If you key JIAM into the search engine at youtube.com you will find some other videos I managed to sneak at our visit to Jesus Is Alive Ministries in Nairobi a couple of weeks ago. My apologies for the poor quality of the video, but it was made with a mobile phone, so go figure.
After our visit to JIAM on the Sunday morning we were greeted at the university by a key researcher into JIAM and the rise of evangelicalism in Kenya. Philomena Mwaura, senior lecturer at Kenyatta University, gave us some interesting background into Bishop Margaret. Unlike what I had presumed, Margaret was actually ordained a bishop by another evangelical bishop about six years ago. Before then she had started a small church on the outskirts of Nairobi’s slums. Her small following had started after years of preaching in the main square in front of Kenya’s parliament house, where she preached that true reform and the end of corruption will only come when Kenya’s people turn to the Lord. From very humble beginnings, she fell pregnant early in her adulthood and worked a variety of part-time jobs in order to maintain a basic standard of living for her and her child, while her real energy was invested in ministry and preaching.
So when people who know her watch her preach and listen to her words they are not blinded my the ignorance that hit me as I witnessed her work. Though it’s difficult to see in the video, her crystal earrings and necklace (worth about 3000USD apparently), were screaming “hypocrisy” at me while her voice told the crowd that God loves the poor, suffering always comes before glory, and God wants us all to live justly. But in our conversation David Morgan mentioned that the audience would see the jewellery as marks of a woman who had undergone suffering and poverty, and through faith, and come out the other side. Her display of riches, therefore would be a display of her authority of one who lives in faith and humbly accepts its spoils.
Indeed, Bishop Margaret and her entourage of appropriately coloured staff (blue and black suits for the boys, pink dress suits for the girls) were not ashamed of the gospel of prosperity. Though she believed no glory comes before suffering, she boldly exclaimed that suffering would never be the end for the believer, to the extent that those who heard her could shout to the Lord that their time has come and their payment is due, confident in the knowledge that God does hear and will acquiesce to the demands of the faithful. With that kind of confidence only joy could ensue, and thus the room was filled with praise and elation that could not be quietened.
Yet unlike in the churches of famous Australian evangelical megachurches, there were no ads, nobody wanted you to buy their CD or videos, or give them your credit card numbers, nobody prayed that your friends or neighbours should pay for podcasts or subscribe to their online newsletter. But though nobody suggested how much you should give, there was a lot of giving.
In our conversation at the university, Juan Carlos mentioned that when he attends services like JIAM, the Catholic in him always asks “Where is the sacrament in this worship?” Sacrament was definitely present. In the giving of money. A ritual more foreign than I have ever seen took place at JIAM around the offering of money. No notes or coins were seen in the church, everything was in envelopes, as if money is both desired and despised, and therefore must be clothed in dignity. After Bishop Margaret’s sermon members of the congregation were called to the sanctuary steps, where they held their envelopes in the air. Margaret blessed the funds and talked a little about the various welfare and evangelism projects of JIAM where they are headed. Then the congregation threw the envelopes on the steps. No envelope exchanged hands, it seemed. All money hit the floor in front of the lecturn before being picked up by a worship staff member. While more payers were said, and blessings were distributed by Bishop Margaret to people, their car keys, their work visas, more envelopes were laid or thrown at her feet. It was as if the money must receive the public blessing before it is taken away, as if it does not belong to them until it is given to the altar first. As if it is not given to them at all, but to God and God’s temple.
This Pentecostal ritual resonated more with my Catholic upbringing than with my Protestant adulthood. At JIAM I saw people connecting with their priest and with their church not as a community of people, but as an audience of individuals. Here I saw, through the sacrament of giving, people connecting with a sense of the church as ekklesia. Their priest and the sanctuary from which she spoke were the conduits to a knowledge of the power of God at work in the world through the church at large. It reminds me of the sacrament of Holy Communion I participated in every Sunday at St Marys Help of Christians Parish where I grew up, where we knelt before an altar that only the priest could touch, that only through him and his space would I meet God and be the church.
This is so unlike the Uniting Church sense of sacrament that I participate in now, where ekklesia is devalued somewhat in favour of its counterpart definition of church, koinonia, where the church at large is recognised but what is valued more highly is the presence of people around me in that particular space and time, and the notion that these people around me and with me will help bring me to God, for God resides among them. At JIAM I saw attempts at connecting audience members with each other, yet it seemed only token, only rhetorical, where words and dances with each other were part of the routine that served more to promote the authority of those who led them.
If a sense of being church could be explained in polarities like ekklesia and koinonia, and I don’t think they justifiably can, then JIAM shows a return to almost Catholic ritual, a lament for that part of being church that the Protestants wanted to play down. Am I right, or have I missed something?
In the centre of this group of strapping males is Stewart Hoover, professor at the University of Boulder in Colorado. Stewart is a prolific 
David Morgan, pictured behind the lappy here, wrote (among other books) Visual Piety which was the first nonfiction books that I read in one sitting. I was rapt by his insight, poetry and humour. One day over coffee he told me he was a little preoccupied with the presentation he was about to give us and I told him “Dude, you’re David Morgan”. Sure enough, we were treated to a riveting and bloody funny presentation about something that could otherwise be quite serious and boring – a history of the use of images for popular devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We were taken through a series of changes of popular images that I was brought up with in my Catholic childhood (parts of which I could never really understand as a kid), and how people like my grandparents used these images to connect with God.
These lovely people are Paulo Gasparetto and Milja Radovic. Paulo lives near Porto Alegre in Brazil. He was born in the Veneto and, since his Italian was better than his English and my Italian was better than my Portuguese, we managed to have some pretty cool conversations. His research is on the mediatisation of public religion (Catholicism) in Brazil, and in particular a case study on a religious television station called TV Cancao Nova, out of which a massive religious movement has been born. He has a lot of interesting stuff to talk about on how television has aided the movement of the Catholic Church in Brazil away from liberation theology towards conservatism, even a certain brand of evangelicalism. I hope the fellowship will be able to get his work translated into English.
This is Patricia Bustamante, from Colombia and studying at the University of Rome. She is researching the interplay between religion and modes of communication in indigenous communities. Her case study is the use of radio to promote tribal narratives, symbols, values and beliefs among the Nasa tribe in southwest Colombia. Patricia promises me the grand tour should I ever manage to get there, so I’m making plans for 2008 (after a short stop in Porto Alegre via Serbia).
The guy on the left in this picture is Juan Carlos Enriquez (2006 and 2007 recipient of the Paul Teusner prize for the planet’s coolest name). He is from Mexico and studying at Boston College. His research is on how popular media impact on the operational belief systems of audiences, and his case study is on popular esotericism, and the response of audiences to films such as The Da Vinci Code and What the Bleep Do We Know?. He’s done a lot of audience research in Mexico and South America, so most of his data is in Spanish (bummer – yet another language to learn). Next to him in the picture is John, the University of East Africa’s Vice-Chancellor’s personal assistant. He spent the entire conference with us, making sure we had everything he wanted. So naturally he worked extremely hard. Everything we could ever want was at our disposal, even a car (and driver) should we want to escape.
Here are Africanus Diedong and Joseph Vallikatt. Africanus has recently completed his PhD with the fellowship, and now is the director of the communications department for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Ghana. From his presentation we were impressed at how huge his department is (I think most Ghanaians are Catholic, thus quite big dioceses), and his responsibilities include oversight of Catholic publications as well as the presence of the bishops in the secular media. Thank God George Pell aint one of his bishops – with a PR job like that we would never see him again. Africanus also studied in Rome, so a lot of Italian was spoken in Nairobi that week.