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Free for Mission: Missional Church 
and Ethnographic Fieldwork

Scott J. Hagley
Associate Professor of Missiology, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, PA
shagley@pts.edu

Abstract

Working at the intersection of ethnographic and missional theol-
ogy, this essay argues for the central role of fieldwork for discern-
ing missional identity in congregations. Recent developments in 
ecclesiology and ethnography have clarified the embodied nature 
of theological knowledge, disclosing the practical wisdom and cul-
tural locatedness of the researcher and congregation. While eth-
nography has been used to help congregations understand their 
context and discern a missional vocation, the ongoing theological 
and formational nature of such practices are often undertheorized 
in relationship to missional church. Drawing from Robert Jenson’s 
notion of the Spirit as God’s freedom, liberating God and creature 
for God’s future, this essay suggests ethnographic fieldwork as a 
liberative practice for the congregation, freeing it to participate 
in the boundary-crossing and sensemaking work of missional 
church. 

In working with congregations, I’m often greeted by some 
version of the question: “Are we (meaning, the congregation I’m 
working with) missional yet?” The question comes loaded with 



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curiosity and concern. What, they ask, is a missional church, and 
would we know one if we saw it? Even more significant: how will 
we know when the work we are doing to renew our theological 
imagination and develop partnerships with our neighbors will pay 
off? The question comes from a good place, but it also leads into a 
deceptive trap, for any answer will betray the dynamism that “mis-
sional” tries to name (Guder 1998, 3–5). And yet, the question also 
unveils a theo-practical ambiguity at the heart of the missional 
church. The problem is not just that missio Dei theology holds to-
gether unreconciled tensions between the God-church-world re-
lationship, but that the boundary-crossing practices that shape the 
missional vocation of a congregation are viewed instrumentally, as 
a means to a missional end. Congregations, seeking to identify as 
“missionary by [their] very nature,” and reorient congregational 
life through practices of missional discernment, can be forgiven 
for thinking of “missional” as a fixed arrival point (Guder 2015, 9).

In what follows, I explore the theological significance of 
ethnographic practices for missional congregations. A staple 
of many approaches to missional renewal and missional church 
plants, church leaders and steering committees regularly employ 
the basic tools of ethnographic fieldwork to better understand 
their own community and their context or neighborhood (Croft 
and Hopkins 2015; Roxburgh 2011). In descriptive terms, these 
practices equip congregants for deep listening, attentive obser-
vation, and disciplined curiosity. They also place congregants in 
new places and with new people, drawing these experiences into 
congregational reflection and discernment. While neither profes-
sional ethnographers nor academic theologians, congregants are 
given through these practices new connections to neighbors and 
offered new vantage points from which to reflect upon the life 
and ministry of the congregation. As such, they are not simply a 
means to a missional end, but rather practices that already par-
ticipate in God’s missional future. Congregational ethnographic 
fieldwork can cultivate new social realities which glimpse—and 
perhaps even liberate—the congregation for God’s mission in its 
particular context. 



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Of course, ethnographic fieldwork is not a theological prac-
tice by itself, nor can missional theology be collapsed into ethnog-
raphy. At stake in this discussion is how otherness is reconciled 
with the missio Dei, how one envisions the relationship between 
God and God’s creation, the church and God’s present and com-
ing Reign (see Swart et al. 2009). Drawing from Robert Jenson’s 
understanding of the Spirit as God’s freedom and God’s future, I 
suggest a liberative approach to missional church. Rather than a 
fixed identity or a future telos, the missional church is liberated for 
God’s mission by and through the neighbor, the stranger, the other 
in and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The church sent 
into the world recognizes and receives God’s “preferred and prom-
ised future” in the concrete relationships cultivated (Keifert 2006, 
16). Ethnography, shaped by this missional intention, becomes an 
ongoing practice for missional theology, not only a step toward a 
missional identity.

