Difusão espacial da religião : Igreja Metodista em São Francisco, Niterói-RJ, a prática religiosa em células (2014)

Abstract

The missionary journeys of the early Christians serve as role models for religious persons to conduct missions. The types of spatial diffusion of religion were recognized in the territorial practice of Methodist Mission which came from the United States to Brazil. Historical Geography helps in analyzing the political and economic factors that favored the territorial spread by Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century. It was found that certain barriers directed the flow of religious innovation to other sites. Studies in the Geography of Religion by Sack (1986) and Rosendahl (2012) provided a theoretical framework for recognizing the organization of religious territory by the Methodist Church in Brazil, and reveal the political dimension of religion . The strategies by which religious territory is recognized and preserved constitute the territoriality of Brazilian Methodism. The Methodist Church in the State of Rio de Janeiro aims at quantitative growth and the expansion of its territory. Seeking to continue nowadays the process of spatial expansion, religious management encourages the organization of the Church's Cell Structure. This research on the Geography of Religion interprets the faith experience to discover how Methodist Christians recognize the manifestation of the sacred within geographical space.