Ethnic Church Meets Megachurch

Download or read book Ethnic Church Meets Megachurch written by Prema A. Kurien and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book exposes the profound impact American evangelicalism is having on the religious lives of contemporary Christian immigrants, and the pressures immigrant churches face to incorporate evangelical worship styles, often at the expense of maintaining their ethnic character and support systems. Most interestingly, it shows that the integration patterns of post-1965 Christian immigrants and their descendants have essentially reversed earlier models. While immigrants from Europe and their children were expected to shed their ethnic identities to become Americans, in the sphere of religion, they could maintain their ethnic traditions within American denominations. This book shows that members of the contemporary second generation are incorporating into U.S. society by maintaining their ethnic identities in secular contexts but are adopting a de-ethnicized religious identity and practice. In particular, many are gravitating toward evangelical megachurches. Drawing on multi-site research in the U.S. and India, this book also provides a global perspective on religion, demonstrating the variety of ways in which transnational processes affect religious organizations and their members, and how forces of globalization, from the period of colonialism to contemporary out-migration, have brought tremendous changes among Christian communities in the Global South. Book jacket.