Are We There Yet? Liberating Missional 
Church

Darrell Guder says it is “the widespread consensus that the ‘church 
is missionary by its very nature’” (Guder 2015, 9). After the 1952 
International Missionary Council meeting in Willingen, Vatican 
II, the WCC study on the “Missionary Structure of the Congrega-
tion,” and (among other things) the Gospel and Our Culture Net-
work, Guder’s assertion remains uncontroversial. The question, 
however, is what “missionary by nature” means. In the latter half 
of the twentieth century, the missionary identity of the church has 
been understood in relationship to the missio Dei, summed up by 
David Bosch as “the classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the 
Father sending the Son, and God the Father and God the Son send-
ing the Spirit was expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world” 
(Bosch 2011, 399). Thus, the missionary church is the church sent 
into the world by the missionary God. However, besides a general 
theocentric reframing of mission, the meaning and implications of 



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missio Dei for the church remain ambiguous. Dwight Zscheile and 
Craig van Gelder track four different interpretations of missional 
church across academic and popular treatments of the missionary 
nature of the church, with different implications for each interpre-
tation (Gelder and Zscheile 2011, 10–11). 

According to John Flett, the reason for this ambiguity can 
be traced back to a deficient trinitarianism in the missio Dei, in 
which the gap between God and world is overcome by “sending” 
as a “second step alongside who he is from all eternity” (Flett 2010, 
19). In its classic articulation after Willingen, missio Dei holds 
together two competing theological strands. On the one hand, 
Karl Hartenstein brought a concern for God’s sending agency in 
mission. The missionary act is in response to the sending activity 
of Father and Son. On the other hand, the American confedera-
tion brought an explicitly Trinitarian rationale for mission which 
served to minimize the ways mission has been Christologically 
understood. God is at work, not only through the church, but also 
in historical movements for justice and liberation. Jacques Mat-
they calls these two positions the “classical” and the “ecumenical” 
approaches to missio Dei (Matthey 2001, 429–30, quoted in Flett, 
2010, 53–54). However, Flett identifies a shared flaw in both posi-
tions: neither clarifies the relationship between God and world. 
Mission either extends Christ’s work to the world by way of the 
Church or names divine action drawing history toward a more 
just end. The first approach envisions the Church crossing the gap 
between God and world, and so provides theocentric cover for 
mission to carry on as it always has been. The second approach 
dissolves the Church into various activist movements without ever 
identifying discrimen for discerning the shape of God’s mission 
(Flett 2010, 35–57). Neither approach clarifies how the life of Fa-
ther, Son, and Spirit relates to the world: “The problem is not that 
one is Trinitarian and the other is not; the problem is that both 
draw on an identical and insufficient Trinitarianism” (Flett 2010, 
56). Without addressing this ambiguity, the missionary nature of 
the Church is bound to be confused.



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Flett appeals to Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation to situate 
the missio Dei on more firm footing. By doing so, he locates mis-
sio Dei’s trinitarianism within Christology and soteriology. For 
Barth, the Chalcedonian formula draws the human creature into 
the Trinitarian communion in a way that protects the otherness 
of God and the creature. The gap between God and world is thus 
bridged within the being of God, and not as a secondary sending. 
As God and creature, Jesus Christ’s election by the Father is also the 
election of all humanity. Thus, God’s economy of salvation, God’s 
reconciliation of the world to God, is also properly located within 
the triune being of God. For Flett, these doctrines renew and re-
direct the missionary vision of the Church. If mission belongs to 
the being of God, then it also belongs to the very being or nature 
of the Church. Mission is not properly the action of the Church 
or the bridging between God and world, but rather the witness of 
the Church to what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ: “Jesus 
Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the sending of the Spirit, and 
the spilling of his community out onto the streets proclaiming his 
name to the ends of earth and of time reveal the nature of God’s 
own perfection in and for himself ” (Flett 2010, 248).

While offering insightful analysis of problems inherent in 
missio Dei and providing a road map for resolving them, Flett’s 
approach neglects the idiosyncratic nature of congregations and 
the way in which the missionary nature of ordinary congregations 
is practiced and expressed. Because the gap between God and 
world is solved within the life of God as a singular and fulfilled 
act, Flett’s Barthian approach does not address the experience of 
narrative surprise and discovery critical to congregational mis-
sion. “Missionary by its very nature” becomes a statement about 
ecclesial ontology rooted in the singular act of God’s missionary 
being. The practicalities of bearing witness in a particular context 
among a variety of others are not clearly connected to the formal 
theological argument. When researchers and theologians work 
from the missional practice of the local congregation, however, 
the theocentric orientation of missio Dei relativizes the various 
ministries of the congregation, simultaneously empowering the 



