RT Article
T1 New Concepts for New Dynamics: Generating Theory for the Study of Religious Innovation and Social Change
JF Journal for the scientific study of religion
VO 56
IS 1
SP 6
OP 18
A1 Marti, Gerardo 1965-
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2017
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1571062122
AB The Emerging Church movement (ECM) is sociologically interesting—not due to the size of its membership or the centrality of its congregations. Rather, the ECM is significant because it provides an opportunity to generate new concepts for the study religious innovation and social change. Using theoretical language, the ECM consists of institutional entrepreneurs who drive their religiously concerned movement by continually deconstructing and reframing beliefs, practices, and identities from “mainstream” Christianity while at the same time promoting newly formulated and broadly resonant religious imperatives. As Emerging Christians cultivate new or altered religious practices, these must be continually legitimized. Furthermore, their renegotiated beliefs (heterodoxies) require new forms of organization (alternative congregations). Such action is not the work of isolated individuals, nor is it independent of societal conditions. Ultimately, the ECM consists of Emerging Christians who creatively operate through diffuse network structures across wide geographic spaces and among disparate social groups to enact a collective institutional entrepreneurship that seeks to reimagine the assumptions of conventional Christian congregational life.
K1 Emerging Church Movement
K1 Institutional logics
K1 organizational analysis
K1 religious institutional entrepreneurship
K1 Theory
DO 10.1111/jssr.12325