Human imagination
as a whole provides the particular idiomatic and narrative construction
of a
congregation; its
members communicate by a code derived from the totality
of forms and stories by which
societies cohere.
One was the work
of a sociologist, Earl Brewer, who, with the aid
of a theologian and a ministries specialist, sought by an extensive content analysis
of sermons and other addresses given in a rural and an urban church to differentiate the patterns
of belief and value constituting those two parishes.67 The second was the inquiry
of a religious educator, C. Ellis Nelson, who departed from a curricular definition
of education to envision the
congregation as a «primary
society» whose integral culture conditions its young and old
members.68 James Dittes, the third author, described more fully the nature
of the culture encountered in the local church.