HIV/AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Institutional responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa arguably constitute one of the biggest humanitarian interventions in human history. The resources mobilised for the fight against the disease have grown from US$1.6 billion in 2001 to US$16.8 billion in 2011 (UNAIDS 2012). This resource mobilisation came along with the massive growth of existing, and the creation of new, state and civil society actors on transnational, national and local levels. Because of the sheer size of these interventions, the fight against HIV/AIDS has transfigured patterns of global connectivity between African and donor countries while global connections and the flows of resources, technologies and values they enable had huge, if diverse, effects on institutional structures and forms of governance on the ground. Importantly they have helped to shape a humanitarian version of what Pandolfi (Reference Pandolfi2003) called ‘mobile sovereignty’: assemblages of internally diverse institutional apparatuses that operate largely beyond the purview of state sovereignty on missions understood as ‘emergencies’ (Nguyen Reference Nguyen2009: 201).Footnote ⁴

In present-day South Africa, with roughly 5·7 million people living with HIV and AIDS and an infection rate of 16·8% of the adult population, HIV/AIDS is arguably not only one of the greatest health risks but also one of the crucial social development issues the country faces (Department of Health 2011: 10). With heterosexual intercourse, followed at distance by mother-to-child transmission, being the dominant mode of transmission HIV/AIDS has rendered intimate and sexual relationships problematic; it has been accompanied by high levels of stigma, created a severe crisis of care for orphans and diseased people and, given the lack of a cure, engendered widespread medical uncertainty. Moreover, as AIDS takes the lives of the economically most productive cohorts of the population, the demographic shifts spawned by HIV/AIDS mortality rates are assumed to undercut economic growth and threaten the reproduction of human capital.

The governmental responses in South Africa to these challenges have been highly controversial. The most critical issues concerned the delay of treatment programmes through the public health sector during the Mbeki presidency (Robins Reference Robins2004), the former president's support for the so-called ‘AIDS dissident science’ (Fassin Reference Fassin2007), ill-conceived scientific research policies (Schneider Reference Schneider2002), cases of corruption in the implementation of HIV/AIDS programmes as well as his, if mostly rhetorical, attempts to ‘re-africanise’ South Africa's HIV/AIDS politics (Leclerc-Madlala Reference Leclerc-Madlala2005). Public controversies further escalated when, in 2006, former vice-president and now president Jacob Zuma faced a rape trial in which he was charged of having forced an HIV-positive woman into unprotected sexual intercourse and publicly discarded HIV prevention messages (Robins Reference Robins2008).

Already in the 1990s and in critical response to governmental politics, a dense network of social movement organisations was formed. Led by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), these organisations mobilised global support, successfully rallied for the universal supply of AIDS medicines, battled against stigma, and organised countless grassroots initiatives of self-help, advocacy and peer education (Robins Reference Robins2004; Friedman & Mottiar Reference Friedman, Mottiar, Ballard, Habib and Valodia2006).Footnote ⁵ Altogether, research on HIV/AIDS in South Africa is characterised by a focus on governmental politics and progressive social movements but has largely ignored the operations of transnational and more service-oriented networks of NGOs (Burchardt Reference Burchardt2013).

With some delay, churches and other religious actors of all kinds have joined the efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. While for a prolonged period the religious response to the challenge of HIV/AIDS was either limited to stigmatising discourses blaming HIV/AIDS victims as sinners, or else was characterised by institutional inertia and inaction, during the past decade or so the activities originating from the religious sector have gained unprecedented dynamic. Churches and religious organisations are now highly active in prevention campaigning and in organising care and social support for the diseased. They run countless support groups and provide medical, psychological and spiritual counselling for HIV-positive people and their families (Burchardt Reference Burchardt, Becker and Geissler2009, Reference Burchardt2010). Furthermore, they have made their way into public education institutions, offering ‘life-skills education courses’ that are essentially organised around themes such as relationships, sexuality and HIV/AIDS (Garner Reference Garner2000; Burchardt Reference Burchardt and Hjelm2011). Pentecostals' uncompromising views of sexuality often cannot but reproduce blame for infection and the resulting stigma. Like other faith-based development projects, activities in the field of HIV/AIDS are largely dependent on foreign funding, mostly from the USA, the EU, bilateral donors and Northern churches, but sustained and implemented by local volunteers and salaried staff.Footnote ⁶

PENTECOSTALISM, DEVELOPMENT AND FBOS

In one way or another, my interviews with Pentecostal FBO workers showed that many of these activities are borne from a genuine engagement of Pentecostal groups with the disconcerting implications of HIV/AIDS and from the appropriation of the disease as a specifically religious concern. Simultaneously, however, their explanation has to take into account the broader institutional and political opportunity structures in which they are embedded.

