Preliminary Programme

Before the 1960s English clergy and church agencies were primarily concerned with urban improvement and church extension in new urban areas as a missionary imperative. However, by the sixties, an acute awareness of secularising tendencies as well as the limitations of the welfare state led to a number of initiatives designed to transform communities suffering from a range of social problems. By reinventing their traditional role in caring, individuals and groups within the churches hoped to demonstrate their continued relevance to society. One of a number of initiatives developed in this period was the Methodist Church’s Ten Centres Scheme, which attempted to establish youth centres in around London. In 1966 George Lovell became minister of Parchmore Church in Croydon, where he applied non-directive approaches to community development under the influence of T. R. Batten. By the 1970s a number of Christian working groups emerged in response to the recommendations of the 1968 Gulbenkian Report. In 1970 Lovell joined the newly formed Community Development Group of the Methodist Church, whilst the British Council of Churches was also pursuing community development through its Community and Race Relations Unit (CRRU), as was the William Temple Foundation. Using Lovell’s activities as a framework (though not restricted to them), this paper will examine the how church agencies attempted to establish and co-ordinate a distinctively Christian approach to community development, both in practical and theological terms, in a period in which a number of faith groups became involved in short-lived Community Development Projects. The paper will also stress divisions within the churches on this issue, particularly as the non-directive approach favoured by Lovell was challenged, particularly by activists in the CRRU who favoured more direct form of political and oppositional action. (Show less)

The theme of religion and sports has gained more and more attention among European historians during the last decade, and especially the relation between different denominations and sports during the 19th and 20th centuries has been under scrutiny. Though, the connection between sports and religion has not gained the same attention among Swedish scholars. To some extent this gap is to be filled by the research project Religion and Sports – Christian attitudes to sports and sport movement in Sweden.

In my part of this project I will, amongst other things, examine how the relation between the established church in Sweden (Church of Sweden) and the sport movement is connected to the process of secularisation. At the same time as the sport movement gained influence in the Swedish society, the position of Christianity was altered. In some cases the established church embraced the sport movement and different athletic activities as a way to counter the de-Christianisation of society. In my paper I will highlight such initiative and the strategic arguments behind them. (Show less)

The paper concentrates on the history of re-democratization period in Brazil (since the decadence of military dictatorship till the implementation of ‘Plano Real’), focusing on social and cultural changes reflected in the Brazilian population religious life. Its objectives are to find, using social science theories to explain (in the context of existing disputes on the theory of secularization) the reasons for high social demand for religion and religiosity in those times, the determinants of expansion by new religious organizations in Brazil as well as to show how and why the historically dominating in Brazil Catholicism started losing its adherents, slowly pushed away by churches of Pentecostal origins. (Show less)

Among Turkish migrants in West Germany from initial guest worker recruitment in 1961 to the present day, Islamic associations have played a central role in organizing religious, social, cultural, economic and political life and structuring interaction with the state in a transnational context. While these associations have been the subject of extensive anthropological and sociological investigation, the historical specificity of their organizational activities, religious messages, and relations with each other and with the German and Turkish states has been relatively underexplored. In this paper, I examine the shifting contours of what Frank Peter refers to as the “Muslim religious field”, from the arrival of the first guest workers in 1961 to the landmark German Islam Conference in 2006. Rather than producing a fixed set of organizational imperatives, I argue, drawing on the histories of the four largest Turkish Islamic associations in Germany, that the Muslim religious field demanded quite different goals and orientations in different periods. The initial labor migration period was characterized by local-scale self-help activity and largely neutral religious organization. In the 1980s, developments in Turkish politics and new theological currents, as well as changes in West German asylum policy and the emergence of Integrationspolitik presaged a greater degree of inter-associational competition and concomitant centralized organization and political advocacy, particularly as the myth of return was gradually discarded. Finally, the post-unification period saw changes in citizenship policy and an emphasis on state-civil society partnership in Germany, as well as increased tolerance for political Islam in Turkey and a new focus on religious, social and political services for the second- and third-generation. This latter period was marked by an erosion of divisions between associations, formalized collaboration with the German state and ever more centralized national organization. These trends are best embodied by the 2006 German Islam Conference in Berlin and its fostering of a new integration narrative of “integratable foreignness” with Islamic associations presenting themselves as reliable and essential intermediaries between irreducibly foreign ideas and practices and the German cultural and political mainstream. (Show less)

The end of the 18th century was a great era of new church building projects in Finland. At the same time the control for public building projects was tightening up in the Swedish realm. The Cathedral Chapter and Governor supervised church building projects which received public funds. The office of the Superintendent (överintendentsämbetet) became foremost building authority. If the parish wished to have financial support, they had to send the construction drawings to Stockholm for the Superintendent, who revised and usually re-drew them. Little by little the old fashioned medieval shapes were forbidden: the peaked belfry (1759) and the armoury (1764). Consequently, the Swedish neoclassical style started to replace older building traditions.

However the building authorities took also a step backwards when suggesting the stone material. In 1776, the wooden churches were forbidden, but this legislation did not totally come to fruition in Finland. Kokemäki parish became one of the exceptions, although parishioners regarded the stone church project far too expensive and laborious. Therefore the political activity and interaction of parish members rose. They participated in many discussions and debates before difficult decision making in the parish meetings. Hence the stone church building projects became a political issue not only in the central administration but also in the local level.

In my paper, I discuss the development of the building legislation and the hardening control of the building authorities – and how this development impacted on the local political practices?
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