Bible--Old Testament--Use

Jon Derek Fortenberry D.Min.

This project aims to equip Longview Point Baptist Church members to be involved in orphan care. The project coordinator argues that as the congregation has a greater understanding of the theology of adoption, the love of Christ for the fatherless, his commands for his people to care for the fatherless, and the great need for orphan care, that more people will be involved in orphan care at all levels of engagement. Chapter 1 lays the theological foundation for the project, an overview of the project, and its goals. Chapter 2 delves into the project’s specifics at Longview Point Baptist Church in Hernando, Mississippi. Chapter 3 details the rest of the sessions and how the project coordinator challenged the participants to further action. Chapter 4 evaluates the effectiveness of the project and how the church will continue to encourage and equip members to be involved in orphan care. It also examines ways to improve the project if duplicated in another context.

Tami F Hooker D.Min.

Incarcerated men often feel abandoned by God. Those feelings of abandonment result in their avoiding the church even if they have been raised in it, in religion shopping or choosing their own understanding of and way of relating to the divine over any religion, and in overt religiosity, Implications of this are that the men no longer identify themselves as children of God as defined by the Christian faith. For some, it means they have no relationship with God or with the Church as a whole or the congregation within prison walls. This work takes a look at prison as exile and exile as trauma using the exile and the trauma that resulted from it as described in the Hebrew Scriptures for comparison. The intervention is a Bible study based on narrative theology that inmates from a state prison created and that I facilitated and evaluated in a county jail. The study is titled "Where was God?" It was created so men could hear stories similar to their own and recognize that those telling them are aware that God had been present in their stories and also explore where similar stories had occurred in Scripture. The authors chose ten topics to explore. They were: where was God when I was hurt, felt alone, felt ashamed, was afraid, was pretending, felt invisible, felt un-forgiven and was unforgiving, felt desperate and in despair. It concludes by asking where was God when I felt hope and when I felt love. The hope was that this would help the participants to see their own stories as part of a divine narrative, which would lead them to build a more authentic relationship to God and healthier relationships with others.

Duane Sterling Sims M.A.

This paper examines how the traditional Ghanaian worldview has been contextualized by grass-roots Christians in Ghana, and further by Ghanaian Pentecostals, and how this has been exported, adapted, and refined from Ghana across national and continental lines to its diaspora. I hope to address some key questions regarding Ghanaian deliverance practices (at home and abroad) and integrate my findings into ministry, whether to Africans or anyone. Some of these questions include: “What drives Ghanaians to seek deliverance? How have they, historically, sought to deal with the spirit realm? How do they currently seek to deal with it? What are some of the differences between a traditional Ghanaian understanding and that of a Ghanaian Pentecostal view?”

Ted Allen Rubesh

This study explores the relationship of the Old testament Jewish diaspora to contemporary diaspora, applying the resulting Jewish framework to the particular experience of the Sri Lankan diaspora resident in the Gulf Cooperation Council. The study is archival in method, quantitative and qualitative in approach and is built on interdisciplinary research applied to the field of diaspora missiology. It concludes that the framework of the Old Testament Jewish diaspora experience provides a formative paradigm from which to discern the social and theological dynamics that shape the experiences sucha s that of the Sri lankan community in the GCC.

Karen Anne Hamilton

This thesis is about the preaching of the Old Testament in the United Church of Canada. The topic is explored through the researcher's experience and theology and the theological tradition of the church, specifically the United Church of Canada, and using a qualitative research methodology. The specifics of the process involve a preacher basing his sermons on the Old Testament Lectionary texts for four weeks of the Epiphany season. Both the preacher and the congregation then reflect, through written and verbal responses, on the experience. The researcher's assumption prior to the thesis work was that the Old Testament is not being preached often or well enough in the United Church of Canada, and the data collected validates the assumption. The thesis then concluded with a discussion of the factors contributing to that lack in Old Testament preaching in the United Church of Canada and some future possibilities for change and transformation.