Mathew Guest

The post-evangelical emerging church: Innovations in New Zealand and the UK

Abstract This article explores new religious groups who build a distinctive vision of the ‘emerging church’ by drawing from a post-evangelical perspective. Specifically, we explore the ways in which two groups (a Baptist church in Auckland, New Zealand, and a group attached to a Church of England parish in York, UK) re-imagine church and reflexively reconfigure ideas of Christian religion, in light of their embrace of a ‘post-modern’ view of the world. Throughout, the focus remains on the question of how religious groups, which self-consciously embrace a post-modern worldview – emphasising detraditionalisation and individualism – sustain durable Christian communities.

Religion and the cultures of Higher Education : student Christianity in the UK.

This chapter is about the relationship between higher education and the religious identities of university students. Unlike some other essays in this volume, its primary concern is not with how religion is managed as a curricula topic within classroom contexts. Rather, it focuses on how the experience of university – broadly conceived - exerts an influence over the religious perspectives of students. The empirical foundation of the following discussion is research into Christian students studying at universities within the United Kingdom, although the patterns discerned there have clear resonance with tendencies in other parts of the Western world. In keeping with the sociological approach used in this research, the chapter begins with an extended overview of universities within the UK and their relationship with religious concerns, tracing historical developments and the challenges of the contemporary context. This is followed by a discussion of how we might access and make sense of the different cultures of higher education manifest within these universities. We then turn to fresh empirical evidence gathered on Christian students across universities in England.

Challenging ‘Belief’ and the Evangelical Bias: Student Christianity in English Universities

Abstract Popular and academic accounts of university-based religion tend to privilege evangelical Christianity, presented as a morally conservative, conversionist movement at odds with university contexts, which are widely assumed to be vehicles for a progressive Western modernity. This is especially the case in the UK, given the association of higher education with secularisation, yet virtually no research has studied this interface by examining the lives of students. This article discusses findings from the three-year project “Christianity and the University Experience in Contemporary England”, including a nation-wide survey of undergraduate students, in examining how the experience of university shapes on-campus expressions of Christian identity. We argue that a sizeable constituency of undergraduates self-identify as ‘Christian’, but evangelicals emerge not as the dominant majority, but as a vocal minority. The emerging internal complexity is masked by a public discourse that conceives of religion in terms of propositional belief and presents evangelicalism as its pre-eminent form.

The Local Church: Developments in Congregational Studies

Summary For many Christians the most familiar sacred space is their local church, and yet the relationships people have with this locus of identity are many and varied. However, one persistent feature relates to the communal nature of the congregation, i.e. the fact that the sacred space of the local church is shaped by a sense of collective identity and shared experience. This article addresses this observation via a consideration of literature emerging within the field of congregational studies. Drawing from existing research on churches in the UK and USA, various models for understanding the local congregation are described and set within a broad disciplinary framework. Attention is then paid to two particular volumes, both recently published, which signal the internal variety and vitality of the UK field of congregational studies.

Students' Constructions of a Christian Future: Faith, Class and Aspiration in University Contexts

Economic uncertainties have unsettled the status of higher education as an assured means to social mobility, raising questions of how students orient themselves to life after graduation. In this context, how does religion (a neglected aspect of student identity) shape students’ attitudes and plans? This article examines the future aspirations of Christian students, theorising Christian identity as an inter-subjective resource through which ‘alternative’ futures are imagined, a resource variously framed by classed assumptions about propriety. It analyses data from 75 interviews with undergraduates at five English universities, and explores emerging aspirational paradigms structured around hetero-normative domesticity, the formation of Christian counter-narratives to contemporary capitalism and positive submission to God.