Space Bending When Matter Matters

Religious congregations regularly take buildings not originally intended for religious use and convert them to spaces for worship and fellowship. This chapter includes five case studies: a Guatemalan evangelical megachurch that worships in a parking garage; a suburban Anglican congregation that transformed a former manufacturing plant; a group in Vermont that turned a former US Army horse barn into a mosque; a suburban non-denominational church that meets each week in a high school auditorium; and an Orthodox Christian congregation that altered a Missouri Synod Lutheran building for their use. The authors argue that a number of religious groups can make spaces work for them, particularly if they have constrained resources and are willing to be creative in changing the interior of structures.

Parochial School Teachers Instructional Use of the Interactive Whiteboard

This chapter presents findings from a study that utilized Davis' (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to investigate K-8 teachers' instructional usage of the interactive whiteboard (IWB). Through surveying 145 teachers and 40 administrators of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod schools, the researcher used multiple regression and moderator analyses to examine whether the TAM model helped explain teachers' reported teacher-centered and student-centered instructional IWB use. The results of the study indicated two variables adapted from the TAM, teachers' perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of the IWB, contributed to the prediction of teacher-centered instructional usage, and PU contributed to the prediction of student-centered instructional usage. Moderator analysis indicated the variable for teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge of the IWB moderated the relationships between PEOU of the IWB and each teacher and student-centered instructional usage, as well as between PU of the IWB and teacher-centered instructional usage.

Parochial School Teachers Instructional Use of the Interactive Whiteboard

This chapter presents findings from a study that utilized Davis' (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to investigate K-8 teachers' instructional usage of the interactive whiteboard (IWB). Through surveying 145 teachers and 40 administrators of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod schools, the researcher used multiple regression and moderator analyses to examine whether the TAM model helped explain teachers' reported teacher-centered and student-centered instructional IWB use. The results of the study indicated two variables adapted from the TAM, teachers' perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of the IWB, contributed to the prediction of teacher-centered instructional usage, and PU contributed to the prediction of student-centered instructional usage. Moderator analysis indicated the variable for teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge of the IWB moderated the relationships between PEOU of the IWB and each teacher and student-centered instructional usage, as well as between PU of the IWB and teacher-centered instructional usage.

Lutherans in America

Lutherans are one branch of Protestant Christianity and have been in America for almost 400 years. Historically they have immigrated to America from Lutheran countries in Europe, especially Germany and Scandinavia. Immigrants during the eighteenth century founded Lutheran congregations in the middle colonies, while westward expansion and further immigration from Europe centered Lutherans in the American Midwest. Lutherans formed regional and national denominations based on geography, ethnicity, and theological differences, In the twentieth century they continued to grow, and mergers reduced the numbers of denominations by 1988 to two major denominations: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In 2015 there were close to seven million Lutherans in America.