“Except You Be Born of Water and the Spirit, You Cannot Enter into the Kingdom”

Abstract

The role of rituals as forces for social change in Christian mission history can be over looked particularly where the rituals are adopted from a Protestant church. Through the examination of the performance – setting, characters, script and sounds – of an early Anglican baptism in Toro, Western Uganda, this article illustrates how this ritual was used to enact and affect the values and objectives of a new society in its immediate context and in transnational frame of reference. The article argues for renewed historical attention to rituals as embodiments of change.