Lignificación ectópica

Kris joined the Indiana Wesleyan University community as a baseball player. He had initially received a sports scholarship at a different Christian university; however, the

baseball coach whom he greatly admired transferred to coach at IWU. Kris decided to follow him to Indiana Wesleyan University and play on this team in order to be able to learn under this coach. Kris spoke of the sport, his team members, and playing with integrity throughout all four interviews. In each interview, he was dressed comfortably and wore a cross necklace.

Based on Kris’ testimony narrative, I initially identified him as an insider of the IWU community of practice: he included all five moves in his testimony (reviewed in Figure 7.1), demonstrating his competence with the genre as well as articulating his commitment to his personal relationship with Jesus and the practices involved in developing that relationship. Figure 7.1 Testimony moves

Since I had asked about his church background prior to the question that typically signaled a request for one’s testimony, Kris did not repeat Move 1; however, he had shared previously that he grew up in a Christian home, attending an Evangelical Free church (#1, line 2). Kris aligned with the typically young conversion in Move 2 when he reported how he “prayed the prayer” at the age of 5 (#1, line 12). Within the same line, though, he went to Move 3: “…but praying the prayer doesn’t make you a Christian” (#1, line 12). He then mentioned how he “really made it personal” (#1, line 18) at a “Dare to Share conference” (#1, line 14) when he was 14 – a clear Move 4 in his testimony narrative. He reiterated this by adding, “I believe that 14 was really the time that God turned my life around” (#1, line 20). He went on to Move 5 in the next line: “As I continue to grow even this year, I’m noticing changes that are focusing my life more towards Christ” (#1, line 22). Without any prompting, Kris

acknowledged his own change in attitude about his faith, which identified him as wanting to further his relationship with Jesus and thus placed him soundly in the insider trajectory of the IWU community of practice.

In addition to the testimony moves, Kris talked about God frequently throughout the four interviews and followed the observed pattern of activating and passivating God

according to topics. While he did not address all thirteen of the topics I identified in Chapter 5, he talked about God regarding ten of those topics, and the way in which he did this aligned with the common practices among the other participants for the categories of majority

passivated and majority activated categories. Table 7.1 demonstrates this alignment with these majority categories. In nearly all of the categories for talking about God, Kris aligned with participants as a whole in terms of when he passivated or activated God. The only place where Kris deviated from the results of the whole group was with regard to the near-even split with the category of Identity. While the full data set included forty-six activated and forty-three passivated references to God, Kris activated God only three times but passivated

God eight times. The majority of the references in which he spoke about his identity relating to God included phrases like “man of God” (#2, line 322), “disciple of Christ” (#3, lines 5 & 83), and “image of God” (#4, lines 12 & 22). While the full data set included a near-even split, the slight majority of references activated God as the agent behind this identity as he articulated his own identity that involved becoming more like Christ.

Table 7.1 Alignment of Kris' passivation and activation patterns to all participants

Majority Passivated Majority Activated Split

Category Group Kris Category Group Kris Category Kris

Relationship 350 40 Plan 175 10 Communication

101P/98A 9P/2A Attribute 83 8 Action 114 5

Topic 90 2 Presence 25 NA

_Identity

43P/46A 8P/3A Conversion 23 2 Blessing 14 2 Belief 8 NA God’s opinion 13 1 Surrender 6 NA

Overall, Kris established his obvious ease with talking about God across a range of topics; and though he did not have the distinction of having the most God references out of the participants, he had the third highest number. Moreover, he demonstrated his competency with the practices of when to activate and passivate God as they aligned with the dominant pattern amongst the participants whom I positioned as insiders. As I mentioned above, he passivated God forty times regarding the topic of Relationship. This particular category included the highest frequency of God references, totaling 28% of the 1,259 references to God and demonstrating its importance to the community. Of all the participants, Kris talked about his relationship with God the most and passivated each of those references. Thus, Kris aligned with the community’s focus on relationships – in this case with God – and he tapped into the community practice of using metaphors to further discuss relationship issues.

As I discussed in Chapter 6, many of the participants used metaphors to describe their relationships. I grouped these metaphors into ten semantic fields based on their meaning and usage, with an additional miscellaneous grouping of metaphors used by a handful of the

participants. Kris used metaphors from all ten of the semantic fields, ordered here by his frequency of usage: agriculture (29 instances), stability (11), conflict (9), network (8), water (7), atmosphere (5), journey (3), depth (2), construction (1), and heart (1).

Throughout the interviews, he continued to talk about the importance of relationships in his life. For example, when I asked him in the first interview about his favorite aspects of the university thus far, he replied, “The community [at his residence hall], and I’ve really enjoyed that” (#1, line 157). He further explained,

“There are 5 or 6 guys…that I’ve been able to intentionally grow with / and be

vulnerable and connect with. / … so it helps to have guys –strong men of the Lord / to come alongside with and talk with.” (Kris, #1, lines 159, 161, 175, & 177)

Kris used metaphors from the domains of agriculture, network, and stability to describe his excitement about having relationships with other men. For Kris, connecting with strong Christian young men helped him grow or further develop his relationships with them as well as with God. He also drew from the water metaphors to explain a method of rejuvenation: “When I’m feeling low or weak like I need energy, I’ll go to Scripture and feel like I can be filled with that” (#3, line 127). But it did not stop with simply being filled. In the final interview, he connected the metaphors of being filled and pouring out when he said, “I said I’d been being filled a lot, but I want to pour out…being intentional with doing, I guess, pouring out” (#4, line 64). The implied object of this was other people, especially since he frequently mentioned his appreciation for the community of people around him.

Finally, Kris specified people and practices in the community that influenced the “slow increase of [his] faith” over the year (#3, line 133); these practices contributed to the overall environment at IWU: “friends that are strong in their faith,” learning in his ministry classes, and “just things around campus that have been really good, like the baseball Bible study, chapel, Summit – all those things help to increase my faith” (#3, line 133). In this way,

Kris experienced the kind of social and spiritual support Bryant (2005) discussed in her study about a Christian campus organization, but Kris expanded the nature of this support to

include elements such as chapel and academic classes. Even though he acknowledged being “blessed by a year of a long mountaintop5_{” (#4, line 14) in the final interview, he had also}

recognized in the previous interview, “What will happen is we’ll be on mountaintops and we’ll know there’s a valley coming to test us in trials” (#3, line 137). In this way, he merged the atmospheremetaphors with conflict metaphors. He even went on to mention Job, the Biblical character equated with great suffering (#3, line 139). Despite his positive attitude about his own experiences, he recognized how the environment around him had the power to shape those in the community – and not always for the better: “One negative aspect could be the bubble /… If we’re so focused on ourselves, then we don’t reach out to others past the bubble” (#3, lines 141 & 143).

Thus, Kris demonstrated his insider status through the ways in which he drew from the linguistic repertoire of the IWU community. Through his testimony with all five moves, the patterns of how he talked about God, and the use of metaphors to describe relationships, Kris participated fully with the IWU community of practice and identified as belonging within the community.

5 _{I included mountaintop and valley in the atmospheremetaphors because of the way they} functioned in the context of the interviews and the way they are typically used in the Evangelical community, as Kris used them here. He was the only one who included them, and he used mountaintop to imply a clear (high altitude), positive atmosphere for growth and valley to indicate a dark (low altitude), negative atmosphere that brings hardship (integrated with the conflict metaphors in line 137 of the third interview).