The megachurch is an exceptional recent religious trend, certainly within Christian spheres. Spreading from the USA, megachurches now reached reach different global contexts. The edited volume Handbook of Megachurches offers a comprehensive account of the subject from various academic perspectives.

The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches provides a survey of global megachurch phenomena, with an international slate of authors introducing existing and emerging research on a wide variety of relevant topics. Over the past decade, the field of megachurch studies has matured and become global in its scope and orientation. The Handbook offers 33 chapters by top scholars in the field, focusing in particular on: The location, demographic nature, and transnational connections of megachurches. Megachurch worship, hermeneutics, and theology (in theory and practice). Megachurch institutional dynamics. The various ways that megachurches have both influenced and been influenced by their social contexts in terms of class, age, gender, sexuality, and pop culture. The Handbook's interdisciplinary orientation makes it essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, media specialists, pop culture observers, business strategists, leadership consultants, marketing analysts, scholars of religion, and Christian historians, theologians, and missiologists. Experienced scholars of megachurches will gain valuable insight into aspects of megachurch research beyond their own specializations. Scholars new to the field will find the chapters useful as signposts for where to begin their own academic exploration. Christian pastors and laypeople will learn more about this increasingly prominent and influential form of their faith.

Six chapters include: A General Overview of Professional Ethics; The Legal Profession and the Kenyan System; Advocate-Client Relationship; Unqualified Persons Acting as Advocates; Remuneration of Advocates; Professional Misconduct and offenses by Advocates.

Christian and Islamic sermons from past and present, and their preachers, are analyzed to reveal the socio-cultural dynamics of religious speeches. Part I focuses on the explicit contribution of sermons in socio-cultural transformation processes. It shows how sermons connect with holy texts, religious norms of the specific group, and social-cultural contexts. Part II analyzes the dynamic tension between normativity and popularity. Rather than juxtaposing normative stances and the popularity of sermons, it shows how that normativity can itself contribute to popularity and the quest of popularity carries its own normative stances. Part III explores the ritual embeddedness of religious speech in the sermon in relation to social dynamics, normativity, and popularity, and shows how speech and rituals have a reciprocal relationship.

What does it mean for the spirit world to be real? Scholars from different disciplines investigate this topic focusing on the role played by the spiritual realm in Pentecostalized Africa. The grammatical angle of their research proves to be a fruitful avenue to clarify the kind of reality or realities the spirit world has. This novel approach takes us beyond most existing research by investigating the often unaddressed assumption that we know what it means for the spirit world to be taken as real. This volume shows the importance of paying close attention to the grammar according to which people speak of spirits, Spirit, witchcraft, ancestors and other aspects of the spirit world.

The Routledge International Handbook of Sociology and Christianity examines the intersection of the sociology of religion – a long-standing focus of sociology as a discipline – and Christianity – the world’s largest religion. An internationally representative and thematically comprehensive collection, it analyzes both the sociology of Christianity and Christian approaches to sociology, with attention to the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches of Christianity. An authoritative, state-of-the-art review of current research, it is organized into five inter-connected thematic sections, considering the overlapping emergence of both the Christian religion and the social science, the conceptualization of and engagement with Christianity by sociological theory, the ways in which Christianity shapes and is shaped by various social institutions, the manner in which Christianity resists and promotes various forms of social change, and the identification, diagnosis, and correction of social problems by sociology and Christianity. This volume is an invaluable collection for scholars and advanced students, with special appeal for those working in the fields of sociology and social theory, as well as religious studies and theology

Drawing upon the scholarship of eminent academics and practitioners in the field of Pentecostal and Charismatic studies, this anthology puts into the public domain theological and sociological literature that posits contemporary thinking in key areas of British Pentecostal and Charismatic thought. Contributors include: Professor Anne E. Dyer (Mattersey Hall), Professor William K. Kay (Chester University), Professor David Hilborn, (Moorlands College), Dr R. David Muir (University of Roehampton) and Dr Babatunde A. Adedibu (Redeemed Christian Bible College, Nigeria).

This book calls Protestant churches, and the ELCA in particular, to a church-wide conversation about racism. It is a response to the 2019 book Dear Church by Lenny Duncan, a former Lutheran pastor who is Black and who, among other reparations, calls for changing the church's worship in order to address segregated Sundays. Changes in worship affect theological foundations. Informed consideration is essential. Because entering into life-changing conversations requires vulnerability and commitment, this book includes several narratives: my life as a White woman and pastor, the history of the Black church as defined by Black theologians, the development of the liturgical renewal movement, and my experiences as a professor navigating worship conflicts as my seminary struggled with financial constraints and a changing student body. The seminary conflicts offered me a window into how better to address racism inspired by the example of post-WWII German truth-telling and how some US Southern states have come to grips with the history of the Jim Crow South (described in Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans). This book outlines a way forward for churches in responding to racism by encouraging healthy engagement with contentious relationships as a necessity for healing.

How do urbanization and development intersect with religious dynamics to shape contemporary African cityscapes? To answer this timely question, contributors from across Europe, North America and Africa are brought together to explore mega-cities including Lagos, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa as powerful venues for the creation and implementation of religious models of urbanization and development. This book interrogates how religious socio-spatial models and strategies engage with challenges of infrastructural development, urban social cohesion, inequalities and inclusion. Chapters explore how faith-based practices of urban and infrastructural development link moral subjectivities with individual and wider aspirations for modernization, change, deliverance and prosperity. The volume brings together ethnographically rich and theoretically grounded case studies of religious urbanization across the African continent. It advances discussions of the ambivalent role of urban religion in development and documents the complex, multifaceted socio-cultural and political dynamics associated with religious urbanization in Africa.

"When did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expanded into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently have been at the forefront of new forms of global Pentecostalism. She shows how new and reconfigured forms Christianity in both the Global North and South are increasingly digitally mediated, engaged with youth and popular cultures, and involve new forms of consumption, branding and identity. The Australian megachurch Hillsong has expanded globally through a Cool Christianity style which embraces pop music, digital media, spectacle, branding, and celebrity culture. Rocha follows young Brazilians from their budding Hillsong fandom, to their journey to Australia to join the church and study at its College, and on their return to Brazil. She argues that Brazilian middle-class youth join Hillsong to become cosmopolitan and to distinguish themselves from the Pentecostalism of the Brazilian poor. Notwithstanding Hillsong's recent scandals, the megachurch offers them an alternative geography of belonging, where pastors speak English and Christianity is about love, ethics, rationality, autonomy, and more equal relations between congregants and pastors. Rocha makes a strong argument for the importance of the local in globalization studies, and the key roles of class, affect and aesthetics for an understanding of the formation of religious subjectivities and communities"--