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The Politics of Becoming a Small ‘Big Man’

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Christianity, Wealth, and Spiritual Power in Ghana

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Abstract

Through an exploration of pastoral trajectories, this chapter unpacks the politics of becoming a small ‘big man’. It discusses pastorship as involving processes of apprenticeship and entrepreneurship. Apprenticeship permits young pastors to draw on the credibility of more senior pastors, but this relation also poses a limit to the possibilities for young pastors to grow. Up-and-coming pastors are entrepreneurial and creative when establishing themselves as church leaders. They draw on various social networks (for instance, family and kin) and establish new relations of less restraining tutelage in this process. In this chapter, I argue that the status a pastor achieves by being a religious expert can be transferred to other fields and improve a pastor’s respectability in families, within other religious networks as well as in the public field.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Karen Lauterbach

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  1. Karen Lauterbach
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Correspondence to Karen Lauterbach .

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Lauterbach, K. (2017). The Politics of Becoming a Small ‘Big Man’. In: Christianity, Wealth, and Spiritual Power in Ghana. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33494-3_6

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