Looking at the broader African context, these research questions are placed at the interface of two literatures: research on ‘religion and development’ and anthropological studies on HIV/AIDS, Pentecostalism and the public sphere. The burgeoning field of studies on ‘religion and development’ (Ellis & ter Haar Reference Ellis and ter Haar2007; Deneulin & Bano Reference Deneulin and Bano2009; Clarke & Jennings Reference Clarke, Jennings, Clarke and Jennings2008; Jones & Petersen Reference Jones and Petersen2011), has documented how religious organisations have become involved in transnational development networks in Africa to an unprecedented extent. Moreover, research has demonstrated how governments, international organisations and donor agencies have invited religious bodies to become ‘partners in development’ (Belshaw et al. Reference Belshaw, Calderisi and Sugden2001) and how resource flows have facilitated the incorporation of religious organisations into the institutional webs of international development policy and ‘transnational governmentality’ (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006). FBOs emerge as the institutional form in which religious communities have adapted to the infrastructure and demands of global development networks and to the new opportunities for institutional growth they offer. Simultaneously, these changes were paralleled by a massive upswing of missionary activities and US evangelical missions becoming ‘invisible NGOs’ (Hearn Reference Hearn2002). While producing important insights, some of these studies functionalise religion and start from an instrumentalist concern with how religion might contribute to ‘development’ (Jones & Petersen Reference Jones and Petersen2011).Footnote ⁷

A more nuanced sense of how Christian – in particular: Pentecostal – sensibilities, practices and imageries play into development dynamics is offered by studies on Pentecostalism, civil society and the public sphere (Englund Reference Englund2011; Meyer Reference Meyer and Englund2011; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; Engelke Reference Engelke2007; Marshall Reference Marshall2009). This research combines the emphasis on Pentecostal notions of salvation, rupture and moral transformation with structural-normative concerns of citizenship and inclusion (through civil society) and ethical concerns of access and voice (in the public sphere). Studies focusing more specifically on religion and HIV/AIDS have tended to highlight either Pentecostal obsessions with sexual morality or concerns over HIV/AIDS, witchcraft and healing. Gusman (Reference Gusman2009) and Smith (Reference Smith2004) show how in Uganda and Nigeria mobilisations around HIV/AIDS and sexuality became central for defining Pentecostal ‘born again’ identities. Dilger (Reference Dilger2007: 61), in contrast, argues that in Tanzania Pentecostalism became particularly attractive because ‘the church's ideology of salvation has tied concepts of suffering and healing to a universalistic paradigm of the devil’. Conversion allows people to believe they are healed from HIV/AIDS that is perceived to be part of modernity and globalisation. Since these studies are invariably focused on churches as units of analysis, organisational dynamics and FBOs are virtually absent from them. Freeman's volume on Pentecostalism and development (2012) explicitly confronts Pentecostalism and NGOs as alternatives.

In this article, I wish to suggest an alternative strategy whereby Pentecostals grapple with modernity and globalisation: by engaging with the model of the FBO and drawing potential converts as clients into organisational interactions. In this context, the attractiveness of Pentecostal FBOs lies not only in their model of salvation but also in graduated forms of clientship.

Yet what are the processes whereby such FBOs have inserted themselves into the networks of transnational development projects, religious or otherwise, ‘on the ground’? How do notions of faith affect these processes? While Bornstein speaks of ‘lifestyle evangelism’ she does not show how faith makes a difference in organisational work. Similarly, I am not entirely convinced by Ellis and ter Haar's (Reference Ellis and ter Haar2007) suggestion that we need to think of religion in terms of ‘African epistemologies’ in order to understand how faith affects development dynamics. While this idea privileges a cognitivist, belief-centred idea of religion as a way of knowing I wish to focus on religion as forms of practice and belonging. In what follows I make two points: First, Pentecostal faith offers theological categories that help to bind FBO workers and beneficiaries through notions of religious belonging. This mediates the circulation of resources and ideas by linking Pentecostal identities and personalised relationships through a framework of patronage. Second, in the process Pentecostal religiosity is transformed through its dependence on donor-driven organisational forms and logics.

