Wilson, Judith Pamela2024-08-152024-08-1519881988https://hdl.handle.net/1828/20155After 200 years of moving to avoid confrontation with "the world," members of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada have become fairly comfortable and successful in their environment. Having given up the fight to remain separate, they face new identity problems as a religious group without the trappings of ethnicity. They are hesitant about joining the religious mainstream and operate under the awkward congregational polity. A newly awakened concern with the issue of clerical authority has brought about lively debate and some changes within the organization. The legitimation of authority is of particular interest in terms of ministers because of their link to the supernatural and their serving a diminishing constitutency. A four-cell model was proposed by Hammond, Salinas and Sloane (1978). The cells were formed by the intersecting of two dichotomies: the sacred versus profane nature of authority, and the office versus person location of authority. Believing routinized charisma to be an anachronism, they tested for only three authority types in a ten-denomination study. Patterns emerged showing that formality, social involvement, professional involvement and social problems were viewed variously by pastors holding the three remaining views of legitimate clerical authority. Authority was pronounced a useful independent variable in understanding the clergy. A correlation has been shown to exist between the form of an organization and the ways in which authority is legitimated within that organization. It was felt that routinized charisma might be located among small post-sectarian groups such as the Mennonites. Pastors of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada, the largest of the Mennonite groups in this country, were approached through a mail survey. Eighty-one per cent (N= 117) returned completed questionnaires. Seventy-one per cent identified most closely with routinized charismatic authority. Legal-rational authority was soundly rejected. No patterns of significance were found in the way ministers reported carrying out their tasks, nor did any of six possible predictor variables show a strong association with the distribution of authority preferences. Authority and group identity are not synonymous but each reflects the other to a high degree. Routinized charisma is a suitable mode of authority legitimation for a group that has only recently accepted acculturation. It is appropriate to a group that is struggling with such issues as separation from the world and exclusivity which affect its place on the sect-denomination-church continuum. Authority recognized and authorized by others is consistent with both congregational polity and the rhetoric of a priesthood of all believers. The location of authority in the process of being routinized was found among a religious group that is itself undergoing considerable change.132 pagesAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis