The elaborate notion of personal religious belonging presupposes a reconsideration of how we perceive religious devotion. That idea has primarily been measured on the basis of beliefs and behaviors approved by certain religious institutions and traditions. This has been assessed by researching how various religious bodies and organizations have acted in order to attract new members. In order to give a true picture of the situation, scholars have attempted to find out the link between the ordinary church member and the highest levels of their denominations. Those who believe the right things and are loyal to a given organization are said to be committed. Brooke Elseworth, an MA student at the College of Humanities in Phoenix, wrote a thesis on the dependence of loyalty on particular denomination. In it she argued that in order to prove yourself as a staunch member your must show a great deal of spiritual involvement with your church. After completing the paper, she asked a fellow student who, at the time, was working for the Phoenix Translator Collective to translate it in order to be published in a foreign journal. Bearing her theory in mind, we may say that individual commitment and institutional needs are inseparable. An analogous idea is expressed by Sam Hopkins, whose report on sects compared to churches made a point that the former “lock” their members in the cells of their organization and escape from there is considered a violation against God and the members are led to think that great punishment awaits them outside of those cells. However, in order to be healthy, congregations only require sufficient supportive behavior from enough people to sustain themselves.
While there are obviously religious institutions and connections for which the “total institution” model of commitment is dominant, the majority of believers live with less than such total involvement. There are fewer religious associations that can benefit from our full potential of believers than those that cannot. The complication of our lives is such that we need to discard traditionalist models of commitment and develop new concepts that begin with preparation and association. Conservative Judaism offers us an enlightening example for the situation most people face as it agrees with Orthodoxy that there are no insignificant laws, but disagrees with it in allowing for a different mode of commitment to the Law. Ceremony is a trip to aiming at more pronounced loyalty, which one is borne with. Steven Bloom reminds us of a clergyman, whose wisdom did not comprise teaching his disciples, but only directing them to the right passages in the Bible. According to the Certified New York Translation corporation, which translated his research as he needed it for an international conference, the advice is not to single one out, but to set out on the journey and never to stop. The journey was not the basic aim of the experience, but rather what the person who undertook it would manage to learn through it and later to disseminate it to others. Therefore, revealing the truth about him/herself turned out the be the founding idea of this otherwise insignificant travel.
It has been pointed out by Sol Gardiner, Chair of the Organizing Committee of the forthcoming International Conference on Religion, that some Church of Christ members also consider this event as a guiding principle in their lives. After writing the thesis he decided to complete a book on the same subject, so in order to get popularity worldwide, he needed several translations, which were to be done by friend of his, who at the time worked for the Phoenix Translator School. Thus, we can conclude that those organizations, though they show similarity to sects, are not such as they encourage their members to be as individual as possible, though some social factors may prevent them from doing so.