THE EMERGENCE OF PENTECOSTAL FBOS: ENGAGING ORGANISATIONAL TEMPLATES

Within the narratives of leading members of Pentecostal FBOs, the emergence of these organisations is often framed through a foundational myth. In these myths, stories revolving around the creation of awareness of the needs of poor communities and elements of specific Pentecostal idioms are intermingled in complex ways. In order to illustrate this issue, I begin with the case of the organisation ‘Living Hope Community Centre’ (LHCC). The organisation was founded in 2000, has more than 100 employees, is multi-denominational and strongly Pentecostal in its ideological orientation. It mainly operates in Southern suburbs and townships such as Ocean View and Masiphumelele while their clients also comprise destitute whites. The organisation offers healthcare services, provides education and training, runs food gardens and various other livelihood-sustaining programmes and has even made its way into public schools where LHCC's educators take over life-skills courses, which are part of official curricula. Institutional capacities expanded tremendously when LHCC managed to attract funds from the American PEPFAR initiative for the implementation of HIV prevention programmes in 2005. In an interview Doris, a white woman of Zimbabwean origin and one of the programme managers, explained:

Most of the other employees and volunteers of LHCC, and in fact many of the other Pentecostal FBOs I worked with, provided remarkably similar narratives when talking about the founding of their organisations and their motivation to work for them. What was typical for Pentecostals and strongly distinguished their accounts from those of FBO workers affiliated to the mainline churches I studied, was the conviction that working for ‘the poor and the needy’ offered a supreme way for sharing the gospel.Footnote ⁹ ‘Telling them about Jesus’ was often presented as overriding any concern with social problems, poverty and disease reflecting the fact that for them spiritual salvation precedes material salvation. In the eyes of Pentecostal FBO workers and in an astonishing contradistinction to the discursive logic of the prosperity gospel (Marshall Reference Marshall2009), health and material salvation were derivative to and only enabled by, but not coextensive with, spiritual salvation.

While these accounts help to shed light on the motivations of people to found FBOs and to start working for them (Bornstein Reference Bornstein2002), they have little to offer when it comes to explaining how FBO operations are put on a more sustained basis and become stabilised. In order to address this question it is helpful to remember how HIV/AIDS interventions have been spread across vast institutional fields comprising highly diverse sorts of organisations and to explore how the idea of Pentecostal FBOs has been diffused in such processes. With regard to organisational diffusion, De Waal (Reference De Waal, Ellison, Parker and Campbell2003: 254) has argued that:

The power of this un-theorised consensus has clearly extended into the Pentecostal domain while the institutional mechanism through which it unfolds is remarkably standardised: Outside the already existing FBOs, responses to HIV/AIDS by church congregations often depend on the enthusiasm of pioneering individuals who mobilise others. As church-based projects grow in size and demand for their services increases, there is a need to mobilise resources exceeding what is locally available. In order to improve the management of their operations and to qualify for funding from donors, church-based projects invariably assume a formalised structure, step by step morphing into FBOs. In the process, FBOs get involved in the highly standardised procedures of proposal writing, grant application, project management and financial reporting. These organisational changes are paralleled by the adoption of the rhetoric and buzzwords of secular development discourses.

The development of LHCC is a striking example of this: Already during the 1990s Pastor John, the founder of the centre, began to mobilise local communities around HIV/AIDS and other social problems through ‘social ministries’ and organised a group of permanent volunteers. Importantly, this activism was linked to the emergence of Masiphumelele, first as a squatter camp, and later a township, in an area hitherto far removed from residential areas for blacks. In 2000, LHCC was founded as a formal entity since, as they acknowledge in a report, ‘as their efforts grew, the need for a centre, separate from the church, became urgent’.Footnote ¹⁰ During the same year, they purchased a piece of land for the centre and vegetable gardens with the help of a generous donation from an American coreligionist. With regard to taxation, both ownership of the plot and the management of activities could have been organised through the church and/or FBO. But after all, with a view towards future growth they opted for the FBO strategy and founded the ‘Fishhoek Baptist Church Community Trust’. As donations and funding grew, one ministry after the other was added (‘Living Grace’ for food support, ‘Living Care’ for women's health, ‘Living Right’ for HIV prevention and Christian lifestyle, and ‘Living Way’ for income generation), while the PEPFAR funds granted in 2005 marked a sea change in organisational growth.

