I am on my way back from a conference on ecclesiology and ethnography that took place in the north of England, at the University of Durham. The theme of the conference was “Ordinary Ecclesiology,” and most of the papers—from presenters hailing from the UK, Western Europe, and the USA, centered on what qualitative research in theology had to contribute, directly or indirectly, to ecclesiology, or theological understandings of the church.

There were more than a dozen papers presented. Among them were research that focused on: how vegetarians motived by faith experience the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) of  their ethical vegetarianism in their churches; how the difference between beginning and experienced pastors illustrates research from expertise studies on the difference between novice practice and expert practice in the move from “following rules” to “transcending rules” through learned intuition; and how a close study of the christology of lay Christians in one British context revealed that most of those Christians do not believe that Jesus is divine nor that his death is of particular significance for them, as they have developed other theologies of Jesus and salvation that work better for them and influence their lives in helpful ways. These are all admittedly not directly operating like the kinds of ecclesiologies that “we” often read in academic theology, but they also contribute to a richer understanding of what the churches really are on the ground, and to what degree they will be susceptible to or interested in taking on or living out official ecclesiologies.

I also co-presented a paper, along with my Fordham colleague Prof. Patrick Hornbeck, on some of our theological explorations of, and research on, the widespread phenomenon of baptized Catholics’ changing their beliefs and practices away from “normative”/prescribed ways of being Catholic. We proposed some implications for thinking about the church today.

The turn to qualitative research, especially ethnography, has taken place in systematic theologies, as well as ethics, with increasing vigor and sophistication over the past decade. In practical theology, while there seems to be deepening interest as well in recent years, this sort of research has been happening since the 1980s in various forms.

This is part of the larger turn to practice in theological and religious studies, in which various official claims about faith, often taken to be settled or fixed outside of history, are explored in the realm of everyday life and ministry, in the beliefs and practices of lay people and pastoral workers, and in the process a much richer and more complicated picture of what Christians practice and believe, and for this conference, what “the church” is and could be, is coming into view.

Why now? In a sense, this is well-trod territory. Theologies of the laity, of the sense of the faithful, of popular religion, and of everyday life have been in play for nearly four and five decades now. All of these approaches have informed ecclesiology “from below,” even though such ecclesiology has hardly won the day in academic theology, not to mention ecclesial governance. (Not that winning the day in these realms is irrefutable evidence of good theology.)

But what practical theology helped to introduce in the 1980s, and what religious studies has begun to valorize in recent decades,

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