In 1955, a young Dutch Reformed Church minister named Robert H. Schuller climbed onto the roof of a drive-in movie theater concession stand in Southern California to preach to a congregation seated in rows of automobiles. Moving from the Chicago area to Orange County, he did not merely relocate an ancient liturgy. Schuller assembled a hybridized institution by fusing sanctuary and parking lot, later expanding this vision into a glass-and-steel structure he named the Crystal Cathedral. His ministry–itself shaped by fusing Calvinist theology, therapeutic psychology, and corporate management–was neither a revival of old-time religion nor a concession to modern audiences. It was a deliberate recombination of sacred and secular forms that accompanied decades of dramatic growth before abruptly collapsing in 2010. As I discuss in my co-authored books on Schuller, The Glass Church and The Church Must Grow or Perish, the tactics behind his architectural expansion and international televangelism became a global template for church growth, influencing pastors, denominations, and independent congregations worldwide.
When we encounter such unexpected reconfigurations of faith–efforts that cleverly dismantle and reassemble tradition at the same time–we confront a persistent linguistic challenge: what, exactly, should we call this kind of religious change? For now, I suggest these developments are best understood as religious innovation: strategic recombinations of tradition undertaken in response to perceived threats to religious legitimacy.
Any history of religion documents the recurring instances of significant changes. New theologies emerge, hierarchies overturn, and novel configurations of belief and practice take form. These shifts prompt observers to distinguish between natural variations, gradual modifications to newly stable structures, and more fundamental reorganizations. At what point does a sequence of accrued adjustments yield a new form of religious life? In short, how do we recognize when continuity gives way to reinvention?
Readily recognized change poses challenges to both insiders and outsiders of all religious orientations. Terms like translation and adaptation often become shorthand to describe these processes, yet the concept of innovation is analytically central. Innovation is commonly associated with engineering feats and technical efficiency, which implies a sharp divide between technological change and religious matters, as if innovation belongs to markets and machines while religion belongs to transcendence and timeless meaning. Treating innovation as exclusively material and mechanical–exclusively tied to electricity or pop culture trends–blinds us to how religious change actually unfolds, since such elision obscures how religious institutions also confront pressures of competition, relevance, and authority. Furthermore, we may ask to what extent these dynamics are uniquely tied to a Western and Christian context. Whether innovations take different forms–or encounter different barriers–outside of this cultural milieu is an open question and fertile ground for future research.
Innovation as strategic recombination
I propose religious innovation as a heuristic for the strategic restructuring of religious organizations, practices, and identities in response to social change. Innovation does not indicate creating something ex nihilo. Drawing on a classic insight from H. G. Barnett, innovation is a social process of recombination that works with inherited materials even as it redirects their meaning and use. New arrangements emerge through reinterpretation and reassembly of existing cultural elements.
Changes accrue, and unseen adaptations certainly occur. Yet religious innovation foregrounds agency. It names moments when actors revise goals, reorganize practices, and mobilize new participants in ways that reconfigure institutional life. Rather than being passive bearers of tradition subject to slow accretions of emphasis and priorities, innovators act intentionally. Religious leaders and communities are usefully approached as institutional entrepreneurs navigating tensions between continuity and change. The greater the perceived threat, the greater the motivation for invoking change through a mixture of skills, resources, and symbolic repertoires, although the extent of consequences are often unanticipated.
My research on the Emerging Church Movement illustrates this dynamic. The movement is fundamentally defined by a shared religious orientation built on a continual practice of deconstruction that intentionally resists pressures for religious conformity. These groups did not reject Christianity. In contention with the direction of mainstream churches and in reaction to their own experiences within them, they dismantled congregational faith practices and reframed them. Many relocated worship liturgies into pubs and coffeehouses and loosened inherited theological boundaries. In doing so, they altered institutional habits rather than inventing a new religion. Their innovation lay in reorganizing devotional life and revising assumptions about authority and spiritual belonging within the revised bounds of Christianity itself.
The Emerging Church Movement also points toward a broader conceptualization of religious institutional entrepreneurship. This captures how actors strategically leverage familiar resources to reshape institutions and remake religious life. Emerging Christians did not simply revive evangelicalism or adjust it at the margins; they dismantled forms they regarded as illegitimate and replaced them with hybrid practices. Their micropolitics of resistance fostered pluralistic communities in which belief was held loosely and rituals were assembled from multiple traditions. By negotiating tensions between religious and nonreligious commitments, they created spaces in which Christian piety could be individualized through deliberate institutional disruption.
It is the proactive orientation toward agency that distinguishes innovation from adaptation. Adaptation implies adjustment to external conditions for survival. Innovators do not merely cope with change; they attempt to restructure the environment in which religious life takes place. They seek to channel religion toward desired outcomes, asserting influence over how religious meaning is produced and recognized.
The multiethnic congregation Mosaic in Los Angeles demonstrates this distinction. To overcome traditional ethnic barriers, Mosaic intentionally co-opts the creative sensibilities of workers in the Hollywood industry to create an ecclesial culture driven by artistic expression and a shared global mission. If Mosaic were only adapting to demographic change, it might have diversified its music, hired more non-white staff, or refreshed its décor. Instead, it pursued sustained innovation by creating new roles and programs organized around what I call “havens”–arenas of participation that reframed ethnic differences into ministry groups with shared artistic and creative goals. The church successfully mirrored the entertainment industry’s project-driven work cycles and emphasis on interest-driven relational networks to organize its people. Additionally, by moving services across different rented venues, they leveraged the region’s infrastructure and transit patterns to draw a geographically scattered yet committed membership. These ministry arrangements are supported by a catalyzing theological framework focused on mission and change, producing new ecclesial arrangements rather than modifying inherited ones.
