Church, Bureaucracy, and State. Bureaucratic ...

Church, Bureaucracy, and State. Bureaucratic Formalization in a Pentecostal Church of Zambia Author(s): Thomas G. Kirsch Source: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd. 128, H. 2 (2003), pp. 213-231 Published by: Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25842916 . Accessed: 18/12/2013 11:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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Church, Bureaucracy, and State. Bureaucratic Formalization in a Pentecostal Church ofZambia Thomas G. Kirsch Inscicuc für Ethnologie, Marein-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, D-06099 Halle (Saale)

Abstract. The arcicle examines the role of formal organization in a propher-healing church in ehe rural areas of sourhern Zambia. Ic is argued that the leadership of this church strives to attain a cercain organizational compatibility with Zambian state agencies by adopting bureaucracic feacures. Such "mimetic isomorphism" represents a self-proceccive measure of the church against ehe threac ofbeing outlawed by the state. When being incorporated, however, the bureaucratic feacures become accommodated to local concepcions of religious power. Since positions of authority in the respective church depend on ascriptions of spiritual capability such as prophesying or healing, chis accommodation creates a configuracion where bureaucratic procedures are conflaced wich discourses and praccices of a charismatic type. What emerges is a "charismacic bureaucracy" thac is oriented towards the scate and simulcaneously represencs a withdrawal from its ambit. [African Christianity, charisma, formal organization, state, 2:ambia]

lntroduction

In studies of religion in sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between Christian movements and state powers has always been one of the main areas of research. 1 Besides examining missionary societies and their associations with and dissociations from colonial and post-colonial agencies, such investigations have concentrated on indigenous churches and movements that have separated from their original mission bodies and become autonomous. The term ''African Independent Churches", which is commonly used for these movements, not only refers to their organizational and doctrinal independence from Western forms of Christianity, it frequently also connotes a detached or even antagonistic relacionship between forms of Christianity that originated in Africa and dominant state structures.

1 For an excellent overview, sec Ranger 1986; more recent works on church-state relations in Southern Africa include e.g. Gifford 1998, Maxwell 2000, Phiri 1999, and Smith 1999.

Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 128 (2003) 213-231

© 2003 Dietrich Reimer Verlag


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Historical case studies into phenomena like the Chilembwe Rising in Nyasaland (Shepperson/Price 1958) or the Northern Rhodesian Watchtower movement (Cross 1973) showed how the newly emerging "religions of the oppressed" (cf. Lanternari 1965) actively opposed the hegemony of colonial powers during the early decades of the twentieth century. The conflicts that arose, which were pardy due to restrictions against the founding of indigenous associations, led some scholars to the conclusion that such movements actually constitute proto-political or even proto-nationalist religions (e.g. Balandier 1955; Rotberg 1965; Wipper 1977). Others, like Lucy Mair (1968) and Robert Buijtenhuijs (1985), maintained that the millenarianism of many African indigenous churches implies that they constitute "counter-societies" and that they provide "compensation for practical disappointments, ( ... ) not a reinforcement of political action but a substitute for it" (Mair 1968: 116). Despite their opposing claims, these two approaches have in common the fact that they treat church-state relations as existing in the political realm, in the form of either local aspirations for political participation in religious guise, or of a deliberate refusal of political engagement. Concerning the latter point, George Shepperson remarks, "Of course, even if a church is completely opposed to any form of political action, it still plays a political role by its very action of dissuading its members from participation in politics" (1963: 87). And even other perspectives, which either point out instances of open collaboration between African churches and state agencies (cf. Maxwell 2000) or emphasize their rather unintentional acquiescence (cf. Schoffeleers 1991), base their assessments of churchstate relationships on the question of whether there is any discernible involvement in

politics. lt is certainly undeniable chat ehe attitude of churches towards state agencies in Africa has always been politically charged, oscillating between different forms of resistance, disengagement, accommodation, or collaboration. Yet it seems that, by concentrating mainly on the political dimensions of church-state relations, other dimensions have been rather neglected so far. In an article on the organizational and legal aspect ofchurchlstate interaction, Wim van Binsbergen observes that social scientists working on Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa have "failed to problematise the successful implantation, rapid spread, and creative adaptation and transformation of the imported model of the formal bureaucratic organization on African soil" (199Y ). His analysis of post-colonial Botswana demonstrates how the institutional framework of churchstate interactions increased the organizational formalization of African Independent Churches.

2 The short version of van Binsbergen's artide The State andAfrican Independent Churches in Botswana appeared in the volume Power and prayer: Essays on religion and politics (Bax, M./Koster, A. [eds.]: 1994, Amsterdam: University Press, pp. 24-56). An extended version of this artide can be found on Wim van Binsbergen's homepage (http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/ botsO.htm). This quotation and all forthcoming references to van Binsbergen (1993) are taken from this webpage.


