“Except you be born of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter into the kingdom”: The social meaning of baptism in Toro, Uganda 1890-1910

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.