Reverse mission and media in the case of a ghanaian charismatic megachurch

Abstract

The rise of new Pentecostal movements in the global South from the 1970’s onward ignited a process which turned Christianity into an eminently non-western religion. Out of this process, hastened and amplified by the junction between large organisational structures such as mega-churches with the Pentecostal doctrine of prosperity gospel, a new kind of spectacular, technological, and modern Christianity is spreading through the initiative of a new generation of religious leaders. The missionary zeal which characterizes these subjects and their organizations draws fully from marketing and entrepreneurial techniques redeploying them in order to stimulate the formation of new churches both at home and abroad. In the latter case, the action of the church concretely articulates a Christian mission which reverse the routes historically traced by European missionaries. In this paper it is described the rise and spread of a Ghanaian mega-church by focusing on the principles and the techniques which allowed the growth of the organization, as well as the current difficulties encountered by the movement and the strategies devised to overcome them. The discussion of the case of an Italian branch in the end of the paper will highlight the variety of practices implied by the action of the mega-church within the context of reverse mission. At the same time, it will also shed light on the fundamental role of transnational connections and objects in the production of the Pentecostal religious experience according to specific and controlled forms.