A growing brand of new Pentecostal churches in southern Africa is known to emphasise the prosperity gospel, deliverance, miracles and healing.
Miracles, including people apparently rising from the dead, are just one of the contentious issues swirling around these churches. Pastors have been the subject of sensational media headlines for spraying congregants with insecticide or making them eat grass, selfies taken in heaven, or claims of fraud and rape.
In response to these kinds of abuses, the South African government even established an independent cultural commission which created a special committee “to deal with issues in the religious sector”.
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The concerns of government regulators are easy to understand, given Pentecostalism’s status as a rapidly growing arm of Christianity all around the world, including South Africa and other parts of the African continent.
But such spectacular events are less important in my research than finding out how most of these churches really work in everyday life. The complex reality of lived experience is far harder to regulate than the spectacular event.
Since 2019, my ongoing research has focused on a Zimbabwe-founded church whose growth followed migrants to South Africa, starting off in inner-city Johannesburg.
One of my key interests is to understand how church members navigate everyday Pentecostalism. To explore this, I use the social science idea of affect and emotion, which can be found in both regular church performance and during moments of spectacle.
I define affect as the raw physical buzz or charge felt during powerful church moments – before you even know what to call it. Emotion is when that feeling gets a name, like joy or sorrow, shaped by what culture and community have taught one to feel in those moments.
It is clear from my fieldwork that miracles and bizarre acts are not in the regular repertoires of the churches I studied. Instead, religious lives form around care, around forging friendships, relations, emotional support systems and events which bring members together, even as daily tensions arise within the church. Much religious activity happens in ordinary, everyday conduct that consists of simple activities, performances, rites and rituals.
These kind of environments are what scholars have called “affective economies”, where emotions like hope and security help a community to manage a precarious world.
This gives us a deeper understanding of the reasons behind the rise of new Pentecostalism, often missed when media or governments focus on the spectacle alone.
Everyday Pentecostalism
On almost any given Sunday in the churches I study, one sees grimaces on people’s faces; swaying of bodies during song; mumbling of words along with great physical gestures with hands and arms; tears flowing down faces. This is not because the members are sorrowful or in pain. Rather, it is the normal course of performing religion within Pentecostal settings.
After church on Sundays, prayer meetings on Tuesdays, in home groups on Wednesdays, prayer meetings on Fridays and at social events or preaching on the streets on Saturdays, members catch up on one another’s lives.
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Prayer and teaching are part of the social mix. I have attended church soccer matches that start in prayer, are followed by a braai (barbecue) and end with biblical teachings.
Everyday churching is characterised by joy, compassion, sincerity, collegiality and care. This is particularly evident in the church groups that many join. As one member told me:
I’m in the music team so I go to practice every Saturday. That is when I socialise with church people. There are church people who become like friends as well as like very close friends … we visit each other, hang out, share life experiences, and so forth.
It is these feelings of connection that enable members to persist with their faiths. Such connections amount to what is called “affective solidarity” – a bond, or alliance that’s built on shared emotions. Congregants experience it differently, but it is how care is established in the church and even spread outside the church.
It also affects love. It’s not uncommon for church members, who spend so much time together, to fall in love and get married. In my study I explore how, within affective solidarity, love and marriage is negotiated in the church. It is one of the areas of church life that can also create discord.
Tensions
Relations in the church can, of course, be exploited by church leaders, who have more spiritual authority than ordinary members. Spiritual authority allows religious leaders to lay claim over abilities that unlock a better life – like access to economic and social capital. These are signs of upward mobility and, perhaps more importantly, divine blessing.
To tap into these networks, members will need to show respect, loyalty and submission to a pastor’s authority. Loyal members seek guidance from pastors on life decisions like whether to relocate for work or whether a potential partner is suitable to marry.
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But relations among ordinary members are less scripted. Disagreements are common. Some are affronted when leaders advise against their choice for marriage. Others are uneasy about finding love in a church where undesired suitors are the only ones available, yet pastors strongly encourage courtship and marriage within the church.
When bad conduct happens, like actual or rumoured financial wrongdoing by church leaders, some members leave while others will disagree and stay in the church and continue paying money to it. Tensions arise and wane in the ordinary course of churching.
It is in the ordinary where simple ideas and rationalisations like loyalty and submission become normalised. Unfortunately, it is also where opportunities for abuse exist, as many church leaders are aware.
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These, I found, are the issues that characterise the Pentecostal churches I have studied. The big spectacle and the dubious miracle are few and far between.
Regulation
Real accountability for new Pentecostalism’s abuses requires understanding how these churches actually work. It also involves churches taking heed of the everyday dynamics which open opportunities for exploitation.
Until regulators and churches engage in dialogue, regulations will miss their mark, and churches will resist oversight that seems disconnected from their reality.
Admire Thonje received graduate research funding from the VW Foundation’s Humanities for Africa program. He is currently a GES funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of Johannesburg.
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