Paper short abstract:

Focussing on Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the Netherlands, the paper explores the cultural competences of Pentecostal leadership. The leadership had to develop specific strategies in order to negotiate access to the public domain.

Paper long abstract:

his paper looks at the question to what extent the place-making of migrant religions in Europe involves or requires specific strategies or modalities for the ways in which sensibilities in the public domain are to be negotiated. In the ways in which migrants in Europe appear to privilege religion in their positioning in the public domain, specific views and practices transpire of how migrant religion is seen to go about this negotiation. By focusing on the presence of the many Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the Netherlands, the specificities of engaging in place-making in a highly supervised, monitored and taxonomic public domain can be investigated. The paper will show that whereas these transnational churches have developed diverse cultural competences in the way they engage with place-making in various parts of the world, the intricate, burocratic, and highly regulated nature of the access to the public domain in the Netherlands, revolving around issues of settlement, noise-making, staying-permits and the like, are matters for which the Ghanaian leadership has had to develop specific strategies, which this paper will discuss.