they believe that the Holy Spirit works through people in a social context, in
an orderly way, and that the details of that context facilitate this communi-
cation.^7 Therefore, the practitioners who were studied took the view that the
concrete details of situated ritual practices are a spiritually directed orderly
social means to a spiritual end. They sometimes talked explicitly about this
aspect of the religious service. This makes Pentecostals different from many
other Protestant religious groups in recognizing the importance of social prac-
tices to the individual faith experience.
In challenging the traditions and control of the Catholic Church the Protestant
Reformation tended to reject both Catholic ritual and hierarchy, stripping reli-
gion down to individual faith and elevating the importance of a direct con-
nection between deity and person. Religious reformers at the time represented
a new middle class that challenged the existing status quo and its traditions,
and advocated a form of worship that allowed more scope to the individual
and to social change. For this reason most Protestant religions tend to stress
beliefs and the individual interpretation of beliefs and downplay institu-
tionalized ritual (even the Pentecostal and/or Revivalist focus on ritual is
thought of as Spirit directed, not institutionally directed). In the same way
that the tendency toward individualism set Protestants in conflict with the
traditional status quo in Medieval Catholic Europe at the time, it now sets
religions based on individualism in conflict with traditional religions world-
wide in an age of globalization.
It is a consequence of this history that practices are more important than
modern western thinking generally acknowledges. Ironically, in the modern
era – when we no longer have common beliefs and have come to rely almost
completely on shared practices – we place an increasingly heavy premium
on shared beliefs. Most traditional and fundamentalist religions advocate a
return to a “way” of worshiping, that is, to an earlier form of practice. But,
our observations of the actual enactment of practices in a modern church
show that practices in details remain essential. In the churches we studied,
there is a time and place, and a way, in which religious practices are expected
258 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls
(^7) In fact one minister from the Full Bible Baptist Church studied in this paper, who
worked with us as a researcher at the beginning of the project, examined his own
ministry and argued that as a minister it was his job to socially construct a situation
in which participants could become receptive to gifts of the spirit. The argument that
recognizable practice necessarily came before belief was consistent with his deeply
held faith.