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congregation to learn from outsiders and surprises.1 Fresh Expres-
sions will use a “Neighborhood Audit” to this end; “The Missional 
Network” and “Partnership for Missional Church,” and many oth-
ers employ similar tools and practices meant to help congregations 
and church leaders to learn from, open up to, and be shaped by 
the concerns, interests, gifts, and hopes operative in a particular 
context (see Croft and Hopkins 2005; Center for Congregations 
2020; Church Innovations Institute 2020). Thus, the surprises and 
diversities of local missional practice are disconnected from the 
Trinitarian problematics of missio Dei, and vice versa. Approaches 
to missional church that lead congregations to ask “are we there 
yet” rely upon vague notions of missio Dei, in which the practices 
meant to help congregations “become” missional are interpreted 
as a means to rediscovering our missional nature. But approaching 
the question without the particularities of congregation and mis-
sion in mind only exacerbates the distance. What is needed, I will 
suggest below, is a different vantage point from which to consider 
the theological density of missional church practices. Beginning 
with Robert Jenson’s understanding of the Holy Spirit as the free-
dom of God, I suggest a pneumatological frame for considering 
God’s surprising and liberative work, freeing the congregation 
for listening and responding to a host of others—God, neighbor, 
world—as a participation in the mission of God. 

The Spirit and the Freedom of God

As mentioned above, congregations discern their own participation 
in God’s mission by attending to and learning from those outside 
the congregation. Encounter with others through the crossing of 
boundaries is critical for learning about one’s context and learning 

1. This is not true of all approaches to missional church. But at least three 
of the “branches” of the missional church identified by Gelder and Zscheile 
have proponents that encourage congregational learning as part of the jour-
ney toward missional. Only the “Discovering” missional publications draws 
“missional” language without some engagement with the broader conversation 
around missio Dei (Gelder and Zscheile 2011, 10–11).



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to witness to the gospel in those places. Insisting upon the mis-
sionary nature of the congregation infuses these practices with the 
burden of faithfulness—to engage such discernment is central to 
its very life as church. Rather than working from a prior grounding 
of the missional identity of the church in ontology, Robert Jen-
son’s theology offers a “revisionary metaphysics,” which can offer 
a vision of congregational mission more attentive to boundary-
crossing congregational practice (Jenson 2004, vii–viii).2 Stepping 
around the usual tensions between being and personhood that 
guide Trinitarian doctrine, Jenson approaches Trinity with the 
narratives that disclose the identities of Father, Son, and Spirit.3 
In doing this, he highlights the relational dynamism of the Trinity 
revealed as a story involving the action(s) of creatures in history: 
or, rather, history in God. Participation in the story of Father, Son, 
and Spirit requires an open posture expressed as receptivity to 
the future and all those included in it. The missionary nature of 
the church is an invitation to participate, an identity disclosed in 
retrospect, a promised future granted by the liberating Spirit and 
made concrete in the various others “join[ed] at the body of Jesus” 
(Jennings 2017, 8).

For Jenson, questions about the being and nature of God are 
resolved in relationship to the narratives attributed to God, what 
he calls the dramatis Dei personae or the drama of the characters 
of God. Jenson’s doctrine of God thus emerges in relationship to 
the events by which God identifies Godself: God is the one who 
raised Jesus from the dead and who has raised Israel from Egypt. 
The dramatis Dei personae becomes the lens through which Jenson 
understands Trinity and God’s relationship to the world. History 

2. It is worth noting that Jenson never engages missional church (and only 
occasionally treats mission) in his writing. As such, I am extending his Trini-
tarian theology to suggest a framework for ecclesiology that is not Jenson’s.

3. Critical to Jenson’s theology is a narrative understanding of personhood, 
where personal identity is rendered coherent in retrospect and in relationship 
to a series of events by which that person is identified. A person, Jenson says, is 
“a sequence of events that before the event retains the capacity to surprise, yet 
after the event displays a coherent dramatic sense that has been tightened by 
that very event” (Jenson 2014, 199).



