ReStory Your Church

This project provides a framework for churches at a turning point or near closure to “ReStory” and consider legacy options for their future including a restart, repurpose, or reallocation of resources. This is the key insight of this project: Churches that tell their past and present stories are well positioned to stay connected to a future vision that meets the needs of the community through creative and innovative means. I am a pastor in the Tennessee Western Kentucky Conference of the United Methodist Church. In this context, I have witnessed the closure of dozens of churches in both urban and rural settings. Denominational leaders hope to find an effective way to address this growing trend while still pursuing the mission of the Church. For years, church revitalization has been centered on a model of learning and importing best practices. The thought has been that, if churches could simply be closed, sold and resources redirected, the mission of the Church might thrive. I have discovered that a story-based approach can guide those conversations in a less threatening, more legacy-affirming way. We must talk about the reality of death and resurrection, legacy and purpose in ways that are informed by the hope we have in Christ. A ReStory asks three basic questions: 1. What story are we telling ourselves now? 2. What story did we live in the past? 3. What story does God dream for our future? By involving the church in a process of storytelling, the ReStory project increases the level of buy-in and belief among church leaders and members. As this project has developed, it has become increasingly focused on helpful ways to adjust the language used to talk about churches in decline. After a successful ReStory process, other ministry partners will be used to implement the ReStory

Replacing the Standard Bearer:Theorising Leadership Transition in Insurgencies

The transition from one leader to the next represents a critical moment in the life cycle of insurgencies: it is a period of heightened uncertainty and vulnerability when roles and relationships are in flux. However, remarkably little scholarly attention has been paid to understanding this process. Building our case around the insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus, we address this gap by developing a typology of key tasks that new leaders must perform in order to navigate the transition period. We argue that, within insurgencies that are weakly institutionalised, leadership can most usefully be conceived of as a negotiated relationship in which both leaders and followers have agency. Successful performance of these tasks helps ensure the maintenance of this relationship and, through this, movement continuity. Therefore, this paper contributes to both the empirical literature on insurgency and our understanding of leadership and transition within rebel movements

Replacing the Standard Bearer:Theorising Leadership Transition in Insurgencies

The transition from one leader to the next represents a critical moment in the life cycle of insurgencies: it is a period of heightened uncertainty and vulnerability when roles and relationships are in flux. However, remarkably little scholarly attention has been paid to understanding this process. Building our case around the insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus, we address this gap by developing a typology of key tasks that new leaders must perform in order to navigate the transition period. We argue that, within insurgencies that are weakly institutionalised, leadership can most usefully be conceived of as a negotiated relationship in which both leaders and followers have agency. Successful performance of these tasks helps ensure the maintenance of this relationship and, through this, movement continuity. Therefore, this paper contributes to both the empirical literature on insurgency and our understanding of leadership and transition within rebel movements

Interpreting the ideological evolution of an insurgency: lessons from the North Caucasus, 2007-2015

Ideology has fallen badly out of fashion. In the study of political violence in particular, it is often pushed to the margins, and there is considerable scepticism over its importance. Yet violent political actors often devote substantial effort to shaping interpretations of their activities, and explanatory models that neglect ideology typically rely on a narrow understanding of the concept and leave important questions about its role unanswered. This thesis interrogates ideology’s role in political violence through a rich empirical study of the insurgency that operated in Russia’s North Caucasus between 2007 and 2015. It applies Social Movement Theory to unique datasets to understand how movement actors defined the conflicts they were engaged in and sought to persuade others to participate, and how internal and external contexts influenced these ideas. In doing so, it establishes the insurgency as ideologically shallow and weakly integrated, and argues that identity and pragmatism were more central to its ideological vision than specific grievances or goals. This thesis significantly advances our understanding of the insurgency and generates important insights into the role of ideology in political violence more broadly. At the same time, it contributes important methodological innovations to the study of clandestine social movements

A cross-cultural re-evaluation of the Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) in five countries.

Research into the detrimental effects of excessive exercise has been conceptualized in a number of similar ways,including ‘exercise addiction’,‘exercise dependence’,‘obligatory exercising’,‘exercise abuse’,and‘compulsive exercise. Among the most currently used (and psychometrically valid and reliable) instruments is the Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI). The present study aimed to further explore the psychometric properties of the EAI by combining the datasets of a number of surveys carried out in five different countries (Denmark, Hungary, Spain, UK, and US) that have used the EAI with a total sample size of 6,031 participants. A series of multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were carried out examining configural invariance, metric invariance, and scalar invariance. The CFAs using the combined dataset supported the configural invariance and metric invariance but not scalar invariance. Therefore, EAI factor scores from five countries are not comparable because the use or interpretation of the scale was different in the five nations. However, the covariates of exercise addiction can be studied from a cross-cultural perspective because of the metric invariance of the scale. Gender differences among exercisers in the interpretation of the scale also emerged. The implications of the results are discussed, and it is concluded that the study’s findings will facilitate a more robust and reliable use of the EAI in future research