The Politics of Space: Affect, Church Membership, and Ecclesial Identity in Contemporary Chinese Reformed Churches

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-165
Author(s):  
Steven Hu
Keyword(s):  
Church Membership ◽  
Politics Of Space ◽  
Ecclesial Identity ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

scholarly journals North to South: A Reappraisal of Anglican Communion Membership Figures

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Church Membership ◽  
Steep Decline ◽  
Ecclesial Identity ◽  
First World ◽  
Global Growth

AbstractIn recent decades Anglicans have developed a largely unquestioned and unchallenged narrative of global growth and decline. This narrative tells a story of Anglicanism’s success being largely due to growth in developing, postcolonial nations which, according to the narrators, is ongoing and unstoppable. At the same time, first-world, mostly postmodern nations have seen a steep decline in church membership and attendance. Numeric growth and strength have been used to define ecclesial identity and to legitimate understandings of ‘Anglican orthodoxy’. This article offers an up-to-date reappraisal of Anglican Communion membership and, in that process, challenges many of the premises of such a narrative.

scholarly journals The reformed confessions and church membership ethically appraised

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Herm J.G. Zandman
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Government

The reformed churches historically call themselves confessional churches, with the confessions adopted by church councils being the yardstick according to which membership is either permitted or refused. The reformed churches consequently consider it necessary for all members of the church to express agreement with the confessions. The reason why the confessions are held as the summary standard of belief is founded in the conviction that they are faithful expressions of the teachings handed down from the apostles.  These confessions have been attributed a twofold purpose regarding their function in the reformed churches. Firstly, they protect believers and congregations from error, and secondly, they help attain unity of faith among the believers in the reformed churches – both at the congregational and denominational level.   Currently this view is under siege from those who hold the conviction that the traditional approach of giving the confessions such prominence is too narrow and binding in terms of who may or may not be awarded membership of the reformed churches.   This article seeks to consider the place of the confessions and to evaluate the claim that de-emphasis on the confessions is desirable in order to celebrate the unity of all believers. Furthermore, the article seeks to demonstrate that ethical integrity is contingent on seeking to exercise church government within the demarcation of the confessional framework.

Mother or Wife?

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 232-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phia S. Salter ◽  
Glenn Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Resource Allocation ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Psychology Perspective ◽  
Cultural Ecological

Inspired by “Mother or Wife” African dilemma tales, the present research utilizes a cultural psychology perspective to explore the dynamic, mutual constitution of personal relationship tendencies and cultural-ecological affordances for neoliberal subjectivity and abstracted independence. We administered a resource allocation task in Ghana and the United States to assess the prioritization of conjugal/nuclear relationships over consanguine/kin relationships along three dimensions of sociocultural variation: nation (American and Ghanaian), residence (urban and rural), and church membership (Pentecostal Charismatic and Traditional Western Mission). Results show that tendencies to prioritize nuclear over kin relationships – especially spouses over parents – were greater among participants in the first compared to the second of each pair. Discussion considers issues for a cultural psychology of cultural dynamics.

Teetotalism in Malawian Protestantism: Missionary Origins, African Appropriation

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Todd Statham
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
And Control ◽  
Abstinence From Alcohol

Although beer had a profound cultural, economic and religious significance among traditional societies in central Africa, teetotalism – in other words, abstinence from alcohol – has become widespread in Malawian Protestantism (as elsewhere in African Christianity), and in many churches it is regarded as a mark of true faith. This article examines the origins of the antipathy to alcohol in the Presbyterian missionaries who evangelised Malawi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who drew a parallel between the ‘problem of drink’ among the working poor in their home culture and central Africans, to urge sobriety and its concomitant values of thrift and hard work among their converts. Yet research shows that it was new Christians in Malawi themselves (and not the missionaries) who took the lead in making temperance or teetotalism a criterion for church membership. By drawing upon the experiences of other socially and politically marginalised groups in the British Empire at this time, it is suggested that these new Christians were likely motivated to adopt temperance/teetotalism in order to assert to foreign missionaries their ability to lead and control their own churches and countries.

On Sinofuturism

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-62
Author(s):  
Yunying Huang
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Future ◽  
Dominant Design ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Cultural Expressions ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Dominant design narratives about “the future” contain many contemporary manifestations of “orientalism” and Anti-Chineseness. In US discourse, Chinese people are often characterized as a single communist mass and the primary market for which this future is designed. By investigating the construction of modern Chinese pop culture in Chinese internet and artificial intelligence, and discussing different cultural expressions across urban, rural, and queer Chinese settings, I challenge external Eurocentric and orientalist perceptions of techno-culture in China, positing instead a view of Sinofuturism centered within contemporary Chinese contexts.

The Massacre of 1740 as Reflected in a Contemporary Chinese Narrative

Archipel ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
Claudine Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Chinese
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