ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the place of ethnic diversity within church and the ways in which church members navigated this diversity. Church members saw the capacity to bridge cultural difference in everyday social relationships with fellow Christians as crucially important. This was because such capacities both maintained social harmony within church and cultivated the sort of ‘openness’ and ‘adaptiveness’ that migrants have been increasingly expected to demonstrate in order to prove their worthiness of inclusion in Britain. The chapter argues that, in addition to the practices of exchange and verbal encouragement explored in previous chapters, believers sought to manage cultural difference by constructing culture as a set of flexible, learned behaviours and habits – constructions that sought to normalise difference and make it easy to accommodate. Moreover, such practices created a set of skills that helped Pentecostals to form social relationships across difference with religious and ethnic others outside church. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how such constructions of culture also reflect the ongoing marginalisation of Africans from more inclusive forms of identity and affiliation in Britain.
