The incombatibility of the Free Methodist Church and fundamentalist theology: why Free Methodists are not fundamentalists

The purpose of this study was an investigation into the question of whether or not the Free Methodist Church is compatible with fundamentalism. Key research questions included whether the FMC at its inception would be predisposed to fundamentalism, why fundamentalism has at times been attractive to Free Methodists and why Free Methodists ultimately rejected fundamentalism. Over the course of the thesis, I have used the literary tool known as reception theory to analyze the way in which leaders and governing bodies within the Free Methodist Church have received and responded to the doctrines and mindset of the fundamentalist movement in America. Chapters in the thesis cover the historic and theological context of the Free Methodist Church and the fundamentalist movement, and the way in which Free Methodists received and responded to two primary doctrines of fundamentalism: the revelation and interpretation of Scripture, and Premillennial Dispensational theology. What I found in my analysis is that particularly as they worked towards merger with the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the FMC moved closer to fundamentalist positions, even officially embracing the position of inerrancy in their Articles of Religion for a time. However, it was clear that leaders within the FMC were never comfortable with these fundamentalist positions, and those positions were ultimately rejected by the FMC after merger with the WMC failed. The FMC traces her roots back to John Wesley and the Church of England. Within that ecclesiological tradition, there is room for theological ambiguity that allows for varieties of interpretations. The FMC shares the catholic spirit of Wesley that centers on celebrating shared beliefs rather than focusing on differences and is thus not compatible with fundamentalism

The Regulation of Prokaryotic Transposable Elements by the RNA Binding Protein Hfq

This thesis investigates the role that the RNA binding protein Hfq has in regulating the mobility of IS Elements and the expression of their transposase genes. Hfq is a known regulator of the IS Element IS10 and is a major component of sRNA pathways in E.coli. In this work, I demonstrate that through the use of a bioinformatics approach to identify a list of additional IS Elements from the IS Finder database, one can successfully identify IS Elements containing Hfq binding sites which may implicate Hfq regulation. One of the identified elements, IS1413, was characterized by transposition assays and transposase expression assays. These experiments demonstrated that the activity level of IS1413 decreases in the presence of Hfq. Another identified IS Element, IS10, had its 3’ end of its transposase mRNA transcript probed for the relevance of a putative Hfq binding site through mutational analysis, and through identifying that there are no post-transcriptional modifications at the 3’ end of the transcript. Although Hfq bound IS10 mRNA in vitro, genetic mutations to the putative Hfq binding site resulted in no difference in transposition activity. A growth condition was identified that increased IS10 transposition frequencies in wild type cells, but not in cells containing a rpoS gene disruption. Overall, these studies have identified another IS Element that changes activity in the presence of Hfq and have linked slow unaerated growth conditions to an increase in IS10 transposition frequencies in E.coli