Studying the Kingdom of God: Consequences for Empirical Ecclesiology

Abstract

This article explores the methodological and theological implications of beginning empirical ecclesiological research not with the church, but with the Kingdom of God. Drawing on Jürgen Moltmann’s eschatological epistemology, it develops two core concepts—reversal and order—to argue that knowledge of the Kingdom arises not through detached observation but through communal, attentive participation in lived reality. Using “experiences of abundance” as an operationalisation of the Kingdom, the article examines how this shift in starting point reshapes empirical ecclesiology by emphasizing discernment as an essential methodological practice. Situated within ongoing debates on ethnographic theology and qualitative approaches, the article contends that empirical research serves as a means of being led into theological knowledge rather than producing it. It concludes that ecclesiology must have a receptive attitude and participative methodology, grounded in concrete life where the Kingdom’s reality becomes perceptible.

1. Prelude: Abundance on a Monday Morning

On a Monday morning, I was sitting around a table, together with the other volunteers—all men—of the “green team”. We take care of the plants inside and outside of a church building that is also a community center, located somewhere in the North of the Netherlands. Some members of the team were new, so we did a round of sharing our names and why we were there. I shared that I was there because of my ethnographic research and said that the topic of my research was experiences of abundance, not intending to tell much more about it. However, Tom, the person leading the team, who was also new in the team, asked me to explain what I meant by abundance.

I said that the best way to explain is by asking him a question and asked whether it was okay to ask a return question. He was okay with it, and I asked him, “Can you tell me about a moment in your life that you experienced an abundance of good things?” He thought about it, and then said, “the birth of my kids.” I said that would have been my answer also to this question. I tell them that I am interested in these kinds of experiences and how the church can be a place for that—I am doing ecclesiological research, so in the end, I am interested in what it means for the church. We talk a bit more about it, with the other men chiming in and sharing their experiences. And then Tom shares that his wife is very seriously ill. He is surprised that, despite the seriousness of the situation, they are experiencing a lot of abundance. He mentions a concert that he and his wife really enjoyed. He experiences moments like these as special, because he realises that you cannot take things for granted. “You start relating differently to time,” he says.

This experience around the table was a special moment—an open and fragile conversation on an ordinary morning, with a group of men who do not know each other especially well. For me, as a researcher, however, this kind of conversation is surprisingly common. Almost invariably, if I ask about experiences of abundance, people start telling very personal stories. And often elements of vulnerability—being sick, being in a difficult situation, experiencing loss—are central to the story.

2. Introduction

The relationship between the kingdom and the church is one of the more prominent issues in ecclesiology. Often this is described with a triad: the church is a sign, foretaste and instrument of the Kingdom (Goheen 2000, p. 33). From this follows that the identity of the church is derived from the Kingdom.

In much empirical work in ecclesiology, as researchers, we think we know what the church is and start our research there. We assume, often implicitly and performatively—in the way we do our empirical research, that the church is a solid thing we can study. But what if we do it the other way round: that we study the kingdom of God empirically and leave open the question of what the church actually is? At first, this seems like an absurd idea, but on second thought, it might not be. If the church is derived from the Kingdom, does it not make sense to start our empirical research there?

I decided to test this out in my research. In this article, I want to reflect on this way of doing research. The goal is to help further the discussions in the field of empirical ecclesiology, in particular in relation to ethnography and other empirical approaches.

My main question is:

What are the consequences for empirical ecclesiological research if you start with studying the Kingdom of God?

I use the word “studying” here with hesitation, which, in short, has to do with my understanding that the reality of what I try to give words to with “the kingdom of God” cannot be studied without the researcher being taken up in what he or she is trying to research. As a researcher, you cannot just take an objective position, as a surveyor and observer of this reality, that is so much larger and encompassing than the researcher himself or herself. I will come back to this important point later in the article, but for now, I want to just mark that I am aware of the problems with the word “study” in relation to the Kingdom of God.

I am doing ethnographic research within the field of empirical ecclesiology. I am combining theological and anthropological methods and concepts. The field of ecclesiology and qualitative methods has been under active development over the last 25 years, with lots of reflections on how empirical research and theological reflection, in particular on the church, can be combined. In this article, I will position myself in these debates. It is mostly a theoretical reflection on my approach to doing empirical research in empirical ecclesiology. This is not only helpful for my research, but also for the discussion about combining empirical research, in particular ethnography, with theological reflection.

