ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Process Church of the Final Judgement, one of the more creative small religious movements, to understand better the sociocultural dynamics of religious innovation. The Process would appear to be a monumental failure, despite the richness of their culture and the great vitality the members showed for a decade. The Process culture was a distinctive amalgam of elements from several sources. The names of the deities, at least, came from standard Christian traditions, and some of the ritual actions were reminiscent of the Anglican church services which many of the founders had attended in childhood. The Process was part of a vast sociocultural system that extended from psychoanalysis to Rosicrucianism, from general semantics to Rogers’s movement. The Process and every comparable small religious movement is a marriage of two sociocultural systems, one internal to the group and one external.