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occurs not only in God, but “as [God’s] being,” revealing God’s 
roominess to accommodate otherness in the triune life of God 
(Jenson 1997, 221, 226). Drawing together a cluster of metaphors, 
Jenson concludes that the life of the triune God is an event, a 
person, a decision, and a conversation (Jenson 1997, 222–23). Be-
cause plot development requires multiple agents and coherence to 
be meaningfully dramatic, the various aporias of Trinitarian the-
ology—three and one, communion and otherness, freedom and 
history—are given dynamic energy and creative room without spi-
raling into incoherence or settling for oversimplifications. Within 
such a framework, theology offers a “revisionary” and perhaps 
chastened metaphysics (Jenson 2014). God is known within the 
experience of time and the events of history, rather than through 
deep structures of normativity or philosophical speculation.

It is not just that we know God by nature of the resurrection 
or the exodus, but that the divine drama is the very life of God. 
The “Triune Identity,” as Jenson frames it, is known in the dramatic 
interaction of Father, Son, and Spirit before, among, between, and 
within God’s creation (Jenson 1997, 63ff). “God is what happens 
between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit. But in the present con-
nection [with creation] we may also say: God is what happens to 
Jesus and the world” (Jenson 1997, 221). In Jenson’s thought, this 
point is critical, for it both guards the difference between God and 
creature and holds open the possibility of creaturely union with 
God; the roominess of God’s triune life does not blur the distinc-
tion between God and creation, but rather discloses the way in 
which God distinguishes Godself “from others by not excluding 
them but by including them,” beginning in the “act of creation” 
(Jenson 1997, 226). Theological interpretation invites interaction 
with and involvement in the divine story. Thus, the contingencies 
of history, creation, and experience are inevitably part of theologi-
cal construction. 

Jenson’s narrative approach to Trinitarian theology identifies 
dynamic creativity within God’s own life in the Spirit as liberator, 
or as God’s future and—as James Henry says—“freedom in God’s 
own life” (Henry 2018, xxv). Jenson distinguishes his position 



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from classical theology, where relations of origin describe the 
triune economy: The Son begotten of the Father and the Spirit’s 
procession from the Father through the Son. While fixed in the 
creeds, relations of origin struggle to distinguish the identity of 
Spirit and Son in relationship to the Father, which often results in 
ambiguous approaches to Pneumatology (Henry 2018, 116–40). 
Jenson addresses this problem by considering the triune economy 
in relationship to the unfolding of the dramatis Dei personae. Be-
cause history is in God, Jenson understands the Spirit proceed-
ing from the Father but also liberating Father and Son for God’s 
own future: as “witness to the Son and the freedom of the Father” 
(Henry 2018, 124). As the “first fruits” (Rom 8:23), “deposit” or 
“guarantee” (2 Cor 1:22) of the Reign of God, the Spirit’s identity 
is disclosed in the manifestation of God’s promised future as inau-
gurated by Christ. The delay of the Parousia makes the Pentecost a 
“dramatic necessity,” where the Spirit poured out on all flesh con-
nects the ministry of Jesus to God’s desire to gather the nations to 
Israel (Jenson 1999, 178). At the Pentecost, the Spirit liberates the 
disciples for God’s future, expressed as communion and connec-
tion where it did not exist before. For when the Spirit descends, 
women and men from the nations hear the word of God in their 
mother tongue and are drawn into a community of eschatological 
promise. As the word of God is received by the nations, and as the 
nations are drawn into the story of Israel’s God, “a ruptured world 
begins to grow together” (Welker 1994, 230). This dramatic action 
of the Spirit works from the eschatological future, working from 
the perspective of the fulfillment of God’s promises and intentions. 
In this way, the Spirit is both the Spirit of Jesus and God’s future. 

Such a view is compatible with broader biblical testimonies 
to the Spirit as the liberator of God’s people for service and holistic 
witness to God’s intentions for creation, who frees both God and 
creature for communion. Shared by Father and Son, the Spirit is 
the freedom of God for the reciprocal, roomy, ecstatic love that is 
the Triune God. In the memorable phrase of John V. Taylor, the 
Spirit is the “go-between God” (Taylor 1972). So also, the Spirit 
frees human persons for participation in the drama of God. We 



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become, in Christ and through the Spirit, dramatis personae in 
the story of God. Gathered as the body of Christ, we become—
by God’s Spirit—witnesses to the future of God. Liberated by the 
Spirit for participation in the life of God, the church encounters 
and contributes to the “force field” of love that is Spirit poured out 
on all flesh as a witness to the future of God and God’s creation 
(Welker 1994, 230ff). 