The term “abundance” functions in my research as an operationalisation of the Kingdom of God. There are multiple reasons to do this. It is based on a reading of bible stories about the Kingdom, where abundance is a recurrent theme. See, for example, chapter 15 in the gospel of Matthew, where two stories are placed next to each other: the woman who asks to eat the “crumbs” under the table, and the feeding of the 4000 with 7 baskets of “chunks” of bread left over. You see a movement here from scarcity to abundance, which is a sign, even to Jesus, of the power of the Kingdom.

My choice of abundance is also based on theologians reflecting on what the church is (Wells 2015). Wells sees abundance as one of the defining criteria of his approach to incarnational theology, and I have always found it a helpful way of understanding what the Kingdom is in practical, day-to-day life. Moltmann also stresses the abundance of the Kingdom in its empirical reality. He calls the Kingdom of God the “transcendent, inward side” (lit. “transzendente Innenseite”, Moltmann [1992] 2001, p. 34) of every kind of human experience. For him, the Kingdom is very concrete. Living according to the Kingdom is saying “yes” to life, in which one can experience the source and spirit of life, God himself. “The experience of God deepens the experiences of life.” (Moltmann 1997, p. 89).

I also followed my intuition as a researcher in thinking that asking about experiences of abundance might open up good conversations that are helpful for my research. And indeed, that has been the case. The question “Can you tell me about a moment in your life that you experienced an abundance of good things?” leads to conversations about a quality of life that I, as a theologian, would be inclined to call “the Kingdom of God”. I normally do not name it as such, because I am not interested, in the first instance, in a conversation about religious ideas. I am foremost interested in whether, when and how people experience this quality of reality.

In summary, abundance serves as a heuristic term that is a good entrance into a conversation about this quality of reality that you could call the Kingdom of God.

Doing research like this has been inspired by two related ideas: reversal and order. The first, reversal, is based on the eschatological theology of Jürgen Moltmann, which offers a rationale for the value of empirical reality (and the study thereof) for ecclesiological thinking. The second idea, order, works out the consequences of seeing the identity of the church as derived from the Kingdom of God. There is an order here, where the Kingdom is primary and the church secondary. In light of this, it makes sense to start our empirical ecclesiological research by asking about the Kingdom of God.

Both ideas work towards a third idea, discernment, which I argue is important as a methodological practice in empirical ecclesiology. In the discussion and conclusion parts of the article, I will reflect on how my approach relates to other, similar approaches in the field.

3. Reversal and Order

3.1. Reversal

The idea of reversal is that the knowledge we look for in theology is not something that we, as objective outsiders, can grasp and get a hold of, but rather that it comes to us and speaks to us and changes us. For the empirical ecclesiological researcher, this means that attentiveness and discernment are required, rather than only objective procedures of data gathering and analysis (although these remain very important). This idea is based on Moltmann’s eschatological epistemology.

Moltmann is well known for his theology of hope. In his theology, he reverses how we usually understand the future. Instead of us making the future, the future of God breaks into our own reality. This breaking in of the future (Moltmann 1967, p. 126) changes who we are and what we do in the present, in a very practical, day-to-day sense. We do not make the future, but we live out God’s promised future in our present.

This eschatological approach is one of the core elements of Moltmann’s whole work and is fundamental to his epistemology. He wrote about his ideas of time and knowledge in his Theology of Hope (Moltmann 1967, originally published in German in 1964) and developed this thinking further during his career in several books, in particular (Moltmann [1981] 1993, [1992] 2001, 1996, 2000).

A crucial term in Moltmann’s thought is the idea of promise (Moltmann 1967, p. 148ff). This concept ties the past, present and the future. What God has promised and already shown in the past as true will be the definite reality in the future, but also already exists as reality in the present. God’s promise is the ground of hope. It consists, on the one hand, of things outstanding, and on the other hand of things that are already reality. Or in other words, you could say that the future of God, which is the Kingdom of God, is always also an aspect of this reality (Moltmann [1992] 2001, p. 34).

