What church administration can learn from the secular world

Conclusion In many ways, it could be argued that the Reformation was a fight for a theology of administration. Whether one is speaking of Luther in relation to the Pope or Calvin and the Anabaptists, tremendous attention was given to the administrative relationships.In our day, we need to recover the awareness of the Reformers that the way we organize our structures perhaps says more about ourreal theology than the sermons we preach. Church order is, in this sense, the heart of the approach to theology. There is evidence that business is beginning to take order seriously. There is equal evidence that the church, too, is beginning to ask the real questions. Unless the church is to be just in the ghetto, or business is to lose the benefit of disciplined questions about meaning, we cannot say that the church and business can be in dialogue. We can say that theymust be.Formerly, Pastor of Larchmont Avenue Church Larchmont, New York     

Psychology and the church

Pastoral Psychology -     

Money for the church

Pastoral Psychology -     

Children and the church

Pastoral Psychology -     

Going to church: attitudes to church attendance amongst Australian core Catholic youth

Religious communities have an obvious interest in passing on their beliefs and practices to future generations. Many traditional churches, however, report major difficulties in retaining the interest and involvement of adolescents. This study seeks to explore attitudes to a key indicator of traditional practice, church attendance, amongst Australian core Catholic youth (14–15 years of age). Fifty‐eight semi‐structured interviews were conducted with adolescents with a pre‐existing connection with parish communities. Most adolescents interviewed expressed either strong or weak familial pattern of church attendance and predicted a likely decrease in their future participation. This, coupled with the experience of older siblings' reported views about the significance of the Eucharist and a lack of supportive social networks either at school or in the wider community, suggests that many core Catholic adolescents are likely to become less involved in church life in the future.