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Theological Action Research
Action research is in the business of bringing about change and takes account of people's values and motivations and the value base of organizations. When working with religious groups, theology (articulated religious beliefs) comes into the picture. Professional researchers need to know how to bracket their own value commitments when necessary and negotiate their way around the values of the group. This also holds true for theological beliefs, but it may be more challenging. Theology is obscure to many. Providing a way of handling the specific quality that religious beliefs bring to social action is one reason for having clear procedures for theological action research (TAR).
Many religious groups want to bring a research focus to their mission and practice. They are aware that theological research must examine action and activities, not just the belief system. This is the task of ‘practical theology’, and it requires proper criteria and procedures and social scientific rigour. But religious groups are right to be wary of underlying assumptions, the risk of a reductionist mindset brought into the research process—even unconsciously—and the religious-theological factor being simply ‘sociologized’ or ‘psychologized’. TAR sets the research process firmly within the lived world of religious faith and theology. As a methodology, it is an adaptation or contextualization of action research.
The model of TAR presented here was developed by a university-based, ecumenical, interdisciplinary research team ARCS (Action Research: Church & Society) on the basis of action research work with 12 Christian outreach initiatives. The team defined TAR as ‘a partnership between an insider and an outsider team to undertake research answering theological questions about faithful practice in order to renew both theology and practice in the service of God's mission’.
The main characteristics are as follows:
- A particular approach to the experience-reflection-learning-action cycle
- An interactive, ‘conversational’ process between the outsider research team and the insider research partners
- A specifically theological understanding of the action goal
Theology in the Action-Reflection Cycle
The cycle moves from practice to reflection to practice in an iterative way and as distinct operations, but it is important to note that awareness and understanding are present throughout. The reflection phases intensify but do not exhaust theological awareness, even if these are characteristically seen as the ‘theological moments'. Theology comes to expression thematically in reflection and also in a non-thematic way in experience and action; it is multifaceted and multidimensional. The lived practice of faith already embodies theology.
The ARCS team developed a heuristic scheme (and others are possible) for analyzing and interpreting the research data, which guards the inherently theological nature of this methodology. There are four dimensions—‘the four voices of theology’—the espoused and operant at the level of practice and the normative and formal at the reflective level. There is the theology that can be discerned in a group's adopted mission (espoused) and in its actual practice (operant) and the theology that is acknowledged as having authority (normative—scripture, creeds, liturgical) and that is the fruit of ongoing inquiry (formal—the work of the academic theologian). These are not totally discrete streams of theology but ‘places' where theology is located. They are constantly interacting and interact differently in different confessional traditions.
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- Ladder of Inference
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- Learning Pathways Grid
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