Concrete examples are the resurrection and creation. If we believe that Jesus is resurrected (past), we can be sure that we will be resurrected (future) and that this resurrection already (present) is part of this reality. Similarly, the very fact that we exist as created beings and that we are part of the enormously rich reality of nature is already a realisation of God’s promise. We can have a solid hope that this creation will be renewed. This renewal of creation is already at work in the present.

The task of the theologian is then to discern where the future of God is already breaking into the present and then attending to this reality. The first part of the theologian’s work is being attentive to what comes their way as the Kingdom of God. It gives Moltmann’s theology a sense of concreteness that also places a lot of value on day-to-day empirical reality as a place where God encounters us.

This attentiveness has a critical and countercultural side. Throughout his work, Moltmann criticizes modern understandings of knowledge. He already does this in Theology of Hope (Moltmann 1967, pp. 179–80) and across his other works, he keeps critiquing the epistemological, socio-political and theological foundations of modern thinking. Moltmann warns for aspects of modern epistemology that are meant to dominate and subjugate and argues that modern thinking is not value-free but is enmeshed with problematic ways of dealing with creation and with other fellow human beings. Moltmann advocates a different epistemological basis for our knowledge, which is more reciprocal. Knowing is participating in the life of the other, which transforms the knower “becoming a participator in what he receives.” (Moltmann [1981] 1993, p. 9).

In summary, the eschatological approach changes what theological knowledge is. It values the concrete reality as a site of learning to know the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom breaks into our reality. Knowledge of it is not pure, objective knowledge that we can use to grasp and dominate the world around us, but it is something that transforms us. One of the consequences of this reversal is that discernment takes a central role in the empirical research. I will go deeper into the consequences for empirical research, but first, let me explain the idea of order.

3.2. Order

I developed the idea of order previously with my colleague (Van der Meulen and Van den Berge-Bakker 2024). It is the formulation of an ecclesiological principle that is helpful in prioritising our ecclesiological research. This idea of order is not new. It is inspired by Moltmann’s reversal I just discussed.

The argument is that if the church is a sign, foretaste, and instrument of the Kingdom of God, in our ecclesiological research, we should start with the Kingdom of God. There is a clear order here. The Kingdom comes first, the church second. The church takes its identity and organisational form as a response to the Kingdom, and not the other way around.

If the identity of the church depends on it being directed to the Kingdom of God, this leads, firstly, to a flexible understanding of the church. Structures, organisations, buildings, etc. Are important but secondary to its calling. Church can then happen in ever-changing places and formations. What church is, can, in a fundamental sense, never be established beforehand. This argument also works the other way around: that what we often call “church” might in some cases not be church at all, because it does not respond to what it is called to be in the light of the Kingdom. This gives a critical perspective to our ecclesiologies.

Secondly, this approach also leads, paradoxically, to a quite empirical understanding of the church. Even though we do not know beforehand what the church is, the church, as a response to what comes its way as the Kingdom of God, is concrete and material. It is like the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 29–37), where the response to the call—a wounded person lying on the side of the road—takes material form in bandages, wine and oil, in the donkey, the money and the inn, and of course in the Samaritan himself, who is a man of flesh and blood.

This is a very short explanation of the idea of order. But what does this mean for empirical ecclesiological research?

For my own research, the choice to start with asking about experiences of abundance and only later about the church was inspired by the idea of order. The location of my research is also intentionally in a neighborhood center and not in a faith community, although the center is related to churches and I do ask the people I meet the question about how church can be a space for their experiences.

Just as with the idea of reversal, the idea of order leads to seeing discernment as an important element of ecclesiological research. Because if the church is a response to the Kingdom of God, how do we know that this particular thing that comes our way is the Kingdom of God, and that of the many paths we can choose as church, this is the one we are called to take? How do we respond to this calling? How do we organise our finances, offices, buildings, procedures in response to our calling? To answer that question, we need a practice of discernment.

While discernment is often understood as an individual, spiritual practice, in the context of the church, it becomes a communal practice. Together with different people, you have to find out what the calling of a church in this particular situation is.

