Imagine your readers with Anglican case studies

I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately — in the various spheres of my life — about using case studies to guide a project. Imagine, say, you have a program at church and want to make sure it works for its participants. You might come up with case studies for a few archetypal participants, and imagine how they would benefit — or not — from the project. It would help identify missing stakeholders, or show that while the Gospel can be all things to all people your project cannot be. As you may guess from the title, I’m trying to identify my readers, so see how I might be better able to interact with them.

I first ran into this model in seminary, but one of the more accessible — in part because the text is online — is in the Church of England’s New Patterns for Worship. It is “designed to educate and train those who plan and lead worship” and uses four case studies, carried throughout the book’s examples. (p. x)

The direst example;

St Dodo’s is a church where worship is simply not one of the most important things the church does. It comes low on most people’s agenda, though there are occasional heated discussions at the PCC. The demands of
different factions and rival views in the church mean that the worship is very bitty, and there is a different kind of service each Sunday in the month, with very few people going every week. The vicar finds little time for preparation
and feels it is impossible to involve others in preparing or helping to lead because of the need to keep the balance between the different factions.

A resource to bookmark and download, at the bottom of this page.

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

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