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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Spirit-Filled Communities and Their Lived, Everyday Praxes: Modalities of ‘Doing Pentecostalism’ in Hong Kong

presenters

    Christian Nathen Ng

    Nationality: Hong Kong, China

    Residence: Hong Kong, China

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

    Presence:Online

This paper aims to describe and interpret the lived, everyday praxes of Pentecostal adherents in a spiritual sub-culture in Hong Kong. Pentecostalism, a Christian movement with an emphasis on experiences of the Holy Spirit and practices of spiritual gifts, is one of the fastest-growing religious movements worldwide. It has long reached Hong Kong since the early twentieth century. However, Hong Kong Pentecostalism has received insufficient attention in academia. The research question of this paper is: how and why do Pentecostal adherents practice their religion in Hong Kong? The author adopts anthropologist Adam Yuet Chau's theory of modalities of doing religion as the theoretical framework to capture a variety of modalities of practicing Pentecostalism in the local context and interpret their religio-cultural significance. The author argues for a theoretical transferability that Chau's theory can go beyond the Chinese religious context and help capture the modalities of Pentecostalism and possibly other non-Chinese religious movements. The author also discovers several new modalities in the local case of Pentecostalism, namely spiritual warfare modality, festive modality, cell group modality, apostolic–prophetic modality, and evangelistic–missional modality. The author also argues that these Pentecostal modalities may also be selectively embraced by the adherents in different contexts, ranging from the African context to the Asian context. The data in this paper mainly come from the author's four-year participation observation in over 20 Pentecostal and Charismatic churches in Hong Kong, interviews and casual conversations with the adherents, institutional publications, and academic and popular Pentecostal literature. This paper envisages contributing to both the Anthropology of Religion and Global Pentecostal Studies.

Keywords:

Pentecostalism, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, Modalities of Doing Religion, Hong Kong, Global Pentecostal Studies