For the empirical researcher in ecclesiology, discernment becomes an element in a methodological approach. Discernment in this case is firstly an attitude that should be characterised by an openness to concrete empirical reality and attentiveness to whatever comes your way (which might be the Kingdom of God). Secondly, it should have a participative dimension. Discernment takes place in conversation and reflection with others. And thirdly, discernment should have a methodological embedding in the research. It is not just whatever the researchers strikes as inspiration, but a structured and intentional feature of the research.

4. Interlude: A Participative Coding Session

In an early phase of the research, I asked two of the respondents whom I interviewed to do a participative coding session with me. I selected quotes from interviews that I had conducted and explained how coding texts works. They started coding the text, and in a conversation with them, we selected the 10 codes that they thought were the most important. I then asked them to visually map the codes on an A4 page and show the relationships between the codes. One of the most striking features of the maps was that the respondents put abundance and vulnerability very close together. The session confirmed for me that abundance was a good term to use, but also gave me a new insight that this element of vulnerability was important. The participation of the respondents was crucial for this discovery.

The session also helped me in selecting theological theories to explore further. In reading about the Kingdom of God as a theological concept, I look for theologies that make space for this vulnerability. Although there is a risk of circularity, the session confirmed to me that using Moltmann’s theology was helpful. In his understanding of the Kingdom of God, the cross of Christ and the suffering and vulnerability of God himself is central.

5. Discussion

I want to situate the ideas I developed within the wider conversations taking place in the field of empirical ecclesiology. It is impossible to cover the whole field, but key publications are Healy (2000)—an early, foundational text for the whole field—Ward (2012), Ideström et al. (2018), Watkins (2020), Ward and Tveitereid (2022) and the journals Ecclesial Practices and Ecclesial Futures. Much has been written in recent years about discernment, participative methods and the epistemological implications of using empirical approaches within theology. Yet I believe that the ideas about reversal and order, as I have been exploring them to describe the relationship between church and Kingdom of God, can deepen this discussion further. These concepts can sharpen insights that have emerged. My aim is to point toward what may already be implicit and give it clearer expression.

5.1. Discernment as a Method

Discernment has a long and rich history in Christian thought. Paul already mentions that the followers of Christ can “test and approve what God’s will is” (Rom. 12:2, NIV). The spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola form a well-known example of a practice of personal discernment. Discernment is also widely used as part of ecclesial decision-making1. It is widely recognised as a spiritual practice, a way of attending to God’s presence and God’s will. It also pops up as a part of empirical research in ecclesiology. What has been less developed is the role of discernment as part of a methodological approach. How exactly does it function? How and what do researchers actually discern in concrete situations?

Robert Doornenbal provides a helpful starting point. He describes discernment as “recognising signs of God’s salvific presence and activity” and identifying “life-giving and destructive elements” in the cultural context, or in the life of people (Doornenbal 2015, p. 6. Translation by me). This definition captures a great deal of what discernment aims at, yet it leaves open the question of how it occurs. This reflects a broader pattern: discernment is often described as a process that happens without explanation of how one arrives at the point of insight.

This is precisely why Clare Watkins’ contribution is significant. As part of her work on Theological Action Research (TAR)2, she places discernment at the heart of theological method and explicitly connects it to participative and empirical approaches. For Watkins, discernment cannot be separated from conversation. Watkins highlights the communal character of discernment. It is:

“… a communal practice, rooted in conversations between practitioners, academics, and others. […] It is in attending to these conversations that we hope to glimpse something of the Spirit’s work.”.

(Watkins 2022, p. 20)

Discernment takes shape in the interplay between lived experience, empirical data, and different theological voices. Watkins argues that for theology as a whole, “the ways of God are to be discerned in the lived realities of our world.” (Watkins 2023, p. 145). She claims that discernment is not just something for the empirically inclined but is a necessary feature of all proper theology.

Discernment, however, ultimately retains an element of mystery. Watkins acknowledges that discernment cannot be fully systematised, that it depends on moments of epiphany or disclosure that break into the research process (Watkins 2020, p. 46). These moments cannot be forced or controlled. They come unexpectedly, often through the voices and experiences of others, and require openness rather than mastery. They also invite humility: theologians must be willing to receive what they could not have anticipated.

