UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Pentecostal Missionary Training: Cultivating Body Logics, Converting Missionaries, Building A Movement Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q36t6j9 Author Brahinsky, Joshua Publication Date 2014 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ PENTECOSTAL MISSIONARY TRAINING: CULTIVATING BODY LOGICS, CONVERTING MISSIONARIES, BUILDING A MOVEMENT A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS with an emphasis in ANTHROPOLOGY by Josh Brahinsky December 2014 The Dissertation of Josh Brahinsky is approved: _______________________________ Professor Barbara Epstein, Chair _______________________________ Professor James Clifford ______________________________ Professor Susan Harding ______________________________ Professor Marilyn Westerkamp ______________________________ Professor Jon Bialecki ________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Josh Brahinsky 2014 Table Of Contents Introduction: Pentecostal Missionary Training………...………………………… 1 Anthropology and Organizing – Cultivation – Cultivation Matters: Sensoriums Change – Reciprocity: Missionary Conversions Coming Back Home – Cultivating Discontinuity as Mobilization Philosophy – Methodology: Ethnography – Methodology: An Anthropology of the Senses, Towards a Theory of Cultivation – Chapter Outlines Preface: Notes on the History and Historiography of Pentecostal Mission……. 27 Early History – Pentecostal Emergence: Chaos Within Order – The Assemblies of God – Why Do They Grow? Section I: Reciprocity Chapter I: The Effects of Missionary Conversion: Transforming Pentecostals from Fundamentalist to Evangelical………………………………….……… 66 Missions and Theology: Reciprocal Narratives – Assemblies of God – Missionary Conversions – Challenge to the Fundamentalist Core – Fundamentalist Missiology – Tipping Point: from Fundamentalist to Evangelical – Intercultural Missiology – Pentecostal Missiology: From Indigenous Church Principles to Intercultural Missiology – Bethany University: God Made Culture Too – Tensions Within: Between Home and Missions – Dangers: Going Native – Changing Theology at Home – Conclusion Chapter II: A Tale of Two Moderns: Pentecostal Higher Education and the Battle of Bethany……………..……………………………….……………… 127 Bethany University – The Shut Down – The Other Story… Facebook – Evangelical Higher Education – Education and Church Growth – Bible College vs. Liberal Arts College – Bethany Lost Its Way: Bethany and NCN District Story – Fear and Safety in NCN Culture – The Inoculation: Crisis Pedagogy – Creeping Liberalism –What Makes for Fluidity? Reciprocity? Or Spirit? – Other Caveats – Fundamentalism vs. Evangelicalism Chapter III: How Does One Grow? Debates Between Fundamentalist Separatism and Evangelical Expansion……………….…………….……… 190 Bethany Took One Route: Evangelicalism – Enclave Culture – Evangelicalism as Change – For Some It Meant Death – But… – Both… Embattled and Thriving – Conclusion iii! ! Section II: Cultivation Chapter IV: Pentecostal Body Logics: Cultivating a Modern Sensorium……. 214 Case Study 1: Bethany University – Case Study 2: The Promise Keepers – Cultivation and Modernity – Utopian Possibilities – Conclusion Chapter 5: Cultivating Discontinuity: To Nurture and Contain Rupture….... 247 The nudge: Reed’s Story – Cultivation – Early Pentecostal Tarrying – Bethany Cultivation – Texts Teaching Gifts – Containing Rupture – Containing Rupture II: Training Texts – Rupture – Epilogue Chapter VI: Cultivating Sensory Aptitudes Organizing Modernity……......... 273 Cultivation The Texts: Self-Development – Cultivation The Texts: Systematic and Yielded – Cultivation The Texts: Uncertainty – Cultivation The Practice: Modernity – Modern Cultivation: Therapeutic Culture – Cultivation Theory – Ritual Theory – Cultivation Theory: Volitional Affect – Conclusion Epilogue to Cultivation: Scaling Anthropology………………………….......… 340 Scale and Scale Effects – Pentecostal Scale Battles – Scale and False Consciousness – Conclusion Section III: Cultivation and Discontinuity The Mobilization Philosophy and Politics of Pentecostalism Alongside Post-Structural Debates on Resistance, Event, and Agency. Chapter VII: Modern Agency-Anxiety and Pentecostalism…………..…….… 353 A True Story – Agency, An Introduction – Modern Agency-Anxiety – Post- structural Agency-Anxiety – Pentecostal Agency-Anxiety – One Agent: The Pentecostal Scholar – Irrational is Agentive – Irrational is Without Agency – Collective Effervescence: Agency? – Yielding: Agency? – Refiguring Agency vis a vis the Pentecostal Challenge: Collective Mimesis – Refiguring Agency: Agency in Submission_R Marie Griffith – Refiguring Agency: Inhabiting a Tradition_Saba Mahmood – Agency: Relational Hierarchies –Conclusion Chapter VIII: Do the Subaltern Speak in Tongues? ……………………..