Reframing Mission: An Action-Research Intervention into a Mainline Judicatory

A system-wide, action-research intervention into a mainline church judicatory sought to empower its members to respond to the adaptive challenges facing them through reframing their understanding of mission in light of their changing context and theological tradition, and through actively discerning the leading of the Holy Spirit. Recognizing that the problems facing mainline denominational systems in 21st century America require attention to foundational questions of identity and purpose in a post-Christendom era, this study utilized a multi-layered, participatory process that encouraged grass-roots transformation. Over the course of one year, approximately 2,000 members of a diocese of the Episcopal Church participated in a mission strategy process that included baseline and follow-up surveys, congregational visits, the development of a theological position paper on mission, and the creation and formal endorsement of new identity and purpose statements, mission and ministry priorities, and an organizational redesign. The renewed missional identity that emerged in the process focused on the theme of communion, integrating the sending emphasis characteristic of the western conception of the Trinity and missional ecclesiology, with the social emphasis of the eastern view of the Trinity and koinonia ecclesiology. A vision for the organizational redesign of the judicatory utilizing network theory was also developed

Who Is My Neighbor? The Church\u27s Vocation in an Era of Shifting Community

Dwight Zscheile is an astute scholar of the shifting patterns and contours of American congregational life, and how the changing aspects of American society are impacting them. He argues for local congregations paying renewed attention to the localized communities around them, as well as the new kinds of communities that have arisen in an age of new technological connections

Improved Numerical Solutions for the Simulation of Microwave Circuits

The electromagnetic characteristics of microwave circuits can be described by the scattering matrix. This results in a three-dimensional boundary value problem, which can be solved using the Finite Difference method in the Frequency Domain (FDFD). A time consuming part of the FDFD-method is the solution of large systems of linear algebraic equations. The coefficient matrix is sparse, symmetric, and indefinite. Using multicoloring and independent set orderings essential numerical improvements are achieved

Numerical Solutions for the Simulation of Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits

The electric properties of monolithic microwave integrated circuits can be described in terms of their scattering matrix using Maxwellian equations. The corresponding three-dimensional boundary value problem of Maxwell's equations can be solved by means of a finite-volume scheme in the frequency domain. This results in a two-step procedure: a time and memory consuming eigenvalue problem for nonsymmetric matrices and the solution of a large-scale system of linear equations with indefinite symmetric matrices. Improved numerical solutions for these two linear algebraic problems are treated

Eigen Mode Solver for Microvawe Transmission Lines

The electromagnetic properties of microwave transmission lines can be described using Maxwell's equations in the frequency domain. Applying a finite-volume scheme this results in an algebraic eigenmode problem. In this paper, an improved numerical computation of the eigenmodes is present

Simulation of Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits

The electric properties of monolithic microwave integrated circuits can be described in terms of their scattering matrix using Maxwellian equations. The corresponding three-dimensional boundary value problem of the Maxwellian equations can be solved by means of a finite-volume scheme in the frequency domain. This results in a two-step procedure: a time and memory consuming eigenvalue problem for nonsymmetric matrices and the solution of a large-scale system of linear equations with indefinite symmetric matrices

Iterative solution of systems of linear equations in microwave circuits using a block quasi-minimal residual algorithm

The electric properties of monolithic microwave integrated circuits that are connected to transmission lines are described in terms of their scattering matrix using Maxwell's equations. Using a finite-volume method the corresponding three-dimensional boundary value problem of Maxwell's equations in the frequency domain can be solved by means of a two-step procedure. An eigenvalue problem for non-symmetric matrices yields the wave modes. The eigenfunctions determine the boundary values at the ports of the transmission lines for the calculation of the fields in the three-dimensional structure. The electromagnetic fields and the scattering matrix elements are achieved by the solution of large-scale systems of linear equations with indefinite complex symmetric coefficient matrices. In many situations, these matrix problems need to be solved repeatedly for different right-hand sides, but with the same coefficient matrix. The block quasi-minimal residual algorithm is a block Krylov subspace iterative method that incorporates deflation to delete linearly and almost linearly dependent vectors in the underlying block Krylov sequences

Simulation of microwave and semiconductor laser structures including PML: Computation of the eigenmode problem, the boundary value problem, and the scattering matrix

The properties of microwave circuits and optical structures can be described in terms of their scattering matrix which is extracted from the orthogonal decomposition of the electric field. We discretize the Maxwell's equations with orthogonal grids using the Finite Integration Technique (FIT). Maxwellian grid equations are formulated for staggered nonequidistant rectangular grids and for tetrahedral nets with corresponding dual Voronoi cells. The surface of the computation domain is assumed to be an electric or a magnetic wall, open-region problems require uniaxial Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) absorbing boundary conditions. Calculating the excitations at the ports, one obtains eigenvalue problems and then systems of linear algebraic equations