When reflecting on their activities, however, even volunteers from very small and strictly local Pentecostal neighbourhood initiatives spoke the language of ‘capacity building’, ‘social capital formation’ and ‘community outreach’ since activists were highly aware that the public use of these categories provides for maximum match with those high on the agendas of possible donors.Footnote ¹¹

This process of diffusion is not limited to organisational models and the discourses surrounding them but extends itself into the areas of activities Pentecostal FBOs are engaged in. In all of the organisations I studied HIV/AIDS projects were highly canonised. This would typically include self-help or support groups, anti-stigma and education campaigns, psychological counselling for HIV-positive people, home-based care schemes, and sometimes the construction of HIV-testing facilities but also soup kitchens, other feeding schemes, income-generating activities such as bead-making and even training for ‘destitute parents’ on how to raise their children.Footnote ¹² While it is clear that many HIV-positive people are also poor and readily positioned as ‘in need’ of any kind of assistance, this obviously strange assemblage of activities raises an intriguing question: What is the logic that leads FBO workers to understand soup kitchens etc. as HIV/AIDS projects?

THE LOGIC OF PROJECTS

In general, it is clear that the availability and the massive increase of funds for the fight against HIV/AIDS have provided huge incentives for FBOs to frame all sorts of charitable activities as HIV/AIDS projects. As donors put maximum emphasis on reaching certain programme targets, collaborating with particularly motivated communities is extremely important for them in terms of expected project performance. As a consequence, in order to improve their terms of eligibility for funding, FBOs need to show that their communities are mobilised, volunteers motivated and basic structures in place (Swidler & Watkins Reference Swidler and Watkins2009). FBOs are thus not only urged to consider and present their activities as related to HIV/AIDS but also to conceive of and fashion whatever they have already been doing before in the area of charity, as projects. As the ‘project’ is the fundamental unit of operations within the institutional field of development, every activity that can be translated into a project is likely to enhance the image of an FBO in the eyes of donors as particularly professional and as a valuable partner.

Another example further serves to illustrate this point. In 2006, a drama group made up of church youth of an American evangelical congregation visited Cape Town to perform a play around issues of HIV/AIDS in schools and various churches. The group had been invited by LHCC when the contact to the group's home congregation was established during one of the many fund-raising trips of LHCC leaders to the USA. The underlying idea was that youth groups in the communities in which LHCC operates should be inspired to form drama groups themselves and to adapt the plot so as to fit their own social and cultural context. It was clear that for this to materialise further funding would be necessary, and LHCC came to provide the institutional umbrella within which the HIV/AIDS drama groups could be organised – as another project. The driving force behind this process was that LHCC had the organisational structure, knowledge and networks that allowed it to transform an evangelically inspired HIV/AIDS drama into a sustained activity that would be eligible for funding. To this end, however, it had to be on HIV/AIDS, it had to be a project, and it had to be organised through an FBO.Footnote ¹³

What is often much less obvious is that the vast array of activities that FBOs clump together in the category of ‘HIV/AIDS projects’ also serve to provide greater space to manoeuvre between the funding priorities of donors and what FBOs construe as ‘people's needs’, for themselves and in front of local audiences. In this context, the following remark made by Doris from LHCC, is instructive:

LHCC employees knew of course through their day-to-day experiences that, most of all, the homeless needed homes and the jobless jobs while what they could offer were HIV/AIDS projects. Stories like this, however, and the way they attach different meanings to projects make it possible for FBOs to justify assistance for the homeless as HIV-interventions (even though the homeless may only figure in the reports submitted to the PEPFAR head offices in Pretoria as ‘people reached’ or ‘people trained’).Footnote ¹⁴

Similarly, there was a series of different meanings attached to the youth drama groups and their incorporation into LHCC's operations. While for some of LHCC's members it was really about supporting creative approaches toward HIV prevention, combining, as it did, drama with messages about sexual abstinence and ‘Christian lifestyles’, the message spread amongst parents was sometimes that drama keeps youth away from mischief and involvement in crime and gang activities. There was a clear recognition that fear of crime was of much greater concern for many people in the community than HIV/AIDS. For others, in turn the drama group was most of all an important opportunity to proselytise amongst the participants and to bind them more closely to the organisation.

