Blog Post 2/11

Last week in class we began presenting our group projects. My group presented on Miller’s book, “Reinventing American Protestantism”. I thought the book was an interesting read that gave a lot of insight into the changing aspects of many churches. The main focus of the book was to point out the ways that Calvary, Vineyard, and Hope Chapel are now appealing to many people who are no longer interested in strictly structured religion. Many of the individuals that are joining these movements want to feel freer and have a more personal interaction within the service. They no longer want to feel that they have to go through a hierarchy in order to make a relationship with God. Moving away from structured religion has a lot to do with the hippie movement and the freedom that was found during that time. This led me to wonder: what may have happened with structured religion, had the hippie movement never occurred? Would there have been a surge of movements such as Calvary, to make religion less structured? Maybe not immediately, but I do believe there would have come a time in society to branch out from structured religion to allow more people to have religious freedom. However, there are still plenty of people practicing structured religion, which was brought up by another group presentation. This group discussed a Catholic Church, Our Lady of Assumption, and contrasted it to another Catholic Church, Saint Brigitta. It was interesting going from Miller’s book which took the stance that in order for churches to survive, they would need to be more relaxed, and the other book which contrasted two popular structured Catholic churches. Although Our Lady of Assumption was much stricter in their views, both Catholic churches showed that many people still prefer the more structured aspects of religion and may not want it to become more relaxed.