This article examines the processes of reformation in the episcopal city of Naumburg, which took place in parallel and at different speeds. Drawing on sociological theories of social movements (collective good problem and threshold theory), it is argued that in addition to individual (partly corporate) actors such as the bishop, the sovereign and the city council, who linked competing political interests with the Reformation events, it was especially the collective actors of the parishes and their differentiated socio-economic characteristics that were responsible for Naumburg experiencing a Reformation of different speeds. The decision of the individual for or against the new faith depended on the one hand on his social ties within the parish, and on the other hand on the given political, legal and economic restrictions and opportunities of the parish itself, whether and how the Reformation could be introduced at all. It was easier to move to the villages and hear the Protestant service there than to install the Protestant service in one’s own parish against the resistance of an Old Believer patron. The implementation of the Reformation was thus not a linear-teleological process whose opponents would have been on the wrong side of history, but a complex process that was broken several times and in some cases came to a standstill, which deepened social rifts within urban society rather than overcoming them.