Academic literature on the topic 'Missouri Synod Church development'

This chapter presents findings from a study that utilized Davis' (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to investigate K-8 teachers' instructional usage of the interactive whiteboard (IWB). Through surveying 145 teachers and 40 administrators of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod schools, the researcher used multiple regression and moderator analyses to examine whether the TAM model helped explain teachers' reported teacher-centered and student-centered instructional IWB use. The results of the study indicated two variables adapted from the TAM, teachers' perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of the IWB, contributed to the prediction of teacher-centered instructional usage, and PU contributed to the prediction of student-centered instructional usage. Moderator analysis indicated the variable for teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge of the IWB moderated the relationships between PEOU of the IWB and each teacher and student-centered instructional usage, as well as between PU of the IWB and teacher-centered instructional usage.

Religious congregations regularly take buildings not originally intended for religious use and convert them to spaces for worship and fellowship. This chapter includes five case studies: a Guatemalan evangelical megachurch that worships in a parking garage; a suburban Anglican congregation that transformed a former manufacturing plant; a group in Vermont that turned a former US Army horse barn into a mosque; a suburban non-denominational church that meets each week in a high school auditorium; and an Orthodox Christian congregation that altered a Missouri Synod Lutheran building for their use. The authors argue that a number of religious groups can make spaces work for them, particularly if they have constrained resources and are willing to be creative in changing the interior of structures.

The sources of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the history of the road to the council, and the nature of theological reform and development have been the object of much scholarly energy since 1965. To this day, the meaning, significance, and interpretation of Vatican II remain contested, and these debates have great importance for the Catholic Church and for Christian ecumenism. While studies exist that link the council to the thought of the Patristic period, as well as to movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hitherto the connection of Vatican II to the post-Tridentine but pre-nineteenth-century church has been almost completely overlooked....

This chapter argues that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, are best understood through a triadic grid: ressourcement (retrieval of past Christian thought and texts, especially scripture and of the church fathers), aggiornamento (updating), and the development of doctrine. It highlights four areas in which Vatican II sought to reform the Church—ecclesiology, religious liberty, liturgy and devotions, and ecumenism. The interpretation of Vatican II is still heavily contested. The chapter argues that the best hermeneutic for interpreting the council, advanced by Pope Benedict XVI and praised by John O’Malley, is a “hermeneutic of reform,” a theologically rigorous and historically conscious hermeneutic that sees Vatican II as having “continuity and discontinuity on different levels” with past teaching. It argues that such a hermeneutic can aid conciliar interpretation and deepen reflection on the nature of Catholic reform through a study of forerunners of Vatican II, who attempted aggiornamento and ressourcement.

This article is devoted to the study of the organizational structure of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (hereinafter UGCC) as the largest Eastern Catholic Church of the Byzantine rite in the world. The UGCC belongs to religious organizations (hereinafter RO), which form a separate subgroup in the general structure of non-profit organizations (hereinafter NGOs) and, accordingly, constitute the third sector of the economy along with government agencies and commercial organizations. When considering the theoretical issues, the article presents the development and evaluation of scientific thought, the theory of research and the functioning of organizational structures. The essence of organizational management structures is revealed, in particular their basic elements, interrelations, as well as the fundamentals of formation and designing. In what follows, the system of general ecclesiastical administration of the Catholic Church is presented, where the power of leadership, or administration, is divided into three categories: legislative, judicial and executive, combined as a whole in the person of the pope and at the level of the Bishop’s Particular Church. The article also reveals the place and status of the Eastern Catholic Churches in the general structure of the Catholic Church, where synodal administration is considered to be a usual form of government. This form of government operates through an episcopal system based on the hierarchy of bishops and their unification into a college (synod) headed by the head of the church. In the analysis of statistical data on the development of structures and personnel of the UGCC for the last two decades, the quantitative growth of the clergy and the quantitative growth of parishes for this period are graphically presented, which testifies to the stable and professional development of organizational structures and personnel (clergy) of the UGCC in the world. When analyzing church documents (normative – legal acts) regulating the activities of the UGCC and comparing them with theoretical developments in the field of management of organizational structures, it should be noted that OSU UGCC belongs to bureaucratic structures with decentralized operational management at the local level. From the point of view of the analysis of the hierarchy of power, the main governing bodies of the UGCC are described, where the status of each governing body and official is clearly regulated by church canons and job descriptions of the UGCC.