Thus, participation in the life of God means participation 
with the characters of the drama of God by the power of the Spirit, 
to be caught up in the “field” of the Spirit’s action (Welker 1994, 
230). The roominess of God is made manifest in the action of the 
Spirit (Jenson 1997, 25). In this way, the “event” and “conversation” 
that is God includes the creatures and historical events by which 
God has identified Godself (Jenson 1997, 222–23). Acting from 
God’s future, the Spirit liberates creation for participation in God, 
and so the identity of the Spirit is revealed in the liberation that 
makes possible the ends of God. Thus, the Spirit is “God as the 
power of his own future, God as beyond himself to be life and act, 
God as his own goal” (Jenson 1978, 54). In this way, we can see 
Jenson’s dramatis Dei personae as another way of understanding 
what is at stake in a theology of the missio Dei. As both agent and 
end of mission, the Triune God draws, frees, and invites creatures 
to participate together in God’s life and reconciling work. As dra-
matis personae in the story of God, the missional church is free in 
Christ and through the Spirit to receive and recognize its future in 
partnerships with other characters in the divine drama. 

It is here, within Jenson’s understanding of the Spirit as the 
power of God’s own future, as the liberator of God and creature 
for relationship, where fieldwork can be envisioned in terms of 
God’s mission, and where missional theology invites ethnographic 
research. For while the Spirit is God’s power to be God’s own goal, 
the drama of God that the Spirit draws to a conclusion includes 
(through the Son and in the Father) all the other dramatic char-
acters liberated and gifted for participation in the divine drama. 
Congregational participation in the Triune life, then, is necessarily 
tied up with the creativity of Spirit. As Pentecost makes clear, the 



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creational scope of the Spirit’s liberating work invites and involves 
boundary-crossing movement, and such boundary-crossing 
movement directs the disciples to recognize new implications of 
the death and resurrection of Christ. In congregational mission, 
eschatological hope finds concrete, though incomplete, form in 
the partnerships between congregation and community as it is 
animated by the Spirit of God. Free in the Spirit to listen and learn 
from one another, God, and neighbor, the congregation encounters 
a world of characters/actors and (sometimes) surprise that invites 
it to retell and revise its story as a participant in the broader drama 
of the triune God. Thus, for the liberating Spirit to free congrega-
tions for renewed missional identity, the congregation needs to be 
open to what might be genuinely new or surprising, an openness 
disciplined and practiced in ethnographic inquiry. The missionary 
nature of the church, I suggest, is not only grounded in the being 
of God but also liberated by the Spirit of God for surprise, and so 
fundamentally open to that which is Other. Where it is engaged 
with what I will call a missional sensibility, ethnographic fieldwork 
can be understood as participation in God’s “preferred and prom-
ised future” (Keifert 2007, 16). To the question—“are we missional 
yet?”—ethnographic fieldwork provides a provocative answer: 
“Have you been surprised? Have you found yourself in new places 
and with new mission partners?”4

Free for Mission: Fieldwork and Missional 
Sensibility

In recent years, a cadre of scholars from several different disci-
plines have gathered around the simple idea that ecclesiology re-
quires the study of actual congregations (Ammerman 1998; Ward 
2012; Scharen 2015; James 2018). Drawing from ethnography, 
congregational studies, and practical theology methodologies, 
these scholars articulate how it is that ethnographies of congrega-
tions do legitimate theological work. While not exclusively about 

4. Thanks to John Ogren for noticing the primacy of these questions for a 
missional sensibility.



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ecclesiology or ethnography, the two terms envision theological 
dimensions to fieldwork and a fieldwork dimension for theology; 
or, as Natalie Wigg-Stevenson has said, an “ethnographic theology” 
(2014). By considering the integration of ethnography and theo-
logical inquiry, ethnographic theologies envision body and place 
as generative and even necessary for theological construction, 
underscoring the embodied nature of theological inquiry. That is, 
ethnography helps attend to the ways in which the experience of 
the body in the world, the location of bodies in relationship to 
one another, and the basic dimensions of creaturely limitation and 
hermeneutic perspective all shape theological reflection. Drawing 
from the work of Natalie Wigg-Stevenson and Mary Fulkerson, I 
offer a missional twist on ethnographic fieldwork as a participa-
tion in the liberating work of the Spirit. No longer instrumental 
toward some missional end, fieldwork both draws the congrega-
tion into disclosive relationships and clarifies the congregation’s 
own missional possibilities. 

