Reawakening the Ethical Imagination of the Local Congregation Through the Exploration of the Biblical Metanarrative

Abstract

JEREMY SEAN HALL REAWAKENING THE ETHICAL IMAGINATION OF THE LOCAL CONGREGATION THROUGH THE EXPLORATION OF THE BIBLICAL METANARRATIVE. Under the direction of David P. Gushee

In the fall of 2019, Towne View Baptist Church (TVBC), a small Southern Baptist Church in north Georgia, voted to welcome LGBTQ believers into full membership. While the church was proud of its newly adopted membership policy, its people were theologically unsure of their actions. If one had surveyed members on why they had welcomed LGBTQ believers, they would either have offered platitudes about God’s love and the ubiquity of sin or would have attempted to prooftext their way through the question. The concern is that this inclusion decision sat on a weak foundation and could be walked back in the future by poor Biblical interpretation. If leaders could move this group of (formerly) Southern Baptists to look at the Bible in a new and life-giving way to see a better and more inclusive church, then it would be possible to form a more robust church witness in the post-Christian United States.

My thesis project sought to train the TVBC membership to approach ethical decisions in the context of the Biblical metanarrative and to awaken the ethical imagination by aligning church decisions with the themes and trajectory of the Bible. If effective, this training would also aid TVBC members in making difficult decisions in the future from a robust Christian ethic grounded in the trajectory of God’s dream for the creation as found in scripture. The exploration of the biblical metanarrative allowed the participants to engage their ethical imagination, moving from choosing affirmation as a negation of their culturally-embedded understanding of the LGBTQ prohibition found in the “anti-homosexual acts passages” to being able to understand their affirming position as a response to the metanarrative of the Bible and the trajectory of God’s redemptive work across the story of the Bible and in the world.