Becoming Pentecostal: Conversion careers in a Holy Ghost Church

This project was the result of three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a tongue speaking Pentecostal church in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The focus was on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal. The goal was to bring the reader into the church and provide an intimate portrait into the lives of its members to unfold their story as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. The research questions that informed this dissertation included asking how individuals become Pentecostal and why they do so at each stage in their careers, as well as some of the consequence to this process. As opposed to past work that focuses on the Pentecostal movement in a macro context, this work focuses on the individual. The research objectives were to write a theoretical model on becoming Pentecostal, that includes a religious conversion, engaging in ongoing debates on the process of conversion. Ethnographic data was collected that included participant observation and formal and informal interviews. Analytic inductive procedures were used during data collection and analysis to form a preliminary theory and test it case by case, attempting to arrive at a general explanation of how and why individuals proceed in becoming Pentecostal. The dissertation also developed a "process analysis" to explain how individuals experience a process, not a single crisis, that includes one of numerous incipient moments that occur at each step in a long chain of events that explain an individual's path to become a religious seeker. This work demonstrates how ethnographic data and analytic inductive procedures create theories linked to empirical data. The conversion theory developed challenges both old and new religious conversion paradigms, updating past conversion research and advancing new ideas on how to approach the problem.