Abstract
This is not the first time that Newfrontiers, a network of neo-charismatic churches founded in England during the 1970s, has been the subject of academic research. However, previous scholarship has tended to focus on its nodes in the United Kingdom and has not dealt with what is arguably the most interesting aspect of Newfrontiers, namely, the extensive transnational network established by its largely white, middle class, English founders. This was a network that grew to encompass eight-hundred-and-fifty churches in sixty nations by 2011 and comprised people of widely diverging ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. The present thesis seeks to offer a historical account of this transnational network and, in so doing, demonstrates that its British arm cannot be understood without reference to this much wider transnational community. Through archival research and oral history interviews, the thesis elucidates the mechanisms by which the network expanded, the way it was experienced by those embedded within it - particularly in the UK and South Africa - and the constraints and asymmetries that inevitably characterised its expansion.In so doing, the thesis intervenes in the existing literature on Newfrontiers and the ‘British’ Restoration movement from which it emerged. It also contributes to wider research on transnational neo-charismatic networks and makes three key arguments. First, it argues that the globalisation of Newfrontiers and its Restorationist ideology evinces a different historical trajectory than those that are commonly taken to characterise Restorationist groups in the United Kingdom. Rather than narrating the ‘apogee and decline’ of Newfrontiers or its growing denominationalism, this thesis recounts the mutation of its ideology as it traversed new socio-political and economic contexts. By 2011, the ideas, discourses, and practices of the network had been significantly shaped by this process.
Second, the thesis critiques the positivist and reductionist tendencies of the ‘networks’ concept. It argues that, in order to understand the historical development of neo-charismatic networks, it is necessary to pay attention to the often overlooked emotional and visceral aspects of their transnational connectedness. It does this through analysis of the ‘emotional regime’ of Newfrontiers, paying attention to the way that it valorised deeply affective, familial relationships as the basis of its network. These informed a transnational familial identity that did important rhetorical and emotional work as the network grew and expanded. However, this affectivity was also a source of constraint and tension.
Finally, the study charts the growing efforts of Newfrontiers leaders to redress the material inequalities that the network threw into sharp relief. Relating these to wider discourses about ‘mutuality’ in late twentieth-century world mission, it argues that a ‘transnational charismatic economy’ was constructed by Newfrontiers church leaders and members. In this system of exchange, substantial flows of wealth from the global North to the global South were framed as just one part of a multi-directional set of exchanges that included commodified cultural characteristics and access to charismatic experience. This ‘economy’, moreover, shaped the way that believers in distant parts of the world experienced and interacted with each other.
In making these interventions, the thesis offers an important new analysis of both the history of Newfrontiers and the growth of transnational neo-charismatic networks, of which Newfrontiers is only one of many examples.
| Date of Award | 1 Jun 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Michael Ledger-Lomas (Supervisor) & Uta Balbier (Supervisor) |