In Ethnographic Theology, Natalie Wigg-Stevenson draws 
from Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of habitus to suggest the body 
as a “vector” for theological knowledge. She argues that ethno-
graphic theology discloses what the body knows in relationship 
to God and world along with the narratives and sources of one’s 
theological tradition. In Bourdieu’s thought, habitus names bodily 
dispositions and perceptions sedimented in persons by nature of 
their participation in particular fields of practice. Relative to a 
cultural field, a habitus both reflects and constructs or reproduces 
practices: “In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces 
individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accor-
dance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu 1977, 
82). As a field of practice, congregations both reflect and construct 
a particular habitus, and so does the theologian. Within such a 
framework, the cycles of experience–reflection–action proposed 
by practical theology and the disciplinary distinctions observed 
in congregational studies miss the point. The knowledge and his-
tories reflected in the congregation are not exclusively practical or 
ideational, but also habitual and dispositional. The use of social 



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science interviews or participant observation, then, cannot help 
but shape our theological work, and any theological reflection we 
do inevitably reflects dispositional attributes of class, gender, race, 
education, etc. Habitus renders the disciplinary distinctions of 
both social scientist and theologian problematic.

Because it addresses inherited, structural, and embodied 
dimensions of cultural participation, Bourdieu’s theory of prac-
tice invites theology to attend to its own reflexive and embodied 
dimensions. The theologian herself inhabits a particular habitus 
in relationship to various fields of practice—church, academy, ju-
dicatory, etc.—while her theological work contributes to and par-
ticipates in various processes of cultural production, all of which 
is produced by, reflective of, constructive for the life of faith in the 
world. In its shape and outcome, the work is inevitably placed and 
“carnal” (Scharen 2015, 91–110; see also Wacquant 2005). Thus, 
Bourdieu’s habitus functions both prescriptively and descriptively 
for theology. Recognizing the inescapability of the body (one’s own 
and others) for the interpretation and production of knowledge, 
Bourdieu helps theologians attend to the communities of faith 
that shape one’s own theologizing, as well as the communities for 
whom one seeks to produce theology. 

Wigg-Stevenson builds Bourdieu’s theory into her method-
ology, developing a collaborative approach to theological con-
struction with an adult education class at First Baptist Church in 
Nashville, TN. Concerned with issues of theological agency and 
production, Wigg-Stevenson offers short lectures and introduc-
tions on significant Christian thinkers and topics—Scripture, 
Trinity, Calvin, Contextual theologies—before inviting the class to 
respond to and interact with these topics and thinkers. As an eth-
nographic theology, Wigg-Stevenson imagines herself as an “ob-
jectified participant” in theological production (Wigg-Stevenson 
2014, 59–62). She both leads and participates in the discussion, 
while also attending to (objectifying) her own choices, experience, 
dispositions, etc. She sees herself embodying a bridge between 
academic and everyday theology, and she attends to how it is that 
theologies are produced at places of disruption and difference. 



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She is not, in her own view, a detached observer of the congre-
gation, but rather one whose embodied presence and formation 
brings particular wisdom and insights into the adult education 
class, while also soliciting particular responses from the class. In 
her research, she both shares in the habitus of the congregation 
and makes it visible through reflection and conversation (Wigg-
Stevenson 2013). 

At stake is a post-Cartesian vision of theology which culti-
vates processes of attentiveness and practices of reflection before 
it worries about producing theological materials or essays. Theo-
logical reflection, in her view, attends to the body as necessary for 
theological knowledge, because human knowing is both social and 
bodily, expressed in communities of practice and sedimented as a 
habitus. It is not that essays or academic theology are unimport-
ant, just that without reflexive collaboration with communities of 
practice the theologian misses an important source of knowledge. 
She says: “Ethnographic theology, because it is conscious of the 
fact that it rises from embodied practice as much as if not more 
so than from texts, is able to see embodiment as a vector of, not 
an obstacle to, knowledge” (Wigg-Stevenson 2014, 140). The 
ethnographic theologian, that is, not only attends to bodies but 
also recognizes one’s own embodied presence and experience as 
partially constructive of theological knowledge. The “vector” of 
knowledge that is the body is thus situated through ethnography 
in a particular world of practice and interaction and memory and 
history, which—through the questions and attentiveness of the 
ethnographer—performs a particular theological understanding.5

