Abstract:
This article focuses on the infrequency with which “gifts of the Spirit” are experienced during
services at a small Pentecostal church in Pretoria, attended mostly by Afrikaans-speaking men
who self-identify as homosexual. It aims to shed some light on the ways in which pastors work
to shape churchgoers’ perceptions of the world, their place in it, as well as how experiences
of marginalisation and suffering relate to spirits (and their absence) that are understood to
mediate between heaven and earth. I argue that difficulties related to the cultivation of faith,
on which relationships with the divine are constructed, frustrate direct experiences of spiritual
gifts. I also show that certain steps are taken in this church, with varying degrees of success,
to try and render the invisible corporeally present. An analysis of sermons is folded into a
broader discussion of spiritual self-fashioning and the roles of technologies of the self within
the church in an attempt to provide an inclusive, broad-based analysis of “gifts of the Spirit” in
a Pentecostal Charismatic Church (PCC) that engages with religious belief on its own terms
