This article reviews and critiques an ethical strategy of minimizing social difference between researcher and child in participatory research with children, and drawing on fieldwork, presents an alternative strategy of minimizing social distance. The author argues that an ethical strategy of minimizing social distance between researcher and research subject(s) (1) enables the constitution of difference in relationship, (2) lends research subjects autonomy to contribute to the research relationship, design, and process, and (3) makes ethics central to the project's implementation, not merely its design. The author advocates for increased methodological conversations across disciplines toward furthering ethical participatory research with children.
This past semester I taught a course called "The Church in Transition," ministry in the context of the decline of mainline churches, closures, mergers, financial instability, and alternative ministries. There is, understandably, much hand-wringing in theological institutions today about the decline in Christian congregational affiliation, which has issued a passionate and sometimes desperate call not only for new models of ministry, but for new models of Christian leadership. Many pastors and Christian leaders are searching for flexible and adaptable paradigms of leadership that can accept, embrace, and, most especially, anticipate change in congregational ministry contexts. This reveals not only a willingness to adapt on the part of church leaders, but a conviction that prior paradigms of leadership and training were molded and wedded to a concept of congregational ministry that is now outdated and obsolete. "What do pastoral leaders look like in a post-Christendom world?" many of us are asking, and especially theological educators are asking, "How can we train them up?" These conversations about religious decline tend to ask existing leaders to reinvent the molds for leadership and ministry. In so doing, they fail to recognize that the most needed conversation partners for such transformation may not even be at the table. My way of answering this question about leadership and training has been to look ethnographically at the people in churches for whom leadership has
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