ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the potential ambivalences of gender and women's exercise of pastoral leadership among African diaspora Pentecostal churches in Flanders. It adopts four theoretical approaches in its inquiry. First, it assesses how female African migration trajectories influence decisions to enter pastoral ministry and serve immigrant African Pentecostal churches in Flanders. Second, it discusses Belgium's gender regimes in order to ascertain how female African Pentecostals appropriate those regimes. Third, it examines the extent to which Pentecostalism's gender ambivalences inhibit or inspire women to assume pastoral leadership roles within immigrant African Pentecostal churches in Europe. Fourth, it evaluates the extent to which the involvement of four female Pentecostal actors redefines gender roles and patriarchal power dynamics within immigrant African faith communities in Flanders. The chapter concludes that while the four women struggle with traditional power structures in their churches, they have not formulated theologies that connect female pastoral leadership to signs of Spirit liberation.
