| dc.description.abstract | In my PhD-thesis I explore the embodiment of the Christian faith and spirituality, from the perspective of faith as an embodied knowledge, incorporating my own spiritual seeking in the endeavour to understand other people’s spiritual seeking and experience of faith. What does it mean to seek God for a Christian believer? How does the phenomenon of seeking God manifest itself in the lives of different individuals belonging to the same fellowship? What does it look like when a church is seeking God and how does the church cater for the individual manifestations of seeking? These are among the questions that the present text investigates. One of the most essential markers of direction for me, has been the desire to grasp, and describe what it is, what sense, that invests an experience, an emotion, a reflection, an event, with an air of the spiritual. Within the church fellowship where I conducted my fieldwork, several people had become increasingly concerned with the issue of the spiritual gifts in church, especially the gift of prophecy. My search to understand the significance of the prophetic thus runs as a scarlet thread throughout my text.
The church at the centre of my inquiries is a local corps within the Salvation Army in London, situated in an area I have called Green Forest. The name I have given the church is Green Forest Community Church, GFCC for short, but often referred to as simply ‘the church’ or ‘church’ by its members. In addition to portraying this church and a number of its members, I also attended the charismatic meetings held in a big church in Central London, at Marsham Street, which a number of the members of the Salvation Army church in Green Forest regularly visited, during the period that I was in the field. Throughout my thesis, I share field extracts from the meetings at both Marsham Street and Green Forest. This context of actually and metaphorically travelling between two churches of apparently opposite and contradictory profiles, sets the scene for the explorations of the Christian life that my fieldwork offered. The travelling back and forth between different churches and different spiritualities also became symbolic of the interviews, discussions, and conversations that I had with people from GFCC, often weighing one church or one type of spirituality against another. Through negotiating different aspects of their Christian walk and faith, people drew a portrait of the Christian fellowship to which they belonged, coloured by their experience of how this fellowship managed to relate to their present realities of needs, hopes and desires. As such, people’s portrayal of church also reflected their search for recognition, care, and direction.
The work that I present in my PhD thesis is a continuation of the work that I started during my master’s thesis. When I came to London for my first fieldwork in 1998, I involved myself as a volunteer in the Salvation Army’s work for people who were homeless. I was open about my own Christian faith and was welcomed into the Christian fellowship. On my second fieldwork, I engaged with many of the same people that I had met on my first fieldwork and continued to attend the church that I had become a part of back then. The theme for my master’s thesis revolved around narratives related to the relationship between people’s Christian faith and the motivation or conviction that had influenced their commitment to working for people in as vulnerable a life situation as being homeless (Cunningham 2003). My choice of subject related to my desire to discover the calling narrative that may have started and shaped the Christian life journey of people deeply involved in social work. The idea of a calling narrative still constitutes a foundation for my explorations in relation to the Christian life and is captured in my PhD thesis in the concept of seeking. Spiritually seeking, seen as the desire to seek God and live the Christian life, to know oneself and the plans God may have for one’s life, is often framed by an experience of calling; having been called by God or seeking a calling from God. In my master’s thesis, I related the concept of calling to the taking up of a particular type of work, a vocation. In my PhD thesis, the idea of calling also incorporates other aspects of life, such as people’s understanding of themselves as well as God, suggesting the connection between a sense of calling and an existential dimension related to questions of identity such as “who am I” and “who is God”.
These themes guided me through the field and through the writing of this text. Endeavouring to understand different aspects and contexts for the longing for the practicing of the prophetic, I ventured into a landscape of seeking God, encountering not only other seekers, but also my own seeking, needs and desires. The questions I asked others often reflected issues that related to my own personal life. One of the subjects that especially concerned me personally when I was in the field, was the biblical concept and phenomenon of grace. This subject will appear in my text throughout my thesis, signifying various aspects of my own spiritual seeking, as well as representing the interweaving between my academic and spiritual journeys, positioning my work within the genre of self-reflexive anthropology called autoethnography. | en_US |
