Den samskabende kirke?

Co-production has become an important notion within public governance, particularly in municipalities. The Danish Folk Church has a long history of working together with the municipalities and is an institution with many civil resources. Through an empirical study involving the municipality, the church and citizens of Aarhus, this article discusses the implications of co-production for the church and its theology. St. Augustine’s concepts of the “City of God”, Luther’s concept of the “priesthood of all believers” and “vocation” and Luhmann’s concept of faith as dealing with “paradox” offer an analytical frame for understanding how the church co-produces the city. The “priesthood of all believers” underlines the “bottom up” character of the congregation and thereby its civil character, while the “City of God” as an ambivalent and paradoxical term for salvation holds together the tensions involved in co-production.

Institusjonelle rammer for kirkelig ledelse

Management can hardly be understood irrespective of the context in which it unfolds. This is also the case with ecclesiastical leadership. Nevertheless, the management literature has rarely incorporated how different aspects of context affect management. This chapter thematizes the public frames and regulations civil society and church/religious organizations operate within and discusses how this affects leaders’ maneuvering space. An underlying premise of the chapter is that churches and religious organizations are institutions and that society as context is characterized by institutionalized frameworks framing religious organizations. Examples of this in a Norwegian context are the Working Environment Act and other laws governing working life, agreements negotiated between the parties in the labor market, and more specifically the Lutheran folk church tradition. Based on Scott’s (2008) analytical approach to analyzing institutionalization, regulatory, normative and cognitive/cultural norms, the chapter discusses how leaders’ maneuvering space is shaped by these mechanisms yet also has the ability to influence existing frameworks.

Word-formation and peculiarities of the structure of lexical units of Folk Orthodoxy

The research is devoted to the analysis of the word formation peculiarities of the vocabulary expressing the idea of Christianity and the creed in the Russian language and its dialects, with priority attention to the dialect group of South Russian Tambov dialects. The aim of the study is to analyze the creative word-formation potential of the investigated lexicon, which defines a new approach: identifying the original derivational base in the historical projection, a variety of methods of derivation, description of motivational semantic relations. The word-formation potential and the structure of Christian vocabulary units are traced with priority attention to the dialect group of South Russian Tambov dialects. In the course of scientific development of the data the originality of dialect word-making is revealed, typical word-formation models in lexical and semantic groups are analyzed, the dominant influence of the historical old Slavic and Russian traditions and the interdependence of language and national mentality are evidently determined. Lexical realizations, the situational use of which sometimes presents unexpected contexts, demonstrates the self-value of studying the “religious” macro-field of vocabulary in the dialect “version”, and the dominant position of language in the formation of the national worldview. The facts prove the extreme importance of explication of the tradition of the creed in the main system and subsystems of the national Russian language. The basic empirical base is the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V.I. Dal. The analyzed array of lexical units is formed from this source and compared with the data of other dialect dictionaries reflected in the bibliography. The reference point for the detection of units of Christian vocabulary by V.I. Dal was the dictionary litter “folk-church”.

Worldview constants in the culture of people’s language

The purpose of this article is to identify and to analyze semantics of the specific terminological system of people’s Orthodoxy from the standpoint of Russian dialectology and ethnic linguistics. The study substantiates and proves the hypothesis of G.P. Fedotov that Russian spiritual poems reaction at the categories of Christian theology is not outdated; they can be fixed not only in different types of folklore and everyday text, but also developed on the lexical material of Rus-sian folk dialects. The novelty of the approach to the allocation of ideological constants in the na-tional language is due to the following material of the study: dialect lexical units associated with the belief of the traditional peasant population of Russia. At the same time, not only the data of dictionaries are presented, but also unique data of the regional dictionary of national Orthodoxy collected by the author in the territory of the modern Tambov region. We trace the peculiar folk philosophy of word-making: reveal the semantic categories of mental spirituality that determined the individuality and sections of the vocabulary of the religious sphere; prove their influence on the formation of dialect data and their generalization into a single system of folk Church vocabu-lary. As a result, we reveal the possibilities of using ethno-linguistic semiotics to describe the vo-cabulary of faith and Church. The proposed categorical approach can become a universal scenario of description, covering the dialect lexical corpus of the terminological system of Orthodoxy.

Utfordringar for prestar og undervisningsmedarbeidarar i dåpsarbeidet i Den norske kyrkja

The purpose of the article is to explore the different emphases among leaders in dioceses and pastors/catechists in local congregations concerning challenges related to baptism in the Church of Norway. Findings in annual reports from two dioceses are compared with an empirical material consisting mainly of interviews with pastors and catechists in six congregations in these two dioceses. The selected congregations are urban and countryside, large and small, and a characteristic of parts of the context of these two dioceses is a strong low church or prayer house tradition. The article gives an empirical contribution by describing and exploring how different challenges come to the fore at the diocesan level and in the practical baptismal work in congregations. The main finding is that while the decreasing number of baptisms in the Church of Norway and how to deal with this is the focus in the annual reports from the dioceses, this theme is almost totally absent among pastors and catechists. Relational aspects, how to deal with the parents’ lack of follow-up after baptism, and the desire of being open to all church members irrespective of their engagement in church activities are among the main concerns at the local congregational level. In a concluding reflection, the concepts of the church as a folk church and as a religious community serve as a theoretical perspective to enlighten the tension between diocesan and local congregational level, but also tensions among the respondents. The tensions seem to stem both from contextual and personal factors.

Towards a Queer Sister-Folk Church? Reimaginations in Lutheran Scandinavian Folk Church

The article argues that the inclusion of material created from an ethnographic research strategy opens the possibility for theological reimagination of two aspects of Scandinavian creation theology: the meaning of ecclesial space and the notion of folk. The article uses elements from queer theory/theology as sensitising devices for recognizing the potential of such theological reimagining. The empirical material is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Church of Our Lady, Trondheim, Norway, an ecclesial practice committed to rituals of hospitality. Reading the displacement of street space and church sanctuary space in the light of elements of queer theory/theology, the article aspires to show how the notion of folk and the meaning of sanctuary space is destabilized and unsettled through these practices.

Folklore and Folklife of American Religious Communities

Religious folklore yields to the same analytical approaches that contribute to understanding similar expression in other groups. Moreover, some groups develop systems of belief, behavior, organization, and symbolism that lie outside standard religious systems. Often ignored by scholars in other disciplines, this folk religion—manifested in forms such as the folk church, folk religious communities, complementary religion, and tribal religion—invites the attention of folklore studies, whose traditional focus has often been on cultures that stand alongside but apart from mainstream societies. Folklorists apply their empathetic research methods to folk religious groups through careful ethnography that accounts for what may be distinctive to the groups as well as what they share with other folk groups.

Marionetter eller dirigenter?

The purpose of this article is to enhance our knowledge of how congregational leaders understand and perform strategy in their work. By comparing findings from interviews with priests, churchwardens, and leaders of parish councils within the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway, this study explores their strategic agency through the illustrative case of a church development program. Role characteristics, responsibilities and cooperation are analysed. The article contributes empirically by clarifying how spiritual and administrative congregational leaders relate to the concept strategy work and elucidates its conditions in a folk-church context. Priests and churchwardens display a somewhat different conceptualization of strategy work. The former category places it within an institutional-cultural organizational perspective emphasising values and processes, whereas the latter understands it as rational-instrumental underlining goals and products. Parish council leaders hold a middle stance. The theoretical interest of this study is how these coexisting perspectives may both supplement each other and compete. The article discusses how and why strategy work is demanding in folk-church parishes characterized by complex structures favouring an internal rather than external orientation. Strategy work presupposes agency and close interaction between congregational leaders.