Abstract
The author uses a modified version of Erikson's six-stage (numinous, judicial, dramatic, formal, ideal and nomatic) ontogeny of ritualization to discuss the problems of individual freedom and community control. A case study of Johann Driedger is used to highlight the struggle for individual freedom within a rural conservative Old Colony Mennonite community. The leaders of this ethnoreligious community sought to control their members in numinous rural villages by judicious means. Some members, like Driedger, tested the boundaries of the Gemeinshaft, by introducing new initiatives and industry. The church, however, judiciously discouraged such innovations by excommunication and the ban. The ritual process got stuck at the judicious stage two. Driedger experimented with new initiative (stage 3) and industry (stage 4), but in the end was forced to retreat. He died before his vision of a new ideology (stage 5) took hold; he did not experience the certification of a new nomatic religious community (stage 6).
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