The aim of this article is the scientific description of the commonly used concepts such as; community and institution. Common use of these concepts, especially towards the Catholic Church cause the allegation that the Church is moving away from the community concept and focuses more on, as institution character. In the first part of this article, the author made a sociological description of concepts of community and institution, demonstrating that from scientific point of view the institutions is a set of principles, rules and laws that relate to the most important elements of social life of human being. Therefore, institutionalization of the Church, is a natural process which in the issue of religion provides the principles and rules which are supplied by custom , tradition and law. In the second part of the article the author goes on to describe the process of institutionalization of the religious communities in the theory of German sociologist of religion, Joachim Wach. This theory allows you to make analysis of contemporary Church in order to see the need of community as well as the institutional religion in the form of Catholic Church in the life of a modern man.
The huge number of interpretations and approaches to religious experiences makes discourse in the scientific studies of religion on the scope and significance of these phenomena extremely difficult. Especially misleading is the identification of them with mystical experiences, as well as attempts to depreciate these types of experience that are alien to researchers. A possible solution is the introduction of a differentiated scale of religious experiences in which mystical experiences constitute their “climactic”, emotionally and cognitively most intensive form. Acknowledging Otto’s definition of sensus numinis, the content of the experience and its cognitive, motivational and physiological components become a problem. In this situation most promising is on the one hand the classical conception of Joachim Wach, which orders the discourse and proposes recognising research on religious experiences with one of the main disciplines of religious studies, and on the other Abraham Maslow’s concept of “peak experiences” and “plateau experiences”. Therefore, (1) religious experience is graded; (2) it is not exclusively the sense itself (sensus numinis), since it brings cognitive and volitional effects, (3) it need not have a personal character and (4) experiencing it usually leads to various, more or less successful attempts to express it, and this then happens by means of symbols and is organised in the form of myths.
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