The Center for the Study of World Christian Revitalization Movements

           From Chicago to Paris to Prague the “Revolution of 1968” marked the high tide of a cycle of contentious social activism within the world’s dominant societies. It also sparked a revolution in the study of social movements. Parallel with New Religious Movement theory’s emergence in the 1970s (see Michael Rynkiewich’s discussion in Revitalization 13:1), the study of New Social Movements (NSMs) has emerged from 1960s sociological research on collective action and social change in the West. A growing body of social movement theory (SMT) offers important contributions to the study of Christian revitalization movements.        Accompanying the acceleration…