Watkins is one voice in the much bigger debate about the relation between theology and the use of empirical research methods. A recent fruit of this debate, which devotes many pages to methodology, is The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Theology and Qualitative Research (Ward and Tveitereid 2022). While the term discernment is not always mentioned, a persistent idea in the many contributions to this edited volume is that solid empirical research is not only crucial for doing proper theology but also for discerning the Spirit, the transcendent, or God.

Swinton (2022, p. 90) expresses this clearly when he argues that revelation requires discernment and that qualitative research can help us perceive the transcendent. Empirical work becomes a way of attending to how God may be present or active within those experiences. Such an approach demands methodological care but also theological imagination.

Of particular mention in the field of empirical ecclesiology is what is called ethnographic theology3. It is theology that is inspired by the (originally) anthropological methodology of ethnography, with intense periods of fieldwork, and the use of participant observation, interviewing and other common ethnographic methods.

Ethnographic theologians argue that theology must be practiced in sustained engagement with the concrete realities of people’s lives. Ethnography offers a way of paying attention that is slow, relational, attentive to nuance and a variety of voices and perspectives. I like Bretherton’s (2022, p. 259) description of ethnography as a “disciplined way of paying attention”. As part of an empirical ecclesiological study, this approach leads to an understanding of church and world that is “fully alive.” The emphasis on embodiment in ethnography is seen as particularly helpful for theology (McClintock Fulkerson 2010; Ideström 2022; Wigg-Stevenson 2014, 2022).

The deep form of “presence” (Blankenship 2023, p. 101) that is a distinctive element of ethnography is what makes this approach so fruitful for theology. Theology is, according to authors supporting ethnographic theology, about being present as a researcher but also attending to the presence of other people and ultimately, God himself. The ethnographer becomes a witness (Lambelet and Shields 2021, p. 10) to God’s presence (or perceived absence) within the community. In doing their work, the ethnographer can also play a role in congregational discernment (Hagley 2020, p. 106; Sexton 2019).

Not everyone, however, is so convinced of the possibility of discerning God or the transcendent. McClintock-Fulkerson stresses that empirical work can only describe a “kind of sociality that indirectly testifies to a redeeming God […] More than that it can never be.” (McClintock Fulkerson 2012, p. 143). Similarly, Wigg-Stevenson argues that ethnography can contribute to “ruptures of the theological imagination” (Wigg-Stevenson 2022) or the “production of theological knowledge” (the subtitle of her work in 2014), but does not go further than that.

My own position here is that I find it generally a good idea to be cautious about invoking the transcendent (or God, or the Spirit) in empirical research. Thinking along the lines of reversal and order, the aim of discernment is not to discern God, but rather the other way round. In discernment, something happens to you first and foremost. This sounds a bit mystical, but I think it is a crucial attitude. It is important that discernment does not become another, more pious way of doing what it actually criticises, namely dominating and seizing reality, whereby the researcher is the understanding subject, and God, the Kingdom, traces of the transcendent, or what have you, become the object.

One of the reasons why I speak primarily of the Kingdom of God and not of God or the work of the Spirit is prompted by this caution. What can we actually say about God? When I speak of God, I feel like the mouse walking beside the elephant and saying, “We’re stamping our feet together quite loudly, aren’t we?” For the Kingdom of God, this is different. Jesus’ parables show that the Kingdom of God is indeed a reality that people can understand. It is part of this reality, as seeds to fall in good soil (Matt. 13:8 NIV). I therefore find it theologically and empirically more responsible, when exercising discernment, to assume that one can indeed indicate where one perceives the Kingdom of God making itself present—in experiences of abundance, or in moments when “righteousness, peace and joy” (Paul’s definition of the Kingdom in Romans 14) are present—and to be cautious in saying more.

As a researcher, it is wise to check your statements with the people you are conducting your research with. The participatory dimension of discernment is crucial here because it means you acknowledge that you are not the only expert, but that other people have at least as much to say about the reality that presents itself as you do. Your research then becomes a process of co-creation. Caution is also wise because people often only dare to indicate afterwards where they perceive the work of God. Kierkegaard’s famous dictum that life is lived forwards but understood backwards also applies to discernment. See (Van den Berge-Bakker 2023) for a methodological elaboration of this idea.