These alternative meanings, however, such as manifest in the quote above also open pathways for FBOs, to establish contacts and work with clients who may not be interested in participating in HIV/AIDS projects at all – and vice versa. FBO workers are generally aware of the fact that in Cape Town, which has been virtually flooded with HIV/AIDS projects during the past decade, many people are not particularly interested or even turn their backs when they are targeted as participants in HIV/AIDS campaigns. The consequences of this dynamic were particularly salient for the educators of Think Twice, a small FBO that offers life-skills courses organised around issues of HIV prevention and sexual responsibility to students in public schools and so-called ‘personal growth groups’. These groups are made up of teenagers, where they discuss similar issues in greater depth.Footnote ¹⁵ Think Twice has seven employees and close organisational ties to the ‘Jubilee’ Pentecostal Church, which is globally active.Footnote ¹⁶ Donations to the programmes mainly come from the UK. The head offices are in Lower Wynberg and employees and volunteers work by visiting schools in different townships but also the city bowl. Educators told me that because of this over-saturation effect they rarely address issues of HIV/AIDS head-on (see also Levine & Ross Reference Levine and Ross2002). They rather talk about ‘the gift of love and sexuality’, about responsible relationships and the value of limiting sexuality to the confines of monogamous heterosexual marriage. Again, what was an ‘HIV/AIDS project’ in the administrative record had entirely different meanings for Pentecostal FBO workers and project participants.

Possible clients may thus shy away when being targeted as participants of HIV/AIDS campaigns – unless their participation helps them to establish with FBOs some sort of relationship of reciprocity within which FBOs work as patrons; in other words: they may use their relationships with FBOs in order to mobilise affective ties and to deploy their personal dependence with a view to achieving some external goal. No example is better suited to elucidate this process than the notorious training workshops (see Smith Reference Smith2003; Swidler & Watkins Reference Swidler and Watkins2009). In summer 2006, I participated in a ‘health and nutrition workshop’ that was organised in an LHCC community hall. About 30 visibly poor people from the local neighbourhood had gathered when Thembisa, an HIV-positive woman and community worker for LHCC, began her talk. The workshop lasted for about an hour and covered topics such as prevention of tuberculosis and HIV, personal hygiene and issues regarding the nutritional values of food products, cooking, the importance of regularity in eating habits etc. Importantly, it was framed through collective prayers at the beginning and the end. In order to introduce participatory elements Thembisa tried to stimulate a discussion but the only people who asked questions were LHCC volunteers that were present. Other participants showed few signs of interest in the topic and some actually slept. After all, it was clear that many had come because of the sandwiches that were offered after the workshop had finished. During following conversations I also learnt that many of the participants were ‘clients’ who regularly participate in LHCC projects of all kinds. The important point is therefore not that clients came to feed their bellies but rather that the workshop served to reproduce ‘ties of dependence’ through relationships of patronage. This in turn raises a broader set of questions as to the diverse benefits of participating in FBO programmes and to the dynamic network of social positions in which they are generated, and how access to these benefits is entangled with the specificities of Pentecostal Christianity.

The above observations convey a powerful sense of the ways in which Pentecostal FBOs have adapted themselves to the technocratic and official templates governing development work across the world. Local Pentecostal organisations are moulded into the models of action promoted by the dominant discourse on civil society and its main protagonist, the NGO. Simultaneously, they incorporate the same mechanisms of patronage into their operations that link people, opportunities and resources in NGOs. These structural dynamics alone, however, are insufficient to explain the operations of Pentecostal FBOs since they fail to take into account how the specificities of Pentecostal discourse and identity shape the meanings, discourses, images and practices around which Pentecostal FBO work is organised.

