Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Intercultural Studies
College
Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary
Program
Doctor of Missiology DMiss
First Advisor
Lester Merklin
Second Advisor
Petr Činčala
Third Advisor
Patrick Krayer
Abstract
Problem
Discipleship among Bengali Sufi–folk Muslims has often been interpreted through outsider analytical lenses that privilege doctrinal classification, institutional affiliation, and decision-centered models of conversion. Much scholarship on Islam has focused primarily on textual and juridical traditions, while comparatively neglecting the lived realities of folk Islam shaped by spirit cosmologies, honor dynamics, and everyday moral practice. As a result, the religious worlds within which many Bengali Muslims interpret experience remain underexamined. Within mission studies, similar tendencies persist, evaluating legitimacy rather than attending to how faith is encountered and sustained within contexts marked by fear of the unseen and contested honor. Theologically, this reduction obscures the incarnational and Spirit-initiated dimensions of discipleship as it takes embodied form within local moral worlds. Missiologically, it reinforces programmatic and event-driven paradigms that overlook households and ordinary life as primary sites of Kingdom formation. A phenomenologically grounded account is therefore needed to examine how faith in Isa al Mosiho is recognized, embodied, and sustained from within the Bengali Sufi folk lifeworld, to make explicit the architecture of transformation in this context.
Method
This study offers a phenomenologically grounded account of discipleship among Bengali Sufi–folk Muslims, drawing on 673 first-hand narratives from 149 Bengali disciple-makers. It employs Braun’s and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) within a critical realist epistemology and a hermeneutical phenomenological framework. Guided by van Manen’s understanding of lived experience as the lifeworld, the pre reflective world in which meaning is inhabited before it is theorized, the analysis follows a nested, three-layer progression: from lived atmosphere (the shared cosmological and moral lifeworld structured by the interplay of fear and peace, honor and shame, and purity and defilement), to recurring macro-patterns (consistent reorderings of that lived world), and finally to an integrated architecture of transformation articulated in seven spiral movements. This structure traces how discipleship is experienced, interpreted, and embodied within participants’ everyday lifeworlds.
Results
The findings suggest that discipleship emerges within a shared atmospheric lifeworld and unfolds through seven interrelated movements: Encounter, Interpretation, Integration, Endurance, Power Reversal, Expansion (as Faith Settlement), and Belonging as Identity. These movements are most often embodied within households rather than individually. Underlying these movements, macro-patterns disclose the deeper structural reconfiguration of the lifeworld, showing how power, purity, and honor are progressively reordered around the presence of Isa, thereby reshaping the very conditions under which discipleship becomes possible. Theologically, a contextual theology of presence appears to emerge from the study, showing how Isa is recognized as Lord of the Unseen and Messiah of Honor through reordered fear, restored relationships, and durable peace. Transformation is experienced as God’s initiative—Presence, Power, and Peace—into which disciples gradually learn to live through sustained moral coherence and relational endurance. In this context, faithfulness functions not only as ethics but as epistemology: truth is discerned as lives shaped around Isa continue to “hold” over time, especially under pressure and persecution, and expand to form house-based movements of disciples who make disciples.
Conclusions
Missiologically, the research data appears to direct us to reframe discipleship as participation in God’s ongoing action rather than programmatic intervention. It challenges decision-centric and event-driven models of mission, emphasizing presence before explanation, endurance over immediacy, and households as the primary sites of Kingdom formation. By demonstrating that phenomenological analysis can function as a disciplined theological method, the study contributes to lived theology, contextual missiology, and Adventist mission thought, offering an interpretive framework attentive to how divine presence is recognized, embodied, and sustained within non-Western worlds of meaning
Subject Area
Discipling (Christianity);Sufis--India--Bengal; Muslims--India--Bengal; Bengal (India)--Religion; Messiah
Recommended Citation
Phillips, Gabriela Profeta de, "Following the Messiah of Honor and the Lord of the Unseen: a Day in the Lives of Bengali Sufi-Folk Background Disciplemakers" (2026). Dissertations DIS. 8.
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dmiss/8