5.2. Contributing the Ideas of Reversal and Order

How can the ideas of reversal and order that I have developed contribute to this discussion? I pick up what I have said earlier about attitude, participation and methodological embedding.

Doing research in the mode of reversal requires an attitude of receptiveness. A posture that is marked by a willingness to be addressed by the world rather than to impose meaning upon it. It is a matter of trusting that when people speak about or deal with reality, they reveal something of this reality. By listening and looking carefully as a researcher, you will hear people reveal something new. The things revealed are like the treasure hidden in the field (Matt. 13:44 NIV)—something is already present but needs to be found and recognised as valuable. Theological empirical methodologies, such as ethnographic theology, should not firstly be seen as a method for gaining or producing theological or empirical knowledge, but rather—and this is the reversal—as a way of being led into knowledge. If the Kingdom of God is the first thing we have to consider, and we expect it to break into our reality, we are the first receivers of knowledge.

Empirical ecclesiology in this mode has a natural affinity with theories and methods that criticise modernist epistemologies. I already mentioned anthropology. Marti (2022) cites feminist and postcolonial theory as examples of fields from which theology can learn. I think that is particularly true for empirical ecclesiology. Liberation and feminist approaches have critically explored different ways of understanding reality, using communal and action-oriented, transformative approaches. Moltmann’s own theology was greatly influenced by liberation theology. He felt resonance with liberation theologians, but was rejected as a believable voice because of his first-world context. He then drafted his “theology for the liberation of the oppressors” (Moltmann 2000, p. 217ff).

It is worth mentioning here that Kingdom theology can easily be misused. Janel Bakker notes that the “logic of empire” (Bakker 2026, p. 118) seeps into the uses of the word. While some people suggest alternatives like “God’s dream” or “kindom”, she proposes to use the Greek original, basileia tou Theou. While I agree with her critical perspective, I would not go as far as replacing the word, but I do agree that the use of the word should be precise. The Kingdom of God, to me, is something that is first received, again with an attitude of receptiveness. I think Moltmann’s theology is a bulwark against understanding the Kingdom of God in a patriarchal or empire-like vein.

Participation is widely recognised as central for empirical ecclesiology. The researcher does not study people from a distance but becomes part of their world. Yet many contributions treat this simply as an assumption rather than a methodological commitment. Approaches that fully embrace participation, integrating it into research design and analysis, are much needed. Participation is not merely a technique but a theological stance: for discernment, it is necessary to take into account the lived experiences of normal people, and therefore the community must be involved in the process of discernment.

In the process, as a researcher, you also give back what you discover out of respect for the people you interact with and the reality you have encountered. You can offer views and ideas that may resonate and provide a new perspective on reality. That perspective can be critical and discerning; it offers something that people had not yet thought of themselves or would rather not see or hear. Empirical theological research then becomes a conversation that the researcher participates in. Or maybe a dance is a better metaphor, considering that reality is much broader than words.

With the attitude of receiving, empirical theological research becomes, by definition, a participatory and cyclical process. Many theologians are well aware that their theology arises within a community of believers. Moltmann, reflecting on the way he himself has always engaged in theology, says: “Christian theology is the joint task of the shared theologising of all believers.” (Moltmann 2000, p. xvii). The question, however, is how to give this form methodologically. Most Western theologians of the 20th and 21st centuries have used themselves as a medium to process experiences from life and to produce something theological new. In the background, all manner of processes of theological discovery are at play that are not methodologically justified. This makes our theological knowledge less rich, less contextualized and less nuanced, excluding many voices.

The methodological nature of empirical ecclesiology is seen as key to its relevance for theology. In fact, empirical ecclesiologists are convinced that theologians should engage intensively with empirical reality and that this reality also contains traces of God. The problem is that this is often methodologically unstructured and/or not precise enough. TAR is an example of a methodology that embeds discernment structurally. Ethnographic theology can be another such method, although I think that there is work to be done in the precise how of this. I see my article as a contribution to the further development of ethnographic theology.