Pentecostal identity and discourse affect the organisational dynamics of Pentecostal FBOs in two distinct ways: First by shaping the self-understanding of FBO workers and their cultural constructions of work; and second by shaping their practices, internally as well as in relationships to their clients and beneficiaries. In the following section, I show how both the construction of self-understanding and practices are interlocked processes but also how the connections between the two are mediated through the nature of their field of intervention, in the case of HIV/AIDS.

PENTECOSTAL IDIOMS AT WORK

One way in which Pentecostal discourse shapes FBO operations is by providing scripted idioms whereby FBO work acquires specific meanings for employees and volunteers. At once these idioms are the forms in which these meanings can be expressed. An important element here is the notion of a personal dialogue with God. Pentecostals often spoke about all kinds of solutions for problems they encounter in their day-to-day work practices in terms of God's advice on how to handle certain situations and especially on how to spread the word so that they may help others. In conversations with colleagues and interviews, some FBO workers openly addressed the difficulties they faced, for example, when working with prostitutes or criminals. Dialoguing with God was the specific linguistic form through which thinking about these problems was expressed.

Often these dialogues took shape through prayers. Prayers are of course a fundamental and ubiquitous element in South Africa of social life. But the way the efficacy of prayers is understood in Pentecostal FBO work is very different from in mainline Christianity. Consider the case of Sarah, for instance, a 43-year-old woman who volunteers as a lay counsellor for Izandla Zethemba.Footnote ¹⁷ This FBO is based in the township of Gugulethu and linked to the Pentecostal church Khanyisa (literally meaning church in Xhosa), which is itself a product of Jubilee's efforts of ‘church-planting’. In one meeting she recounted how she visited a bedridden AIDS patient to assist and feed him:

Just after this remark I asked whether this patient was on treatment and she confirmed that he had just begun his antiretroviral (ARV) therapy. Importantly, it did not occur to Sarah to charge biomedicine up against prayers. In general, Pentecostals closely associated the success of their daily work with the transformative power of the prayers, which invariably preceded all activities.Footnote ¹⁸

A second important element within Pentecostal discourse is a certain way of reconstructing their activities and motivations in the notion of ‘calling’. This is true for both employees and volunteers and was typically expressed in phrases such as ‘God had a special plan for me’ or ‘God needed me’. Again the case of Sarah from Izandla Zethemba is instructive in this regard. In a biographical interview I conducted with her she explained that before beginning to work as a counsellor her life was marked by all sorts of failures and frustrations. She remembered that initially because she was ‘shy and ‘couldn't speak’ she had been scared of being a counsellor:

Here, the idea of a calling is constructed through a direct analogy between her sudden personal faculties and a biblical sequence. While FBO workers deploy the notions of calling usually in an individualised manner as a way of accounting for their motivations and engagements, in other cases such as manifest in the above quote by Doris from LHCC the calling is even taken to interpret the existence of the organisation itself.

Both calling and personal dialogue with God are closely associated with a third concept, that of God's plan. For FBO workers, hearing and following God's call means to help to fulfil his plan for them, namely to serve the people by spreading his word. In connection to the calling, again this plan is understood in a highly personalised and individualised manner. In the context of the interpretation of FBO work, however, the notion of God's plan acquires a much broader meaning in that Pentecostals equate their efforts in working with clients with making their lives cohere with that plan as well. The personal dialogue with God, asking questions and receiving answers, then is important as a way of knowing and constantly proving that what they do really conforms to that plan.

In some cases, the calling coincides with the beginning of the conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. That is, the moment of hearing and following the call initiates a process whereby people convert to Pentecostalism and simultaneously to FBO work. In these cases, FBO work and its multifarious mixtures of practical assistance and evangelism are rendered the primary field in which followers enact their newly acquired faith in an often dramatic and highly committed fashion. In other cases, people have already been Pentecostals without having received the call to FBO work. Dialogues with God, prayers and testimonies of callings enable Pentecostals, as Engelke (Reference Engelke2007: 178) put it, to inhabit a Christian language that would bind speakers and listeners in shared hermeneutic webs. Importantly, these webs in turn facilitate the workings of Pentecostal FBOs as organisations.

