Designing a Religious Pedagogical Communicative Methodology: A Transformative Reciprocal Methodology for Religious Pedagogical work with Gangsters G.E. Dames Originally published in Afrikaans in the Dutch Reformed Theological Journal, 46 (3 & 4). 1. Introduction Macmaster’s (2003:60) insights into the phenomenon of gangsterism in our society make an important contribution to practical theology. Gangsterism is a common reality, which traumatises the lives of peoples in the poorer suburbs of the Cape Peninsula on a daily basis (MacMaster 2003:59). This phenomenon originates from the historical, socio-political, and economic conditions on the so called “Cape Flats”. MacMaster (2003:69) pleads with the church to invest in “life-changing” programmes. This article is a descriptive effort at developing a religious pedagogical methodology for people working with gangsters. 1.1. Setting the hypothesis This article assumes that church ministry mainly stems from a first-world philosophy. Rationality is being elevated to a higher position than meaningful human feelings and experiences. The result is that this scenario creates difficulties for the church in working with gangsters in a meaningful way. The hypothesis set for this article is that gangsters can indeed be reached by the church by way of intersubjective communicative faith acts. 1.2. Problem statement The question that comes up for discussion in this paper is the following: Are meaningful communication and transformative thought, attitudes, values, virtues (Koopman & Vosloo 2002), and faith acts possible amongst gangsters? Hypothetically spoken, it seems that gangsters lack a healthy or practical rationality (cf. Van der Ven