Stream of miracles : a Christian Pakistani community in Malta

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on The Church of Sacred Anointing (TCSA), an ethnic church founded a decade ago to serve the community of Pakistani nurses who had just arrived on the island to work in state hospitals. Since then, the religious community has grown exponentially, from only five members to over 170. This rapid growth was possible because the founder of the church positioned TCSA as non-denominational, enabling people from different Christian backgrounds to become members. I examine the role of the ethnic church in the lives of its congregation. In comparison with global Evangelicalism, there are interesting differences of practice, rhetoric and emphasis, which I seek to explain. What emerges is that while the initial motivation to join the church is often linked to a cultural strategy of adaptation and a quest to reconstruct their identity as migrants in a new country, over time the congregants re-engage with their faith and are drawn into the spiritual experience and communal ethos of TCSA. At this point any sense of utilitarian pragmatism is dispelled, as the congregants experience a shift in their moral universe, and they start to experience the stream of miracles bestowed upon them by God. Within TCSA, a miracle effects a life-transforming change in the quality of life and status of the grateful recipients. I argue that it is not experienced, nor should it be analytically understood, as simply a quasi-magical transformation of the ‘external world’. Miracles are experienced as an act of transformative communication of moral experience. They transform both the world and the congregation, which participates in their occurrence and reproduction.