various kinds in my context. Many are tired or weary from working on the edges or with unsustainable margins. Others face loneliness, which is often only heightened by the forms of polarisation and complex negotiation of difference religious leadership requires. And others carry the silent and often unseen griefs of loss, fragile mental health, and an uncertain future for the faith communities they have called home. Grief and crisis are part of the complex and material realities that surround many of us in our work.

In these times marked by concurrent encounters with celebration and crisis, my ongoing work as Editor will seek to create a harbour for hope. The articles in this volume demonstrate the breadth of human experience that surrounds the journal Practical Theology and invites practical theological reflection; they tell a thick and compelling story of the living reality of faith and the (theological) wisdom that sustains a common life. The thickness of these stories resists settling for naive optimism or trite triumphalism that to try to find shorter routes to hope. Instead, the hope they offer to us is buoyed by a belief that the ordinary and quotidian realities that mark the life of faith contain what is needed. Drawn forth by hope, our work together over the rest of the issues in Volume 17 will provide a similar series of reflections to support our broader conversation and local practice.