In her approach to ethnographic theology, Wigg-Stevenson 
draws from the work of Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s work in 
Places of Redemption, which connects post-modern place theory 
and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to articulate the theological 
importance of place as a necessary element of embodiment. Place-
theory provides for Fulkerson a means of extending Bourdieu’s 

5. In this, she is working with Kathryn Tanner’s work to find a vocation 
for the academic theologian in relationship to the construction of “everyday 
theology” (see Tanner 1997).



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conception of practice to the life of a congregation. The congre-
gation, for Fulkerson, is not only an organization sustained by 
practices and rituals, but also a place: “a gathering of meanings” 
that “[endure] through practices” in the bodies, habits, social 
imagination, and artifacts of the congregation (Fulkerson 2007, 
36). Places, according to Fulkerson’s construction, both constitute 
and are constituted by the communities, narratives, and practices 
gathered there. Extending Bourdieu’s habitus, we know place as a 
dense gathering of meanings, as bodily dispositions, and a way of 
moving through the world. So also, we make places by our move-
ment, interpretations, and interaction within a locale. For theology, 
place-theory provides a robust frame for the interconnectedness 
of sociology and theology in understanding the dimensions of 
faith and a faith community. Someone located somewhere con-
structs theological knowledge; through ethnography and other 
fieldwork practices, the body and place and not only sites for such 
knowledge, but collaborators and contributors to theology (Fulk-
erson 2007, 52).

By making place and embodiment visible in her theologi-
cal work, Fulkerson challenges approaches to practical theology 
that imagine a discrete moment of theological reflection apart 
from questions of place and attentiveness to social phenomena. 
Within the rush of experience and data, theologians operate with 
a “nonfoundational sensibility” that functions in the background, 
alerting the theologian to “what deserves attention—of what is out 
of place, of what is broken and needs to be fixed, as well as of what 
is good and compels thanksgiving” (Fulkerson 2007, 14). This sen-
sibility, of course, reflects the theologian’s own cultural and theo-
logical formation, and reflective of her own habitus and sense of 
place. In Fulkerson’s own work, she identifies a dual sensibility for 
the ethnographic theology: attention to the “place of the wound” 
in communities with an interest in “the logic of transformation” 
(Fulkerson 2007, 14, 22).

Both approaches chart significant directions for theological 
inquiry beyond fact-value, mind-body, and subject-object di-
chotomies. Wigg-Stevenson’s reflexive and collaborative approach 



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to ethnographic theology begins to imagine a different role for 
the theologian in relationship to congregations. The theologian, 
in Wigg-Stevenson’s work, not only attends to the everyday life 
of faith, but invites congregations into public performances of 
theological construction. And, while Fulkerson emphasizes col-
laboration less, she draws into focus the theological dimensions 
of social science tools because of the embodied, placed nature of 
human knowing. Bodies, practices, places, and communities, in 
both proposals, are envisioned as theologically constructive. Com-
munities of practice place both theologian and community, form-
ing and informing the theologian because embodiment—and the 
dimensions of place and movement that embodiment suggests—is 
a “vector” of theological knowledge (Wigg-Stevenson 2014, 140). 
This is true for both the theologian and the community in collabo-
ration. The reflexive tools of ethnography clarify for the theologian 
her own presuppositions and “sensibility” operating in the back-
ground (Wigg-Stevenson’s “objectified participant”), sedimented 
as part of the habitus and reflective of one’s own participation in 
various communities of practice. Ethnographic practices help to 
clarify where it is that the theologian is working from. But they also 
bring the particularities of the community into the open as well. 

