I needed resilience just to study resilience!

The journey just to get to my dissertation project was immense. Without going back through all the trials of getting into the graduate program, negotiating three years of coursework, and passing my comprehensive exams, I will simply begin where this project initiated. For those not accustomed to the steps required in academia, my project proposal alone was 42 pages with 110 references. After writing that proposal, I had to defend my idea of the project before my committee of five highly regarded professors. It was no simple task. I had to convince them to allow me to do this amazing project. Let me tell you about it.

I study resilience. By definition, resilience is simply the ability to bounce back from adversity. I feel a deep personal connection to the subject because I have had to learn resilience in my own life and it excites me to see it in other people, organizations, and communities. With my specific field being communication, I examine resilience by analyzing how people communicate their strength to themselves and others around them. One of my favorite ways people showcase resilience is through stories. Nothing gets me excited more than a great story. And my favorite story format is film.

What really gets me pumped is stories of overcoming adversity through faith. I can't help it. I just like the church as an organization. There's something humble and yet powerful about people coming together to act out their faith, especially during times of crisis. I find great value in the church as an integral institution within communities. The trouble is that over the last few decades the church overall has been dying. That's not a generalization or overstatement. Here is just one quick article about US churches on the decline. Believe me I have tons more data and I get it from the top people who study that exact phenomenon. I'll go into those specifics later in this project. Yes, there are churches that are thriving but they are mostly megachurches. For the average medium to small church in the United States, times are dire and only getting worse. That concerns me.

Sometimes it helps to get a different perspective by stepping outside the box to take a look at something similar yet different. With that in mind, I thought it would be amazing to examine a church outside the United States that has been resilient. There are already studies on thriving churches in our country. I wanted to take a look at a church that overcame adversity through the lens of another culture. Perhaps no other church is more resilient than the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It is the oldest church building in the world with the longest running community of worshipers in history. And they have been through centuries of adversity. Wars, terrorism, earthquakes, pandemics, economic strife, boundary disputes, theft, fires, and more. Yet the building and the congregation still stand. To me, that's pretty compelling and their story has not been told.

So, I proposed going to Bethlehem to study the church and its people. I will dig into archival texts, record interviews, and make ethnographic observations all for the purpose of producing a documentary film as the major portion of my dissertation. After a healthy discussion, the five professors on my committee approved my proposal. But that was only the beginning of the journey.

While I have been to several international locations, I have not been to Israel or Palestine where Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity are located. You need to know that technically, the United States and Israel do not recognize Palestine as a country. I use the name designation so you understand where my field research is located and the gravity of this project. Just the controversy surrounding the name of the territory where I'm going is difficult to understand. But that in itself is what makes it interesting. This is not an easy place to get to and not a simple study. Since I had not been there, I did not know anyone. Yet to set the project in motion, I needed to make connections so that my university would allow me to go. While I enjoy just figuring things out as I go and stepping out on faith, Texas A&M appropriately required me to lock down at least one contact that would vouch for me while I was there. After reaching out by email over the course of several weeks, I linked up with a professor from Bethlehem University and a Bethlehem parish priest who for some reason agreed to support a goofy guy from Texas who wanted to visit them and make a film. I ended up with two incredible contacts that believed in what I wanted to do. Surprisingly, that was the easy part.

Next I had to get my project through IRB or the Institutional Review Board. Put in place to prevent researchers from harming humans, the IRB process can be extremely challenging to negotiate. It's only natural that a university wants to protect the researcher, the subjects of study, and the university itself so it makes sense. But imagine proposing a study about going into a foreign country that's not even recognized as a country to record people on video and make those recordings public on social media and through a film. The process took weeks and I was grateful to finally get through the various meetings and seemingly endless paperwork.

Then I had to get through the Education Abroad office so they could make sure I knew what I was doing as an international traveler and that the situation was safe. I spent a few weeks meeting with them and explaining what I planned to do and contacts I had lined up. Then Israel broke into riots due to political turmoil and at the same time began to receive rocket fire from several adjacent countries. My project was put on hold until things cooled back down. But that's the way things are in the region. It's a dynamic location that is always in motion. This is exactly why this study is so important. After waiting it out for a few weeks, I was cleared for international travel by that department.

Since I was awarded grants to fund my project through the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University for this project, I am able to actually go and do this field work. But once again, I would need to get through the approval process to actually use the money that the university already agreed to give me. It was an arduous process that took another month of waiting, emailing, zoom meetings, calling, and praying. The request to use the money that the university already gave me took me through eight different people. I met with the offices of Risk Management, Export Controls, and was routed back to the Education Abroad office again where the meetings and waiting started all over. I had to showcase my background in traveling to international locations where safety was a huge factor and explain how I minimized the risk through experience and keeping up with the facts as they occurred in real time. Finally just last week, I was approved. I had the funds and I was completely green lit with everything I needed from the university.

The one serious question I was asked over the course of the entire process that I found funny was by one of the university administrators interviewing me. They seemed genuinely interested and supportive of this project so they asked me, "Why don't more people do projects like this?" I kindly and humbly suggested that it might be because every single step to gain approval took weeks. Sure, one office might not consider taking a few weeks to make a decision a big deal. But then consider how many offices I needed to get approval from.

I should write a story just about the process of getting approval to do this project and go. That alone took six months. Yes, I had to dig down deep to find resilience just to get ready to make this film. And now the exciting part is about to begin. But, that is not what this project is about. At the end of the day, this is just the start. Big things are coming from here.

I'd love it if you supported this project just by following along. I plan to upload pictures, video samples, and blog posts over the course of my field work. My goal is to tell the story of resilience at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem through film as a tool to encourage other churches and other organizations to do the same. Sure, the culture is different and perhaps not every strategy will translate. But maybe what I've learned most during my graduate studies is that by listening to other people and other cultures, we just might learn something significant about ourselves.

Andrew Christjoy

@andrewchristjoy

www.andrewchristjoy.com