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Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the church's importance stems from its "span of ambiguity," the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration, It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five women religious exemplars representative of the variation in religious expression within and outside the fold of the thirteenth-century ecclesia were selected for analysis. Narratives were constructed for each case. Each narrative focuses on the distinctive features judged significant in the constitution of a case pattern or prototype. From these an array of analytic concepts was selected and applied to each exemplar. The methodological approach enables preservation of the empirical character and historical setting of each religious virtuosa yet provides for the selection of abstract distinctive features present or absent in each exemplar or ideal type. The analysis demonstrates that for the virtuosae, classic Weberian categories are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Different exemplars express different orientations at different times and in different places. And the analytic elements recombine empirically to produce a wider variety in typology than envisioned by Weber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The layman has taken the church situation into his own hands in nearly twelve hundred communities in the United States. A profound change is going on in the attitude of these lay workers toward the ecclesiastical order in which they have been reared. The history of the community churches in the United States shows that most of them came into being with lay initiative. Each is therefore different from every other. There are now on the lists of the community Church Workers, a national serve ice organization, non-ecclesiastical in scope and function, a total of 1170 community churches. This organization does not claim to have the names of all of them for there is no reason why a community church should report to anybody. New ones are being discovered every month which have been in existence for several years and which have never corresponded with the Community Church Workers.