How faith finds its anchor’s hold. Pastors’ information searching behaviour in the spiritual service

This Master’s thesis concerns the information behaviour of pastors in nonconformist churches (especially new evangelical and Baptist church communions) in Sweden in their spiritual service to the local parish. The thesis also looks into how the information flow functions in the pastors’ context and why the information need appears as it does. The theory used in this study is contextual analysis based on Buckland’s, Weber’s and Patrick Wilson’s theories on authority and power structures. Interviews with open-question approach were conducted with 6 pastors. Analysis showed that the pastors use different sources in their effort to intermediate information to their congregation. The most common source is literature, i.e. the Bible or other Christian literature and reference books. The pastors express the importance of meditation and prayer to access divine information, as well as the influence of important cognitive authorities. What the pastors lack is a clear view on how sermons are received, but most importantly a way of accessing information through sources they are unfamiliar with. They tend to walk the same information path as they have before. I propose that national church communions work together in establishing means for pastors to access said information. The literary circulation within the Christian church appears to be strong in the way that they hardly use any non-Christian resources and that the pastors in high regard use the same literature that other pastors do. There is also a need to further study how information flows within the small congregation as well as to study meditative and spiritual information search.Uppsatsnivå: