Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

6-2026

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how globalization, migration, and Pentecostalism shape the cultural and theological of second-generation Ghanaian Pentecostals in the United States. Using Mark Cartledge’s four-stage empirical theological cycle, it interprets participants’ lived experience as theological data in critical dialogue with Scripture, the doctrine of The Church of Pentecost (COP), and Pentecostal theological method. The study is based on 26 weeks of multisite fieldwork in three COP U.S.A. congregations—Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Tacoma—and draws on participant observation, 55 semi-structured interviews, three focus groups, and archival materials. The analysis yielded three interrelated findings. First, participants negotiate a bicultural Ghanaian American identity within congregations that function as the primary local sites through which global influences are mediated. This finding refines glocalization and demonstrates that hybridity is differentiated across domains: pronounced culturally, moderate institutionally, and limited theologically. Second, cultural hybridity coexists with marked pneumatological continuity across the three sites, illustrating Pentecostalism’s contextualizing capacity and challenging accounts that construe migration primarily through civilizational conflict. Third, participants articulate a missional orientation that exceeds conventional reverse-mission paradigms through incarnational, holistic, and vocationally integrated witness. The study, therefore, identifies missional transformation as an important dimension of second-generation immigrant religious change and extends migration-as-mission scholarship to the agency of the second generation. Based on these findings, the dissertation constructs a pneumatologically grounded diasporic missiology comprising five mutually related dimensions: incarnational, pneumatological, holistic, contextual, and hybrid. This framework reframes reverse mission by locating second-generation Pentecostal witness within a dynamic negotiation of diaspora, culture, vocation, and Spirit-empowered ecclesial identity. The study contributes to mission theology by advancing a constructive diasporic missiology rooted in the theological self-understanding of Ghanaian Pentecostal communities; to globalization and diaspora studies by clarifying the role of congregational culture and second-generation missional agency; and to practical theology by demonstrating the theological yield of empirical engagement with Pentecostal lived experience. The findings are limited by non-probability sampling, insider-researcher positionality, and a cross-sectional design; consequently, their applicability beyond the study population requires further investigation.

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