We heartily congratulate Tim Bradshaw, one of our sponsored doctoral students, on completing his PhD project. It’s a huge achievement and a fascinating interdisciplinary topic.
The title of his dissertation is: A Search for Transformational Stories: A Multi-disciplinary Investigation of the Parables of Jesus and their Significance for Culture Change for Mission in Local Methodist Churches
His abstract follows:
This research explores a possible basis for developing stories for organisational culture change facilitation within the life of Methodist local churches and Circuits. These stories, which will be referred to as ‘Transformational Stories’, need to be able to open people’s minds to possibilities beyond their current experiences and enable them to grasp new and challenging ways of being the church. It focuses on the parables of Jesus in the belief that these parables were used in a similar way to that which the Transformational Stories need to work. I will seek to discover a format to identify a consistent set of features associated with the way they function.
The research forms a conversation between several different academic disciplines, primarily: cognitive science, narrative research, neuroscience, New Testament studies, practical theology, and systematic theology. It contains a brief consideration of the historical understanding of the parables of Jesus, metaphor (historical and modern understanding), transportation into narrative (the way that a person is drawn into a story), stickability (the way that the parables stick in one’s memory), and the concept of mind-block. The neuroscientific literature, cited in this research, shows that the ‘Novelty Effect’, alters the way the brain remembers.
My research has applied the ‘Novelty Effect’ leading to a new understanding of the role of the unexpected, sometimes shocking ‘twist’ that is arguably present in the parables. This analysis opens the possibility of creating Transformational Stories, based on the format of the parables, that can be used to open people’s minds to possibilities beyond their current experience, to combat mind-block, remember the main point of the story, and grasp new and challenging ways of being church.