Neo-Pentecostal Missionaries in Latvia: A Network of the Anointed

For a long time, sociologists and anthropologists of religion have done most of their research on denominations, churches, or missions as relatively isolated entities. I want to suggest that along the concepts that describe religious bodies we pay more attention to the agents who are building networks, both across different sections of religious arena and across national and linguistic boundaries. My focus in this paper is on neo-Pentecostalism and I want to argue that a key to their success has been the structure of their organizations, including the missionary ones. To demonstrate this, I will present an ethnography of the charismatic Christian communities in Latvia.
Religious organizations can be viewed as agents or participants in complex, and often international projects (in such fields as evangelization, religious education, charity work, broadcasting etc.). That may be one of the reasons why network analysis as a research method has won an increasing recognition in sociological studies of religion in recent decades. I will attempt to demonstrate here that the developments in the life of religious communities also reflect broader trends in the contemporary globalizing world in which economic, cultural and political processes intertwine in a number of complex ways.