(Re-)Placing Pentecostalism: Swedish Mission and the idea of the Baltic

Abstract

I draw on fieldwork based in the Word of Life Ministry, Sweden, to consider how these neo-Pentecostals have constructed the Baltic as a landscape of both action and imagination. One part of my argument states that we must see the ministry’s attitudes to Sweden and the wider Baltic region in terms of its desire to situate itself within Swedish revivalist history. I also argue, however, that we can fruitfully draw on Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ to trace how the Baltic constitutes a potent spatio-temporal context for the construction of a narrative which encourages Word of Life members to see their missionary role as being contained within, but also looking far beyond, the Baltic Sea region.