ABSTRACT
As the German evangelical movement became the Reformation-as it became clear that its protests would not lead to its desired reforms in the Old Church, but instead foster the emergence of new religious bodies that constituted themselves as city and territorial churches-evangelical communities were faced with the need to define their relationships to the larger Christian world, present and past. Formal aspects of community membership were legislated by law and confession, but the introduction of new customs, rituals, and liturgies offered both opportunities and challenges for consolidating a sense of belonging to the new confession. While the parish community or congregation itself could often rely on ongoing relationships between its members for internal cohesion, a congregation’s sense of belonging to a wider community beyond the parish, both in space and time, could no longer easily find an anchor in the traditional notions of Christian unity and purity, which themselves had been co-opted in polemic by the Old Church and used as a rhetorical scourge against the new churches.1 Communities and groups often look back to shared historical experiences in order to withstand such pressures; a constructed sense of shared historical community can hold groups together in moments of crisis.2 But how does a group without a very long history create this sense of cohesion?
