Community of practice foundations in Scripture: a model of vocational preparation

Newcomers Learning Religious Ritual

“…7 The concept of community of practice has been highly influential in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century research on informal and workplace learning and adult education (Hughes, Jewson and Unwin 2007, 1-2). It has also been applied to investigating learning in a variety of religious and spiritual contexts: ritual magic users (Cejvan 2023;Merriam, Courteney and Baumgartner 2003), parish organs and small groups (Otero and Cottrell 2013;Anderson 2018;Regan 2016;Robinson, Cranley and O'Connell 2023), medieval monasteries (Long 2017;Long and Vanderputten 2019;Snijders 2019), extremist religious groups (Kenney 2017;Knott and Lee 2022), and faith-based collective housing (Murphy 2018), as well as among Jesus's disciples (Csinos 2010;Courduff 2018), meditation practitioners (Lomas et al 2016), Jain ritualists (Stausberg 2001), and Muslim commu nities (Olson 2017;Shanneik 2018). Only a minority of the studies target newcomers' experiences.…”

“…These two scholars have conceptualized beginner learning as taking place through modified participation in interactional con texts they refer to as communities of practice. A number of previous studies (Staus berg 2001;Merriam, Courtenay and Baumgartner 2003;Csinos 2010;Courduff 2018;Shanneik 2018;Cejvan 2023) suggest that their concept of "legitimate peripheral participation" (Lave and Wenger 1991) provides a promising perspective for understanding learning processes of newcomers to a religious community. In this study, we use this theoretical vantage point to interpret our ethnographic material, testing the concept's usefulness for deciphering how beginners learn in and about collective ritual.…”