"In 1905, Weber contended that uncertainty about their eternal fate forced Protestants to find secular signs of their destiny in their vocations, their frugality and in their ability to work hard and accumulate capital. More than a century later, the ‘Protestant ethic’ has changed irrevocably. T ... oday, the phenomenal rise of Pentecostal–Charismatic Churches has largely displaced the doctrine of predestination and firmly entrenched the prosperity gospel at the very heart of popular Protestantism. In many African PCCs, the pursuit of ‘blessings’ now trumps older concerns over secular vocations and hard work. Indeed, in churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), Christians are urged to demand ‘miracle jobs’ from God and to reject humble vocations and small salaries, regardless of their qualifications, skills or experience. Based on long-term fieldwork with members of the UCKG in South Africa, this paper examines the work of luck (good and bad) in the lives of ordinary believers, how this new ‘work’ attempts to regulate the flow of money and how it participates in older notions of prosperity, fate and good fortune." (Abstract) more

"The UCKG’s phenomenal success in post-apartheid South Africa had been a source of much speculation. Scholars generally attributed the church’s growth to new political and economic processes while the South African media and the church’s critics suspected that the UCKG’s attraction was caref ... ully manipulated by a predatory multinational business. Beyond the structural reasons why the UCKG might be attractive to South Africans, I have paid attention in this chapter to local “cultural” reasons why the church had such wide appeal. I showed that the church’s prosperity gospel and its spiritual warfare provided “answers” that were almost immediately grasped by people in search of religious efficacy. The UCKG’s “answers” were also contingent in ways that converged with local ideas about witchcraft and the flow of prosperity from the spiritual to the material world. Unlike other Christian churches then, the uckg did not offer attendees at its services an escape from the work of evil in the world. Instead, the church depicted Christians as fundamentally constrained because of their situatedness in the world and their fallibility as transactors with their spiritual benefactor. In the UCKG then, people were often told that their blessings would not materialise unless they tithed and sacrificed to God. Although this version of Christianity was arguably less poetic or hopeful than the millenarian promises of other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches, it rang true for many South Africans who remained poor, ill and unhappy despite political liberation. As one of my friends in the church remarked, “They are not new but their message is very strong.” more

"The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic churches (PCCs), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be dev ... oid of ‘emotions’, that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are ‘useless’ in materialising God’s blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s." (Publisher description) more