This project is a practice in telling a small part of a less common story: one about negotiating commitments to academic and church communities when the stories told across those communities don't always line up or are incomplete. Through the stories of my three participants as well as my own experiences, I will describe this in-between space and the individual negotiations we perform to explain those spaces to ourselves and to rest in them. In telling these stories from the in-between places, I use cultural rhetorics to permeate boundaries some scholars continue to hold between academic and community learning. Through the stories of participants and myself, I demonstrate that holding, challenging, and shifting community rhetorics is a complex process of critical thought and individual experience that carries religious rhetorics into the realm of belief and practice and beyond.Using methodologies and mixed methods from cultural rhetorics, Indigenous rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, and grounded theory, I emphasize practices of relationality, listening, and storying to share stories from three participants who participated in an Evangelical church community, pseudonymized here as "Hope Church," while completing graduate studies. Through a thorough exploration of these stories as well as my own, this study finds that individual negotiations of academic and Evangelical communities come out of and create a rhetorical space of faith and learning that allows them to hold multiple knowledges in constellation while shifting narratives across spaces.
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