In 1989 I completed my University of Hull Ph.D called New Denominationalism: Tendencies Towards a New Reformation of English Christianity. Completed using an Amstrad PCW it was converted afterwards to be more like a readable book and less like a thesis. Nothing came of it and this electronic version has since been lost. However, Ph.D theses were digitised and now a picture and text OCR version exists. So, after a gap from 1998 when this website was begun until May 2016, the Ph.D now exists again.

The Church/ denomination/sect continuum is used as a theoretical device to understand organised religion but it fails to give an adequate picture of the mainstream Church today. In this thesis a new scheme is searched for as a means to analyse current mainstream change. Using in particular previous research, academic and non-academic theological literature, interviews with three ministers and participant observation in an Anglican church and a Methodist church, an alternative continuum is suggested consisting of conversionist, traditionalist, orthodox liberal and heterodox liberal belief typologies matching charismatic, traditional, bureaucratic and systemic authority typologies respectively. Such typologies may be usable in other religious and non-religious organisations and the substitute titles militants, traditionalists, norm managers and critics are suggested. There is a focus particularly on the problem of both liberalisms in the mainstream (concerning exclusion from the churches and their involvement in higher education and the leadership) and in independent alternatives where heterodox liberalism has its own human relations authority system. Therefore ecumenism between the existing institutional denominations has been accompanied within them by increasing divisions on the basis of these belief and authority types. Conversionist Anglicans, for example, have more in common with conversionist Methodists than they have with, for example, orthodox liberal Anglicans. This reintroduces - but in a new way - the old Church/ sect dichotomy as a broad Church/ independency dilemma, in that the tendencies within the mainstream Churches must now consider whether to become structurally independent themselves. The thesis itself is organised to give rapid access to particular arguments and the Appendix of the discussions with the three ministers shows dramatically the differences within the so-called mainstream today.

In 1995, Contemporary Mainstream Religion, was published by Avebury, edited by Peter G. Forster, and I had a chapter in it based on the participant observation in my Ph.D research. Click on the academic woman to read it as a web page. Use select, copy and paste to another application to save it later.

Another use of the Ph.D was towards a syllabus in the Sociology of Religion at University of Hull Centre for Lifelong Learning. In 1997 and 1998 the syllabus was accepted but there were insufficient student numbers each time to run the course.

Since my Ph.D on mainstream churches, I completed an MA more focussed upon the problem of liberalism and religion, and taking as a study the consequences of the most extreme form of liberalism - pluralism and individualism without limits. For this I built an idealised model of Unitarian Universalism and compared this with real situations. Completed in 1998, the dissertation is marked and I have my MA. It is called Plurality in Proximity: The Gospel of Unitarian Universalism for Contemporary Culture.

When Ernst Troeltsch created the typology of Mysticism he was then thinking of individualism and voluntarism as a Christian category incorporating the Reformation, the Renaissance and modernity. A form of faith and organisation that meets this typology well is creedless Unitarian Universalism. Its highly diverse plurality in proximity suggests a social gospel for how the world might incorporate difference. This study observes how four broad belief types or general narratives have formed in contemporary Unitarian Universalism on both sides of the Atlantic. These are liberal Christianity, religious Humanism, neo-Paganism and Eastern faith. There is also pluralism. Each divides on the basis of loyalty to the narrative or the denomination. One debate is whether they can give rise to a "metatheology" or if this is excluded. Another question is how successfully Unitarian Universalism promotes plurality. Much theology applies itself to plurality but assumes Christian content. The nature of Unitarian Universalism demands that Christianity cannot be so privileged. This requires the methodology of both drawing on relevant approaches to theology and then applying them in an extended and perhaps unusual manner. Sociology of religion helps. A sub-theme throughout is whether, in a post-Christian culture, Christian theology is for the seminary alone and whether a broader basis of theology is possible.

In 1996-1997 I gave a three-part lecture to the MA Theological Understanding of Contemporary Society class in its sociology section based on this thesis (despite also being a student of the course!). You can read this PDF lecture. Click on the altar table for it. Incidentally, the file is called triangle.pdf after the mainstream triangle, offered as a summary shape of contemporary main denominations.