Ethnographic theology should invite researchers to make this process of discovery explicit, to reflect on the role you as a theologising medium play, and to show how others are part of this process. Often, these experiences are embodied and situated in a particular place, offering different forms of knowledge. Of course, in the process, something is always lost. The movement from lived experience to theological formulation involves abstraction. This is unavoidable. The challenge is not to avoid abstraction but to approach it in a way that honours the reality from which it arises. I therefore see ethnographic theology as a structured form to give attention to those experiences from concrete life and to publicly account for the experiences you do take seriously and process, and which you ignore and do not make part of your theologising.

I find myself thinking of the metaphor of the poem. A good poem opens up reality to its readers. The words help people to see their own reality in a different light. A good poem only comes into being through an intensive engagement with reality. A similar thing might be true of ethnography. The stories you tell and the images you show resonate with the reader if, as the ethnographer, you have truly received, seen, shared and loved this reality.

6. Conclusions

What, then, are the consequences for research if we as theologians begin our empirical studies with the Kingdom of God?

As suggested earlier, the Kingdom cannot be “studied” in any straightforward sense. The problem is not that the Kingdom is unreal but that it is so real that we cannot approach it from a position of objectivity. We are not outsiders, having an epistemological special place where we can judge what we see, put our thinking hats on, and give our final opinions about a reality that is outside us and can be grasped by us. It is more helpful to see us as participants and fellows in knowing. The Kingdom comes toward us; it addresses us. In responding, we are drawn into its reality and transformed.

This reversal and order are important for the way research is done in ecclesiology. People who want to study the church empirically, and want to do this from the perspective that the church is first and foremost dependent on the Kingdom of God, need to adjust their methodology accordingly. Questions arise, such as: how does one attend to the reality that approaches us humans in a proper, methodologically sound way? How are others involved in this research process? How does it influence the theories that are used?

Discernment becomes essential. It calls us researchers to openness—to moments of disclosure that interrupt our expectations. Openness to moments of epiphany is not some annoying feature of methodology, but rather the point of the whole enterprise. Being a good theologian is paying attention to what breaks into your reality, what you had not expected yet and what you could not have discovered just on your own. Moltmann’s work reinforces this: the future of God breaks into our lives, and we are invited to receive and discern its presence.

In this context, knowledge becomes less about conceptual mastery and more about formation. We learn what love, hope, and faith are by practising them. We also learn by listening to those who embody them. Empirical research provides a way to listen carefully to such people.

Participation becomes a central dimension of this process. Theology cannot be done in isolation. It should be conducted with communities rather than about them. Empirical research makes theology more transparent, requiring us to disclose our methodological choices and to acknowledge the voices that shape our work.

Empirical research, especially ethnography, grounds theology in daily life. It connects theological reflection with the lived experiences of people who seek to live life abundantly. It helps theologians engage in the shared human search for meaning, purpose, and flourishing. Asking about experiences of abundance opens conversations about love, fear, vulnerability, and faith. These conversations draw attention away from institutional concerns and toward the embodied realities that shape what it means to be church.

The church becomes a space where a different kind of life can be experienced—a life of abundance received as a gift. Theology becomes a practice of paying attention to this abundance, of living in anticipation of God’s promised future. It is not first about knowledge of concepts but about faithful living.

In this light, empirical research becomes indispensable for theology. It offers a methodologically thoughtful way of engaging with reality. Yet this research should reflect the ideas of reversal and order: it must be marked by anticipation, discernment, receptivity and attentiveness, and should be done together with a variety of people and maybe even with the rest of creation. Done in this way, empirical ecclesiology becomes a shared quest to recognise and receive the Kingdom that comes toward us and to find ways as a church to respond to this calling.

7. Postlude: Celebrating in the Sun

Even in the most difficult circumstances, people can experience profound moments of abundance. In an interview, I asked a respondent to share a moment in her life in which she had experienced an abundance of good things. She told me the story of how she and her husband left the hospital during his cancer treatment. They had finally received good news, and they ‘skipped like children’ out of the building. They sat down at a sunny café terrace and felt as though everyone else there was celebrating with them.

Two things stand out for me in this story. First of all, the experience of abundance happens in the context of great vulnerability. Secondly, how concretely and materially the experience was told. They were skipping, and the sun was shining. This story and the other ones I heard teach me that if I, as a theologian, want to use the concept “Kingdom of God,” I need to take this vulnerability, materiality and concreteness into account. These stories change how I do my theologising.