ABSTRACT
When I originally located the fieldwork for my PhD in two congregations in Sweden, the decision was informed by my training as an anthropologist. As I later came to realize, I was implicitly assuming that these congregations would be my ‘tribes’: self-contained units that I would somehow come to understand in the round. On entering ‘the field’ (otherwise known as Uppsala) in 1986, my intention was to examine the interrelations between two groups that appeared to be rivals: a long-standing Filadelfia (Pentecostal) congregation that had become part of the inner-city landscape; and a new, controversial Faith (Prosperity) ministry called the Word of Life (Livets Ord). Eventually, however, I wrote a different kind of PhD, one that mostly focused on the new ministry and its congregation as representing a ‘deviant’ organization in the context of supposedly secular, tolerant Sweden. Then, by the time I wrote the research up as a book (Coleman, 2000), my focus had again shifted, towards examining the ministry – increasingly a transnational missionizing force – in the context of social-scientific theories of globalization. I mention these intellectual moves because of the admittedly crude trajectory
they trace, from the ‘tribal’ to the global, from a well-defined field (bounded congregations) to a much more ambiguous set of reference points. In the preceding chapter, Arthur Farnsley notes that the rise of congregational studies, at least in the USA, can partly be attributed to a theoretical and intellectual movement away from grand theories and towards empirical studies. Thus, if the sociological trend he describes is towards examining the local and the small, the anthropological journey I have traced has moved in the other direction, using an initial study of ‘the local’ as a catalyst for reflections on wider theoretical and substantive concerns. I suspect that, in certain respects, Farnsley and I do indeed meet in the middle, but it is a centre-ground the ambiguous location of which reveals something of the dilemmas currently facing both congregations and congregational studies. Farnsley argues that recent interest in congregations relates in part to their potential role as creators – or measures – of levels of community organization. If such a role is evident, however, it usually depends upon the ability of such groups to adapt to contexts marked by voluntarism, pluralism, mobility and postindustrialization. In this chapter, I shall be juxtaposing general reflections on congregations as
organizational forms with specific accounts of particular churches and
ministries. As an anthropologist, my initial instincts are ‘situationist’ and small-scale, to adapt phrases from Woodhead, Guest and Tusting’s introduction, in other words to attempt to understand congregations by looking at how they interact with their local contexts (cf. Jenkins, 1999). However, part of my argument is going to be that, at least for some of the groupings I discuss, it is very difficult to assess what the primary context of reference actually is. Thus one of my interests is in what locality and community, and indeed mobility and globality, might mean to members of different congregations. An associated question asks how a globalizing world might shape the project of congregational studies. To be sure, these are questions that resonate with social-scientific literature
on religious organizations, but they have also emerged inductively from the fieldwork that I have carried out in the two Swedish congregations referred to above. They can be traced, for instance, in my own shift from studying the Word of Life largely in the context of its deviancy from Swedish society (or ‘The Social Order’ as the title of my PhD put it), towards understanding it as further connected with social imaginaries and networks that extend far beyond Sweden. They also lead me to the title of my chapter, ‘Conference People’. This phrase was used in an interview by a Swedish Pentecostalist woman to characterize many of those people (some of them ostensibly Pentecostalist) who had ‘gone over’ to the Word of Life. It encapsulated a number of meanings (and much feeling) within just two words. It was intended to describe those believers who had abandoned their regular church and gone looking for powerful experiences in the mass contexts and transnational workshops regularly organized by the new charismatic ministry. On one level, the term ‘conference’ was implicitly contrasted with ‘congregation’ or ‘church’. It was meant to be critical of people who were seemingly addicted to the excitement of one-off events that usually involved foreign, especially American, preachers. For a Pentecostalist to be criticizing the in-gathering of Christians for an apparently spontaneous experience of worship is rather remarkable, but the woman – and many others like her in her congregation – not only doubted the spontaneity displayed at Word of Life conferences, but also mistrusted its lack of rootedness in a local congregation. As we shall see, ‘conference’ in these terms can be seen as a metonym for ideological conflicts over the nature of religious belonging, and therefore not only a comment on the dynamics between two Swedish congregations but also a summary, in lay terms, of ambiguities over the meanings of affiliation and community that are equally evident in socialscientific studies of the contemporary role of congregations in the West. We shall reflect further on such ambiguities towards the end of this chapter, but in the next section I wish to preface my case studies by sketching some broad background to the recent study of conservative Protestant congregations.
