Headship and hierarchy: Authority and control in a Catholic charismatic community.

The Word of God is an ecumenical Christian community located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The community is a product of the Catholic charismatic renewal, the neopentecostal movement within the Roman Catholic Church. Like other charismatics, its members espouse and practice baptism in the Holy Spirit and the related gifts or charisms, including tongues, healing and prophecy. The Word of God was founded as an egalitarian, lay prayer fellowship in 1967. By 1971 it had evolved into a community in which members shared their daily lives under the direction of a small group of leaders, who exercised limited authority over a few, narrowly defined aspects of the group's common life. Leaders lacked access to legitimate sanctions to enforce directives and were understood to act on the basis of decisions made by the membership as a whole. By 1976 the community was organized as a hierarchical, bureaucratic system in which control was exercised from the top down by a series of leaders who enjoyed greater status and prestige than nonleaders, had legitimate authority over all aspects of the group's and its members' lives and had the right to use sanctions to enforce conformity and punish noncompliance. This study examines the community's development between 1967 and 1976, focusing on changes in the organization, uses and understanding of authority and power in the group. Two interdependent types of changes are analyzed. One type concerns the community's evolution from a relatively simple, decentralized organization in which control was exercised informally to a complex, hierarchical organization in which control was formal, overt and legalistic. The second type concerns changes in the perception and interpretation of the community by its members that accompanied changes in structure and goals. The latter are argued to stem from changes in the underlying, belief determining or epistemological premises shared by the community's members. That is, from changes in statements about codification, values, personal relationships and social structure which together structured and informed members' experience within the context of community life.PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104820/1/9610183.pdfDescription of 9610183.pdf : Restricted to UM users only