Every Christian organization has an approach to practical theology, whether it has named that approach or not. You can see it in the decisions an organization makes about whom to serve, how to respond to cultural change, which outside disciplines to draw on, and what counts as faithful ministry.
The question is not simply, “What do we believe?” It is also, “What does what we believe mean for these people, doing this work, in this place and moment?” Answering that question helps turn core theology into a theological vision that can guide an organization’s priorities and strategic decisions.
Key Takeaways
- Practical theology connects an organization’s core beliefs to its daily ministry and decisions.
- An organization’s tradition, mission, and communities served shape the questions it must answer.
- Engaging outside disciplines requires a deliberate relationship between their insights and theological commitments.
- Biblical faithfulness and cultural adaptation need not be opposing organizational goals.
Table of Contents
- Where practical theology fits
- Practical theology serves more than one audience
- Theology helps an organization think about its boundaries
- A set of questions for assessing your approach
- How do biblical and other sources relate?
- Know the movements and traditions that shaped you
- How will you engage the surrounding culture?
- What this looks like in City Vision’s work
- Move from an assumed approach to a deliberate one
Where practical theology fits
One way to understand practical theology is to place it at the top of a theological pyramid. The layers below it matter. They provide the foundation for applying theology to everyday life:
- Scripture is the foundation.
- Hermeneutics provides a method for interpreting Scripture.
- Exegesis carefully examines a passage’s original meaning before moving to application.
- Biblical theology develops theological claims and doctrines from the biblical material.
- Systematic theology brings those claims together into a unified, usable whole.
- Practical theology asks what all of this means for life and ministry.
I remember going through undergraduate and graduate education thinking that next year we would finally get to the useful part. That may be a little unfair to the foundational disciplines. They are important, and they are not merely abstract. But practical theology is where many of us most clearly see how that foundation informs the work in front of us.
In many schools, practical theology gets less attention than it deserves. Part of the difficulty is its range. There cannot be just one undifferentiated answer to “How do we apply theology?” We also have to ask, “Practical theology for what, and for whom?” A pastor thinking about worship, a nonprofit leader thinking about operations, and a believer trying to live faithfully in daily life are asking related but different questions.
Practical theology serves more than one audience
Drawing on the framing in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, I find it helpful to think about several overlapping audiences.
At the broadest level, practical theology belongs to everyday believers. It is part of sustaining a reflective faith in ordinary life. This is not a subject reserved for people with a ministry title.
It also belongs to Christian organizations. Here the question is how theology informs holistic ministry: the work an organization does, the people it serves, and the way it operates. That is a particularly important focus for organizations whose ministry reaches across spiritual and practical needs.
Then there is practical theology for particular areas of ministry, such as children’s ministry, worship, and pastoral care. There is also practical theology as a method for examining the relationship between belief and practice across theological education. Finally, a smaller group of scholars studies practical theology as an academic discipline that supports these other forms of work.
None of these audiences cancels out the others. But knowing which audience you are addressing changes the questions you ask. An organization assessing its approach should not assume that a resource written primarily for pastors will answer every question involved in running a Christian nonprofit.
Theology helps an organization think about its boundaries
A definition of theology that has stayed with me comes from a course on the history of Christian theology taught by Dr. Philip Cary at Eastern University. Christian traditions have boundaries, and people disagree about how wide those boundaries should be. No single rule can settle in advance every question about change. The ongoing conversation about the tradition’s boundaries is itself part of theology.
That gives theology a very practical organizational function. When a new idea, practice, or cultural expectation arises, an organization has to ask whether to adapt, resist, or respond in some other way. Its answer will reflect where it understands the boundaries of its tradition to be.
Organizations with more theologically conservative commitments may draw those boundaries more narrowly; more theologically liberal organizations may draw them more widely. Theological position is not the same thing as political position. The point here is to understand how an organization approaches Christian tradition and change, not to assign it a political label.
A set of questions for assessing your approach
Before choosing a framework or adopting a new practice, I would start with the organization itself. These questions bring the assessment down to a useful level:
- What larger movement or tradition are we part of? Its assumptions may already shape our approach to practical theology.
- Where does our core theology fall? Consider the theological commitments that set boundaries for the organization.
- What kind of faith-based organization are we? Our organizational identity affects how we relate biblical commitments to other sources of knowledge.
- Whom do we serve? Consider race, class, gender, and other factors that shape the context of our ministry.
- What are our mission and values? Ask what practical theology informs them, rather than treating them as statements detached from belief.
- Which other disciplines do we need? Consider how we will relate theology to fields such as counseling, psychology, social science, or leadership.
