Pastors as Mediators of Respect in African American Pentecostal Churches

This article explores how two African American Pentecostal pastors in Buffalo, New York (USA) promote a phenomenology of respect as they link imperatives to labour for the good of others to the need to discern God’s purposes. In African American communities, church leadership has long elicited respect because pastoring is hard work, important elements of which consist of encouraging other members to labour for the church and seeking insights from God about believers’ lived situations. Respect is likewise key to believers’ relationships with God, in that pastors promote techniques that encourage them not only to recognise spiritual beings but to respect and obey God and their leaders. As a result, acts of respect shape bodily knowledge about relationships with powerful human and spiritual others. Such enactments of respect counter suspicions of exploitation that accompany relations of dependence among the urban poor, so that believers’ idioms of intercorporeal connection provide means for them to reflect on who has worked on behalf or taken advantage of others.