I wanted to write in the manner of my Ph.D relating to the Unitarian Church. I did this as an experiment and a suggestion of extra research within the MA course. This and aspects of the disertation became a talk to the Hull and District Theological Society on 2nd December 1998. It is called The Hull Unitarian Church: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, although it has a wider application and only set the Hull church within a context of Unitarian history, theology and pluralism and general sharp decline. In my view the nineteenth century leader James Martineau established the never resolved liberal contradiction between the language of theism and the higher authority of the individual in a setting of creedlessness, the former being objective and the latter subjective. Postmodernism does make creedlessness and supreme and logical in its terms through the pursuit of "difference".

The Hull Unitarian Church: historical and sociological perspectives
by Adrian Worsfold

There are no agreed definitions to Unitarian terms and individualism is eclipsed by congregationalism. There is only history and sociology as a moving escalator of ongoing theologies. Diversity can generate a positive experience of plurality in proximity within its walls and offer this as a gospel of toleration to a fractured world. However, the experience within is often itself localised and fractured, with wrongheaded desires for local informal consensus; and it has left the Church as a whole lacking direction.

Banner - "Hull Unitarians Established 1672". It's misleading. The founders would have been horrified about the kind of liberal faith that later developed. These trinitarian Calvinists opposed Socinianism. They qualified even the desire for liberty to worship in Hull's Trust Deed of 1689 because includes the hope that they could be returned into the Church of England.

Mercantilist trustees whose method of church self-government reflected the gilds own governing system and the architecture of the new chapel in 1693 for the united congregation suggested their status, being in the style of the London Merchants' Halls. They were socially corrective and charitable in basic welfare and education.

New Arminian ideas had no effect on the Trinity one way or another. Dissenters met at Salters Hall London against Arianism but Presbyterians still maintained non-subscription and left naked to further change. They had no Presbyteries to maintain discipline, members only had to rent pews and attend. Trustees concentrated on buildings and appointing the minister who did what he was good at. Middle class sects moderate into denominations.

Presbyterians did not participate in the eighteenth century evangelical revival but were saved by new broom of doctrinal unitarianism promoting a literalist reading of miracles and the bible as history. The absence of a biblical Trinity was for Unitarians the essence of denominational self-identity. The denomination was split.

William Severn was the first Hull self-confessed unitarian minister (1806 – 1813). Three Unitarian Baptist churches in Hull became only one around 1840 and probably merged into Bowl Alley Lane. Ministers had connections to Priestley, Martineau, and Hull swayed between the wings of the denomination.

The Hull Unitarians up to 1832 petitioned parliament for their own and other's liberties to undermine the old political regime.

In the 1840's court cases took away trust funds until Parliament saved the denomination and boosted the Free Christian side. When in 1865 Samuel Bache tried to fix unitarian beliefs nationally, he failed, unlike in America where there was a split and humanism and ecological transcendentalism gained definition in the West.

Martineau believed that belief in the biblical narrative itself was a blockage to the ultimate theology of pure theism and this horrified the denominationalists. Martineau also said the individual conscience must be the final arbiter in matters of belief. Objective theism thus was set against a superior radical subjective individualism. Unitarianism has never settled this contradiction to this day.

Thus was produced multi-faith implications (which he rejected). Secularists met Unitarians including Hull minister James Dixon (1866-83), bringing a change to the Hull church as big as William Severn's

Unitarians reached out to the working class but not within it due to its class identity.

Lofty subjects and broader humanist tendencies arrived in sermons.

All churches marginalised after WW1 - and Unitarians were increasingly isolated too, including Hull. A more multi-faith direction happened. A recent pluralist experience was arguably superseded by a quite deep gender conservatism. The family church model does not work as in America, but Britain can take American's sense of radical plural identity for an interested religious minority. Unitarian "difference" cannot be a comfortable religion.

The talk is in full as a web page. Use select, copy and paste to another application to save it later. Click on the UUA chalice.

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