본 논문은 지역사회에 공헌하는 신앙공동체로서의 지역교회들을 사례 연구함으로 그들로부터 얻은 선교적 통찰을 정리하고, 지역사회와 긴밀히 소통하며 지역사회의 필요에 성실하게 응답하는 교회들이 선교 적 교회가 추구하는 핵심 가치들을 공유하고 있음을 밝히고자 한다. 본 연구를 통해 얻은 선교적 통찰은 다음과 같다: 지역사회에 공헌하는 기독교 신앙공동체는 1) 지역사회를 선교지로 여긴다; 2) 지역사회에 임하는 하나님의 통치를 추구한다; 3) 지역사회의 필요에 총체적으로 응답한다; 4) 교회의 담을 넘어 지역사회 전체를 품는다; 5) 지역사회의 공공성을 추구한다; 6) 지역단체들과 적극 협력한다; 7) 평신도를 중요한 선교 파트너로 여긴다. 이러한 통찰은 오늘 지역사회와 단절된 채 더욱 게토(ghetto)화 되어가는 한국교회에 새로운 갱신의 길을 제시할 것이다. 지역사회와 함께하며 지역사회의 다양한 필요에 응답하 는 교회들이 많아질수록 한국교회의 대 사회적 신뢰도는 높아질 것이고, 한국 사회가 협력, 조화, 나눔, 상생의 바람직한 방향으로 나아가도 록 더 크게 공헌할 수 있을 것이다.

본 연구는 기독교 대학 신입생들의 주관적 행복감에 지각된 스트레스, 신앙성숙도가 어떤 효과를 나타내는가를 파악하기 위해 시도되었다. 서술적 조사연구로, 2018년 4월에 조사된 신입생 232명의 자가보고 설문 자료를 SPSS 프로그램을 이용하여 분석하였다. 주요 연구결과로 주관적 행복감에 영향을 주는 요인은 삶의 만족도, 지각된 스트레스, 동료지지, 가족지지, 신앙성숙도 순으로 나타났고, 이들의 설명력은 70.3%이었다. 따라서 대학에서는 스트레스 감소 및 사회적 지지체계 구축을 위한 노력과 신앙성숙을 위한 다양한 교육적 접근을 시도해야 할 것이다.

T. S. Eliot was raised and educated under the influence of his Unitarian parents and family. Thanks to William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder who is Washington University in St. Louis and the Church of the Messiah, which is the first Unitarian church, Eliot’s father and mother practised and inculcated the family religion to T. S. Eliot. His mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot, was a writer and a reformer and committed to father-in-law’s decrees. But Eliot criticized radicalism of Christianity―it made it too tepid, too liberal, too much like the enlightened Unitarianism of his family. Eliot also worried about the Church as an institution. Eliot’s denounced empty idolatry of forms with the reforming zeal that his forebears had. Eliot took up a position opposite to the humanitarian attitude of his mother and grandfather, the faith that one tries to approach God through human effort. Everytime he went back during these undergraduate years to join in his family’s Sunday’s worship, he found it an increasingly stifling ritual. Eliot suffered religious experiences “as though traversing the Boston street were like wading through time” in undergraduate years at Harvard which are described in his Four Quartets. Eliot divorced his wife through his attorney in spite of her refusal to recognize a divorce. Eliot repented his wrongdoing due to the consciousness of guilty to her and marriage life since his former wife died lonely in mental hospital. During the rest of his life he suffered from his deeds, for which he was possessed of the consciousness of guilty and sin to his dead wife. The sense of damnation, the remorse and guilt that Vivienne evoked were essential to Eliot’s long purgatorial journey that continued long after his formal conversion and their separation six years later. He could escape from her, morally, only by embracing the ascetic Way of the Catholic mystics. In “Little Gidding” of Four Quartets written during in remorse and the sense of guilt due to the debt to Vivienne, we can find the opposite meanings that are both the fire of bomb implying the death of desire and the fire of Christ implying the love of Spirit. Eliot showed a sense of sin through the protagonists of his later poetic plays. In his poetic plays, Eliot sought human love, which was the fruit of blessings of his second marriage free from guilty consciousness after revealing his sin to his family.

The baptism and confirmation in June 1927 is surely the most important event in Eliot’s life. To think first and most of the “supernatural order” became the prime principle of his new life and thought. It is an indispensable task, therefore, for Eliot scholars to assess why he decided to join the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholic wing, and what sort of effect his belief exerted upon his literary works. In this paper I intend to do two things: firstly, to present a thesis how Eliot came to espouse Anglo-Catholicism; I will look into the influence of the Oxford Movement, the solidification of his faith manifested in his vehement attack on the scheme for the Church Union in South India, and his freeing himself from the prejudices against Roman Catholicism that he encountered at first hand in St. Louis, Boston, and London. Catholicism was fixed with the image of unintellectual Irish immigrants, and totally alien to the English Protestant identity. He chose the Established, and national, Church of England because he believed it was “the Catholic Church in England”, and in his adopted country, Roman Catholic Church was only “a sect”. Secondly, I consider the “limits” of Eliot’s Christian faith. So far, the problem of his faith has not been fully addressed. It looms large, however, in a postcolonial context. The claim I should like to make is that the world of Eliot’s Christianity is closed to the ‘other’ worlds. This I discuss looking into the world of The Cocktail Party. Set in a post-Vatican II context, Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism looks very restricted.