Learning how to feel: Spiritual knowledge and emotionally-based narratives of social transformation amongst Nigerian and Congolese pastors in diaspora

The celebration of conferences, the articulation of visions with spiritual gifts and the teachings on everyday life orientate Pentecostal migrants to develop personal skills, frame interpersonal challenges and ‘tune’ their minds to understand sentiments and emotions. Either in Africa or outside Africa, Pentecostal churches affect congregants though a set of multi-level activities in which transformation is the effect of rules of which obedience must be acknowledged.

As part of an ongoing doctoral research carried out in Bilbao, Spain, and, Johannesburg, South Africa this research engages with the current debates on emotions and social transformation exploring their places within church leaders’ narratives within a migratory milieu. Moreover, Cazarin analyses here the modus operandi of Nigerian and Congolese church leaders on articulating congregants’ emotional responses (hope, fear, love, suffering, etc) with everyday life in a foreign city by presenting and exploring three scales in which this process takes place. In doing so, Cazarin intends to related these geographically distant cases by a mutual, recognisable set of emotionally-based interactions, narratives and practices that frames the Pentecostal discourse on transformation.