A parallel dynamic can be seen outside Christian contexts. Consider the Burmese pantheon of the “thirty-seven nats,” spirit figures whose worship predates Buddhism but has become formally intertwined with Theravada practice in Myanmar. Images depicting figures such as Thónban Hla (nat number five) and Taung-ngú Mingaung (nat number six, associated with a historical king) materialize a religious system that is neither purely indigenous spirit religion nor purely Buddhist orthodoxy. Instead, nat devotion represents a recombination of older ritual authority with Buddhist cosmology, producing a hybrid form that sustains legitimacy by embedding local spirits within an established religious framework. Here, religious innovation is not synonymous with rupture but works by reauthorizing existing traditions through strategic integration rather than replacement.
Because cross-cultural theorizing on organizational innovation is sparse, the vast majority of our current understanding is based on theories and practices developed in the United States and Europe. It is important to discuss innovation in non-Christian and non American contexts, yet an adequate discussion requires more thorough attention. Consequently, more research using an international lens is needed to explore whether innovative strategies generalize across borders, or if different cultures rely more on uniquely indigenous mechanisms for religious innovation.
Innovation and fragility
Deliberate innovation is seldom welcomed by those already deeply invested in existing arrangements. Although innovation strives for stability, in practice it is disruptive and therefore not inherently stable. Schuller’s mega-ministry exemplifies this paradox. Over five decades, he recombined business management, therapeutic psychology, and celebrity culture that revisioned congregational practices. Treating the church as an organization subject to market dynamics, he redefined pastoral success through metrics of growth, aiming for higher attendance, more buildings, greater fundraising, and expanded viewership.
While these innovations generated expansion, they also produced vulnerability for the Crystal Cathedral. Aggressive debt financing, reliance on spectacle, and dependence on a specific suburban constituency provoked criticism from his own denomination and concealed structural weaknesses from his own members. When economic and cultural conditions shifted–as they invariably do–the precarious balance among charisma, capital, and constituency collapsed.
Innovations are not defined solely by their relative success. Schuller’s ministry reinforces how innovation can generate short-term success while simultaneously embedding within itself long-term fragility. Thus, innovation is best understood not as a stable endpoint but as an ongoing process of institutional reconstruction. The revised arrangements religious actors build–whether architectural or theological–introduce new strains that require vigilant management. And since evidence suggests that social change is being accelerated, such management becomes more constant.
Analysis of innovation must therefore attend not only to what is newly emergent but also to the unanticipated vulnerabilities that accompany reorganization. Moreover, past innovations can often be traced to current circumstances, yielding the long-term influence of even those innovations that are deemed in hindsight to be failures. Especially notable are those religious innovations which, while initially rejected, become absorbed into even the most “traditional” of settings. This dynamic is characteristic of both the Schuller’s Church Growth philosophy and Emerging Christians’s negotiation of Christian authority.
The centrality of legitimacy
What drives religious innovation is largely the pursuit of legitimacy. Legitimacy, as classically defined by sociologist Max Weber, is the collective judgment that an institution’s practices and authority claims remain worthy of recognition, whether grounded in cultural expectations, sacred lineage, doctrinal coherence, or ritual continuity. Yet religious actors innovate when inherited forms of worship, governance, doctrine, or ritual authority no longer convincingly answer why an institution should matter within shifting moral and social worlds. In such moments, innovation becomes a form of institutional repair through efforts to establish, sustain, or restore recognition that a religious organization’s practices and authority claims are morally credible and socially meaningful.
For example, when leaders recombine tradition with contemporary idioms–colloquial language, managerial trends, aesthetic styles, or political sensibilities–they do so not because novelty is prized for its own sake but because these elements signal contemporary relevance and competence to new audiences.
Religious innovation is therefore less a departure from tradition and more a response to legitimacy crises that arise when authority loses its taken-for-granted character. As cultural expectations shift, gaps widen between what religious organizations do and what their constituencies recognize as authentic. Even so, the pursuit of legitimacy is inherently precarious.
Each recombination risks alienating existing members even as it attracts new ones, and every claim to renewed relevance invites scrutiny and contestation. Innovation can never entirely resolve the problem of legitimacy; it relocates it. Successful innovations redefine what counts as properly religious and generate new standards by which future practices will be judged. The resulting forms are hybrids that draw from multiple cultural repertoires, intertwining elements commonly marked as sacred and secular. Innovation thus becomes recursive: institutions innovate to regain legitimacy, and in doing so, they create criteria that will later be used to alternately affirm and question their adequacy.
Religious innovation as a heuristic
Religious innovation captures the strategic restructuring of religious organizations, practices, and identities, and is undertaken to manage tensions between inherited traditions and social change. As a heuristic, it shifts attention away from viewing religious actors as passive bearers of tradition and toward their role as active co-constructors of institutional life. Through recombination, religious institutional entrepreneurs–including clergy, ritual specialists, teachers, movement leaders, and ongoing participants–will mobilize doctrines, rituals, and moral repertoires to generate new forms of authority and belonging. When perceived as especially discontinuous with past religious forms or practices, institutional changes are viewed as more truly “innovative.”
In practice, innovation both responds to the ongoing disruptions of social change and produces it. Further, the same processes that restore legitimacy can also introduce fragility. Religious innovation should therefore be understood not as a marker of progress or decline but as a recurring feature of religious life under routine conditions of uncertainty. Naming these processes as innovation foregrounds legitimacy, agency, and institutional vulnerability as central problems in the study of religious change. It directs analytic attention away from whether religion is adapting or reviving and toward how religious actors reconstruct authority and practice when the taken-for-granted status of tradition can no longer be assumed.
The threat to legitimacy is central to the motivation for innovation, although it can never be fully assured, making for an ongoing dynamic of innovation that makes the study of religion even more compelling.
