Relating Pastoral and Prophetic Ministry in Congregational Life and Theological Ethics

Engaging Racial, Gendered, and Class Barriers
in Multicultural Public Ministry

Co-Principal Investigators: Dr. Dale P. Andrews and Dr. Norman Faramelli

This project was designed to introduce students at the Boston University School of Theology community to various models sustaining an important dialectic between pastoral and prophetic ministry, and how those models are vital to the life of our congregations. Stemming from Boston University’s historical role in religious personalism and the legacy of prophetic ministry exemplified by alumnus Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement, this project began with models exploring this dialectic for the contemporary Church and its implication for cross-cultural and multi-cultural public ministry. The project bridged several disciplines-theology and ethics, homiletics and pastoral theology.  The examples of prophetic ministry will be oriented to issues of race and class-racial justice and economic justice. It is vitally important we understand the doggedness of racial issues in our often polarized culture in the terms of a black-white framework and recognize the growing multi-racial and multi-ethnic needs facing our churches, especially with regard to Asian and Latino/a cultures. How we theologically engage these social exigencies with transformative agency is not only central to doing practical theology but also is central, we believe, to the School of Theology’s historic and emerging mission.