Theological Ethnography and World Christianity

Over the past decade, the use of ethnography in theology has grown significantly, as this special issue of the Journal of World Christianity shows. Then, weaving these threads together, I comment on how theological ethnography’s disruptive potential for theology and church doctrine, for decentering authority structures, and for displaying the way theology and ethics are entailed as integral to fieldwork, and not as an appendage or mere entailment. Conceiving of “ethnography as theology and ethics” shifts the question from ethnography as method “borrowed” for use in theological work to ethnography as fully theological and even an enactment of the ethics of discipleship. This offers a possible path for rapprochement between social scientific and theological approaches to research in religion that, in their enactment, “chime in” with God’s work of loving the world

Christianity · Doctrine · Ethnography · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Christian Theology and Mission · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development