expanded opportunities for the laity. Among the most important of these practices were itinerancy, voluntary association and disestablishment. Itinerancy : John Mason Peck was a pioneering Baptist preacher in the American Mississippi River valley at a time when it had become obvious that the formal American denominations – Congregationalists, Episcopalians and Presbyterians – were largely failing to keep up with the expanding American population. Yet what Peck concluded about the need of the hour spoke for

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-75

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expanded opportunities for the laity. Among the most important of these practices were itinerancy, voluntary association and disestablishment. Itinerancy

Chapter

ABSTRACT

In the American context itinerancy was one of the forces that loosened OldWorld restraints. Timothy Hall, in a fine general study, has suggested that,

the element of choice in religious life highlights another enduring effect of the vast cultural transformation in which itinerancy played a role: the relaxation of cultural constraints which had fixed the self in a particular station within a deferential, bounded community.