…… 398 Romanticizing Immediacy, Resistance, and the Event – Opening: One Pentecostal World – Opening: One Theory World – The Post-Structural Context – The iv! ! Romanticization of Immediacy: Spontaneous Events – Post-structural Critique as Evental Limit-Experience – Rupture or Limit-Experience as a Concrete Solution – Resistance to Linguistic Totalization – Do The Subaltern Speak in Tongues? – Pentecostals and Social Change – Is There A Politics Here? – Could There Be A Politics Here? – Conclusion Conclusion Love, Secularism, and the Future of Pentecostal Cultivation………………..... 455 Pentecostal Effects on Evangelicalism, The Christian Right, and Global Christianity? – The Impact of Bethany Pedagogy: From Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism – Are Young Evangelicals Skewing More Liberal? – Is Secularism Coming? – Cultivation – Dangers of Cultivation – Cultivation as Utopian Bibliography………………………………………………………………..…..… 480 v! ! Abstract: Pentecostal Missionary Training: Cultivating Body Logics, Converting Missionaries, Building A Movement Josh Brahinsky 2014 This dissertation explores missionary training pedagogies among the Assemblies of God (AG), a global pentecostal fellowship. Tensions between systematicity and the sensory manifesting via meticulous pedagogies, portable body logics, and evental ruptures contributed to AG’s growth from a few thousand to over 67 million in the past 100 years. “Missionary conversions” meant US missionaries transformed political- theology through encounter with postcolonial interlocutors and came home to provoke AG with newfound cultural sensitivity and compassion ministries. Similarly, pedagogy at AG's Bethany University inoculated students against secularism via encounter with it. Thus, AG shifted from rigid fundamentalism to a more fluid evangelicalism with kingdom theology challenging previous pessimistic premillenialisms. Bethany was closed through a schism between evangelical- pentecostals and fundamentalist-pentecostals in 2011. Tracing techniques that render bodies capable of mystical experience from 1800s radical evangelicals to current AG practice and its training manuals suggests that instead of “discipline” or the “Age of Mobilization,” cultivating tension between systematicity and the sensory characterizes modern evangelicalism, perhaps modernity itself. For pentecostals “cultivation” signals collective self-fashioning that vi! ! aspires towards skilled yielding to the Holy Spirit. As such, modern religiosity might be less about turning inward, than about inhabiting modern rationality. Further, pentecostal practice provides a foil for post-structural mobilization theories responding to similar tensions within modernity. Resonances between pentecostal missionary strategies and post-structural “agency,” “resistance,” and the “event” when thought with the pentecostal penchant for right wing politics suggests such strategies are politically empty. That pentecostals incite Western agency- anxiety with collective and yielded practices stretches agency to include explicit rendering of relational hierarchies and the recognition of scale effects and scale battles. In all, pentecostal volitional affect involves sedimenting practices of mutability into the bodies of practitioners via the rhythmic cellular thrumming of flesh, church, and doctrine. Here, ephemeral sensations and testimony solidify into durable sensibilities, aptitudes, and rites, congeal as tradition tied to training texts or scripture, and the crystalline structures enabling rupture - conversion, experience of spirit, and schism – emerge to catch the edges of modern capitalist proliferation and suggest a model for mobilization effective in a period of neoliberal globalization. vii! ! Outline: The dissertation is divided into four sections as follows: 1. Reciprocity - Fundamentalist AG missionaries go out into the world, come home changed, change their home churches and universities and cause a battle between fundamentalists and evangelicals within AG. Clarifies that distinctions between evangelical and fundamentalist might pivot upon differing sensibilities built from evangelism and separatism. 2. Cultivation – Describes the training mechanisms developed within AG and how they are disseminated and internalized by practitioners. Develops the notion of portable “body logics” as sedimented elements in pentecostal efforts to nurture and contain the sensory aptitudes that engage ruptural transformation.