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Taking up this perspecrive, I will here attempt to explore some aspects of churchstate relationships that evolve implicitly and on the basis of an organizational "mimetic isomorphism" (DiMaggio/Powell 1983). By advancing the case study ofa contemporary African Independent Church in Zambia I will demonstrate how imaginings and anticipations concerning a potentially coercive state lead to a mimetic incorporation of bureaucratization by African Christians. This appropriation, it will be argued, is characterized by a blending of bureaucracy and charisma which simultaneously represents an accommodation towards the Zambian state and a wirhdrawal from its ambit. 3

Formalizing social relations In his seminal study The State and African Independent Churches in Botswana, Wim van Binsbergen (1993) demonstrates how interactions with state agencies have stimulatedAfrican Independent Churches in post-colonial Botswana to formalize their organizations. Starting with the Societies' Act of 1972, state agencies in Botswana endeavored to contain and control the proliferation and practices of these movements by incorporating them into a formalized procedure of church registration. On the basis of a quantitative analysis ofdocumentary evidence held by the Registrar of Societies and of qualitative studies of cases like the Guta Ra Mwari church, van Binsbergen argues that such incorporation actually took the form of "co-optation": Christian idioms of expression came to be integrated into the discourses of state agencies and representatives, while the African Independent Churches were prompted to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements for being legally registered. By registering churches, the administration brought its influence to bear on, for example, the naming of denominations and their constitutions. According to van Binsbergen, formal registration thus enhanced accommodation: "Names chosen for such good reasons as personal preference, a prophet's dreams, their time-honored emotional and symbolic power( ... ), distance from yet recognizable association with a parent body from which one has broken away, are put to the test of bureaucratic adequacy, ethnic and linguistic acceptability, juridically unequivocal identification. Offices, election to which is supposed to be governed by divine inspiration or hereditary succession, have to be re-defined so as to fit in with, e.g., 'the democratic spirit of the Botswana constitution'. Unspeakable

This article is the extended version of a paper given at the EASA-conference in Krakow (2000) and at the DGV-conference in Göttingen (2001). 1 want to thank the organizers of the panel "Der Staat im Alltag'', Thomas Bierschenk, Pierre-Yves LeMeur and Richard Rottenburg, for their helpful commemaries; and 1 am also grateful to Franziska Becker, Gertrud Hüwelmeier and especially Werner Schiffauer who thoughtfully commented an earlier version of the article. For a detailed version of the argument presented here, see Kirsch 2002. 3


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conflicts which ought never to arise in a living, inspired church have to be considered and catered for long before they inevitably do arise." (van Binsbergen 1993). Such rethinking and reshaping of previous practices in the face of state-defined demands is certainly highly significant for any research on African Christian bureaucratization. But although van Binsbergen demands a close study of the "implantation, rapid spread, and creative adaptation and transformation of the imported model of the formal bureaucratic organization on African soil" (1993; my italics), his own analysis tends to treat formalized organization as a "logic" that is rather "alien" to African Christian movements. Instead of devoting more attention to the question of how African Christians actually adapt and incorporate organizational formalism - thus making it inevitably part of their own practice -van Binsbergen considers "bureaucratic logic (... ) often irrelevant and alien to their original orientation". If the term "original" is here understood to mean previously held, this quotation helps us specify the cases van Binsbergen seems to be referring to, namely those churches that had no formalized organization before being confronted with state-defined bureaucratic requirements. The bureaucratization of the churches induced by the state, then, would atfirst actually represent something external to such churches. Yet in most cases it appears questionable to me where this initial externality ought to be located: The ethnography of both contemporaty and historical Christian movements in Africa suggests that most churches have in some way or another had a formalized hierarchy and a variety of church offices since their very foundation: indeed, many of them outline and document their religious practice in texts such as constitutions, registers and reports. 4 Formalized organization, after all, is a gradual matter, not something that can be said to be simply "present" or "absent" (cf. Zucker 1977: 726). And, as the case study below will show, organizational formalism does not only arise in situations of immediate contact with state agencies. Van Binsbergen also argues that the practice ofbureaucracy might impose "demands upon the churches which run so much counter to their doctrine, liturgy and general orientation that they have to present an official bureaucratic front, a compromise to bureaucratic discourse, which may greatly deviate from actual church practice" (van Binsbergen 1993; my italics). Here, we have an "official bureaucratic front", one which is depicted as a fas;ade that shows itself but at the same time conceals something,

4 Three examples from the history of indigenous Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa: Tomo Nyrienda, a witchfinder ofNorthern Rhodesia who had been influenced by the teachings ofWatchtower and who in the 1920s came to dubious fame because ofhaving killed several hundred alleged witches, kept registers of the baptized and introduced to his followers the "outlines of a literate administration" (Ranger 1975: 50-51). Efraim Andersson in his study of Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo (1958: 160161) describes that the prophet Sebuloni Nsonde in the years 1934-35 issued member and congregation cards as weil as "passports to heaven". And Andrew Roberts remarks that the Zambian Lumpa Church under the leadership of the prophetess Alice Lenshina was characterized by a "carefully regulated hierarchy'' (1970: 16) and to have been in the possession of a !ist of church mies (cf. Oger 1960 for a reprint of this church constitution).


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namely "actual church practice". At a later stage of my argument, we will return to the interesting notion of a double gesture of presentation and concealment in formalized organizations. Yet, at this point in our considerations, we should be careful not to equate "bureaucratic front" with mere simulation: the notion of a fa