Organizing Spirit: Pneumatology, Institutions, and Global Imagination

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Jamie Pitts challenges readers to participate in the work of the Holy Spirit by taking the risk of getting involved in the work of global institutions.

Contemporary theologians tend to associate the Holy Spirit with the formation of local communities, social movements, and fluid relational networksand not with institutions such as denominations or global church bodies.

In this considered work, Jamie Pitts argues that contemporary theology misses important aspects of the Spirits work. Some theologians tend to associate the Holy Spirit with the formation of local communities, social movements, and fluid relational network rather than key institutions such as denominations or global church bodies. To counter this, Pitts draws on a wide range of theological and theoretical resources to depict the Spirit as organizing the complex, dynamic, and relationally entangled structures that constitute creation.

Human organizing that seeks to participate in the Spirit can take a variety of analogous structural forms, including formal organizations or institutions. Organizational participation in the Spirit is not a function of an organizations scale, mobility, or relative informality, but rather of its practical orientation toward the Spirits goals of life, solidarity, healing, and inclusive justice. A series of case studies clarifies and extends the implications of the argument in connection to organizing for environmental, gender, sexual, and racial justice. In the final chapter, Pitts addresses the role of a political theology of the organizing Spirit in imagining organizational alternatives to the global neoliberal order.

Author Bio

Jamie Pitts is Professor of Anabaptist Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Seminary, USA. He is also Director of the Institute of Mennonite Studies, and Editor of Anabaptist Witness.