It is easy to answer these questions one at a time and miss the connections between them. The more useful assessment asks whether the answers fit together. If an organization says it values holistic ministry, for instance, its approach to the people it serves and the disciplines it uses should make sense alongside that claim.
How do biblical and other sources relate?
One useful way to examine a faith-based organization is to look at how it draws on the Bible and on other disciplines. At one extreme is a Bible-only approach, sometimes described as biblicism. At the other is an approach relying only on secular sources, which we would call secularism. Between those extremes are different forms of biblical engagement that involve interaction with both biblical commitments and other fields.
This is not just a question of which books are on a shelf. Suppose counseling is relevant to your ministry. You have to decide how insights from that field will be evaluated and used in relation to your theological commitments. The same question arises with organizational leadership, cultural studies, and other areas of expertise. Effective ministry may require engaging those disciplines, but an organization still needs a thought-out account of how it engages them.
Know the movements and traditions that shaped you
An organization does not develop its approach in isolation. It sits within society, within one or more movements or traditions, and within its own particular history. Those layers influence what seems natural, what raises concerns, and which ministry practices feel familiar.
A denomination is one kind of tradition, but a non-denominational organization also has a theological setting. Other influences might include evangelical or mainline traditions, the Black church, Hispanic churches, white evangelical parachurch networks, rescue missions, Christian community development, the Salvation Army, Youth With A Mission, Teen Challenge, or global relief work.
These identities can overlap. An organization could be connected to both the Black church and Christian community development, or to both rescue missions and white evangelical ministry. Recognizing those connections is useful because each movement tends to bring assumptions about theology, culture, and practice.
Church history can help here. Understanding where Anabaptist, Reformed, or Holiness traditions emerged, for example, gives more meaning to those labels and helps explain why organizations may approach the same ministry question differently. The goal is not to fit every organization into one neat branch of a family tree. It is to recognize the inheritances already informing its decisions.
How will you engage the surrounding culture?
Another assessment question is whether an organization values relationships with the wider society while maintaining its Christian identity. An adaptation of an acculturation model puts those two questions on separate axes. The resulting grid distinguishes four approaches:
- Assimilation: engagement with wider society accompanied by a loss of distinct Christian identity.
- Biblical engagement: relationships with the wider society alongside a maintained Christian identity.
- Marginalization: neither strong engagement nor a sustained connection to Christian community.
- Separation: a strong emphasis on distinct identity with little engagement beyond it.
That grid can also be framed around two organizational priorities: Is it important to innovate and adapt to be culturally relevant? And is it important to avoid secularization? An organization that answers yes to both is aiming to be what I would call a biblically faithful innovator. Many organizations we work with are trying to occupy that space.
That phrase is worth thinking about carefully. “Faithful” and “innovative” are sometimes treated as opposing goals. But the question for a ministry is how to adapt in ways that remain accountable to its Christian commitments. That takes more discernment than either adopting every new approach or rejecting change as a matter of course.
H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture offers another way to think about Christian responses to culture. Its five approaches include Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. These are helpful categories for naming different instincts, even though an organization’s actual practice may not fit neatly into just one.
What this looks like in City Vision’s work
At City Vision, our emphasis follows the contexts of many of our students. Many work in Christian nonprofits and parachurch organizations. Many serve people who are poor, experiencing addiction, or otherwise disadvantaged in urban settings. A good portion are theologically conservative to moderate while engaging deeply with society.
That context means our practical theology cannot stop with traditional categories of church ministry. Our students also engage counseling, psychology, social sciences, cultural studies, and organizational leadership. We have therefore spent time thinking about practical theology in urban ministry, cross-cultural ministry, Christian community development, addiction counseling, online Christian education, innovation and technology, and organizational health.
It also reaches into fundraising, human resources, and operations. Those may sound like administrative subjects rather than theological ones. Yet Christian organizations make values-based decisions in all three. Asking what it means to approach fundraising as ministry, HR as ministry, or operations as ministry is a practical theological task.
That does not mean adding a religious phrase to an otherwise unchanged activity. It means doing the harder work of asking what is different about the way Christians understand and carry out that activity. What commitments guide decisions? How does the work relate to the organization’s mission? How do its values show up in practice?
Move from an assumed approach to a deliberate one
Most organizations already have answers to these questions embedded in their habits. The opportunity is to bring those answers into the open. Identify the tradition you have inherited. Clarify your theological boundaries. Be specific about the people and context you serve. Decide how biblical commitments relate to knowledge from other disciplines. Then examine whether your ministry practices and internal operations actually reflect those decisions.
Practical theology is where foundational beliefs meet everyday organizational life. When that connection is clear, theology does more than describe what an organization believes. It helps the organization make faithful, thoughtful choices about the work it is called to do.