I've got a pretty solid idea of what I'd like to do for my research project. At the moment, I just need to choose between the two perspectives that it entails.
As a religion major and a Christian, I've become increasingly interested in how one goes about "evangelizing" or sharing the gospel and converting others to Christianity. This too has been fueled by my commitment to a church in north Nashville called The Axis Church. It was strategically planted in the Salemtown neighborhood, a low-income, predominantly African American part of town. My pastor, who is white, and having grown up as the son of a pastor, has encountered throughout his life a great number of different social groups, all bound by Christ. He feels very at home in Salemtown and equipped to administer the gospel to anyone, white, black, homeless, etc, who enters the Axis Church.
So for my project I'd like to examine and investigate how one goes about evangelizing to different Discourses. The core is obviously the same, the gospel remains the same in any circumstance, but I'd like to narrow in on vocabulary, body language, tone of voice, really specific speech patterns, and see how one might go about talking about Jesus to different socio-economic groups. Is there a huge difference? Where are the links?
What I need to decide is whether I'd like to approach this from the pastor's perspective, or the people's perspective, or both. This will be an interview-heavy topic. What I will need to do is interview a WIDE range of people; I am aware that a relationship with Christ is a very personal thing and no two people have come to Christ in the exact same way: however, I want to see if any trends occur.
We'll see where this takes me.
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