However, ethnography for a “worldly church” remains, in the 
end, focused on the church situated in the world rather than mis-
sional nature of the church for the world (Fulkerson 2007). Eth-
nographic theology tends to describe human experience of God 
as mediated through the practices and narratives of an ecclesial 
community. As Fulkerson suggests, the conditions for transforma-
tion are cultivated when theology makes visible the situation of a 
congregation. But one also brings to the descriptive task any num-
ber of assumptions rooted in one’s social location and theological 
interests. Fulkerson’s interest in transformation within a diversely-
abled, interracial congregation helps her articulate the place of the 
wound as situating her ethnographic theology. Following Fulker-
son, but with an interest in how the congregation can discern its 
participation in God’s mission in its context, a missional sensibility 
for fieldwork will attend to the spaces and relationships where the 



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status quo of congregational life is challenged or provoked by new 
relationships or unexpected partnerships. Drawing additional 
guidance from Wigg-Stevenson, such a sensibility will attend to 
the places of difference, disruption, and surprise. For God’s mis-
sion, as I’ve argued elsewhere, precipitates a crisis for the congre-
gation, because “the arrows in mission do not point in only one 
direction, but rather come back to shape the church sent out into 
the neighborhood” (Hagley 2019, 51–52). Echoing Fulkerson and 
Wigg-Stevenson’s insights, then, I suggest that a missional sensi-
bility in relationship to ethnography emerges from and attends to 
boundary-crossing movements of the congregation; ethnography 
becomes missional theology at the place of disruption and differ-
ence, at the intersection and interaction between congregation 
and community. 

Attending to boundary-crossing movements in relationship 
to the neighborhood and practiced by members of the congrega-
tion, a missional sensibility within fieldwork is a liberative prac-
tice which embodies possibilities for God’s future. The focus on 
boundary crossing focuses ethnographic attention on the dense 
network of relationships within which the congregation is located. 
This act of understanding and interpretation is inevitably theo-
logical, since the congregation engages fieldwork from within a 
Christian habitus, which situates attentive study and interpreta-
tion within strands of the Scriptural narrative and the broad hopes 
of Christian eschatology. Similarly, because ethnographic field-
work requires boundary-crossing movement, it can help facilitate 
a missional sensibility. The ethnographer, through participant 
observation becomes an “objectified participant” in the bound-
ary-crossing movement of church and possible neighborhood 
partners (Wigg-Stevenson 2014, 59–62). In this way, the bodies 
at the intersection between congregation and neighborhood are 
a “vector” of theological knowledge, a source of disruption and 
surprise in the missional discernment of the congregation (Wigg-
Stevenson 2014, 140).

For these reasons, approaches to missional church involve the 
congregation—and not only theologians or pastors—in various 



Scott J. Hagley—Free for Mission

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ethnographic practices. Because missional church assumes a fluid, 
dynamic, and contextual ecclesial identity, missional congrega-
tions are encouraged to pay attention to their particular context. 
Drawing from ethnographic practices, missional congregations are 
encouraged to cross boundaries and interview, observe, and learn 
from neighbors and neighborhood partners to discern missional 
vocation. They attentively cross boundaries with a missional sen-
sibility. By crossing boundaries to understand its context, persons 
in the congregation place their bodies in new places, embodying 
new theological possibilities before the congregation articulates 
or conceptualizes a missional future. Placing congregants in new 
places and with new people with a discerning posture, ethno-
graphic practice with and for a missional sensibility practices and 
points toward future possibilities for the congregation. Such atten-
tive boundary-crossing opens the congregation to new surprising 
possibilities while also embodying new possible partnerships. 

Conclusion

The question “Are we missional yet?” betrays uncertainty about 
the missional-theological nature of various processes and practic-
es designed to help congregational missional discernment. While 
ethnographic fieldwork has helped theologians attend to the 
embodied and local dimensions of theological construction, and 
while it has been utilized in helping congregations to understand 
their cultural context, the theological dimensions of its boundary-
crossing practices are not always clear. Because fieldwork with a 
missional sensibility places congregants in new settings, equipping 
them for observation, participation, and reflection, it offers a set 
of practices that can surprise the congregation, freeing it for new 
possibilities of congregational life in relationship to its concrete 
setting. Fieldwork, in the life of the congregation, participates in 
the liberating work of the Holy Spirit, preparing the congregation 
for God’s “preferred and promised future” by disciplining persons 
in the congregation to cross boundaries with open hearts and 
minds (Keifert 2006, 16). Thus, the fieldwork of the congregation 



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is not in service to a missional identity, but partially constitutive 
of that identity. It is not a means to a missional destination, but a 
ready participation in it. 

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