All this implies, of course, that being a Pentecostal is intimately associated with one's position in the concentric structures of FBOs involving leadership, employees, volunteers, clients and other beneficiaries. In order to become an employee of a Pentecostal FBO one is generally expected to be a Pentecostal. Pentecostal belonging though is constituted and socially recognised in complex ways. Being a Pentecostal involves having accepted Jesus Christ as a personal saviour through an individual religious experience and having undergone a process of conversion and concomitant personal transformation in which this acceptance is understood to be embedded. As with Pentecostals elsewhere in the world (Robbins Reference Robbins2004), the entirety of these experiences and ritualised constructions are brought together and discursively represented in the notion of ‘being born again’. In general, Pentecostal FBO workers were able to give rhetorically elaborated and emotionally charged accounts of their own experiences of becoming a Pentecostal. Often such accounts were narrated in public testimonies, that is, staged performances of authenticity in which biographical storytelling is used to intensify collective religious experiences. In some sense, these accounts were themselves important discursive elements in Pentecostal FBO culture in that they helped to remind people who they were – first and foremost – and to reproduce the sense of calling that shapes ‘Pentecostalism at work’.

Pentecostal discourse and identity, however, not only affect organisational dynamics by providing the cultural meanings that sustain self-understanding and FBO culture; they also shape FBO practices in two important ways: first, in relation to internal dynamics; and second with regards to work practices at the interface with clients.

The concentric hierarchical networks through which FBO work is organised are closely linked to the ways of being Pentecostal and the maturity one is perceived to have acquired in religious terms. In the organisation Think Twice, for instance, it was clear that all employees were Pentecostals. What is more, all of the educators I interviewed had completed a full year of volunteering in a Pentecostal Church with Jubilee. This voluntary work included assistance with maintaining the church premises, charitable activities as well as participation in evangelistic crusades. It seemed evident that only after completing this voluntary engagement would they be eligible as Think Twice employees, even though this was not stated in straightforward terms. We may say with some confidence, however, that in FBO work Pentecostal faith operates by mediating the entire set of relationships, interactions, practices and expectations that structures the field of Pentecostal development. In other words, it is less belief than Pentecostal belonging that links people and opportunities in collective action.

Conversely, some volunteers also explained that sustained contact with these organisations provided the contexts in which later conversions took place. Both volunteers and employees in turn often showed great satisfaction if clients or beneficiaries converted and joined affiliated churches such as Khanyisa or Jubilee as a result of their relationships to FBOs such as Izandla Zethemba. Therefore, membership in a Pentecostal church and the display of Pentecostal identity through certain forms of speech and religious practice are extremely important when it comes to explaining organisational dynamics and the ways in which patronage works in the Pentecostal domain.

The possibility of converting people is of course central to the ways Pentecostal discourse shapes FBO operations at the interface with clients and beneficiaries. Pentecostals are very much driven by evangelistic zeal and the desire to promote their faith. Yet this evangelism works often less on the surface level of proselytising than through the specific symbolic concepts they deploy. In conversations with groups of clients, regardless of whether they were HIV-positive people, drug-users or people with a criminal record, Pentecostals typically described people's life circumstances in terms of ‘individual choices’ and ‘decisions’. Betty, one of LHCC's counsellors for instance, remarked: ‘I always tell them [her clients], you can choose to get into mischief or drug or you can choose to have a good life!’ Similarly, Jenny who works as a life-skills educator for Think Twice mentioned when talking about her work experiences with high school students: ‘I tell them ‘Think about what I said but in the end your life is in your hands. It is your choices and your decisions. It's you!’ While the rhetoric of responsible choices has diverse genealogies in behavioural pedagogy and in Evangelical theology it acquires a very distinct meaning in Pentecostal FBO work. Here, it serves to incite people to reconsider and scrutinise their lives on the same dramatic and emotionally charged terms that are also understood to animate people to make a choice for God (see also Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006). In other words: conversations with clients are largely understood in structural analogy to the notion of conversion. The Pentecostal idea of ‘breaking with the past’ (Meyer Reference Meyer and Werbner1998) is thus transposed into the registers of earthly social existence and personal progress. Likewise, the improvements in life that are envisioned to result from FBO interventions are construed as effects of conversions to a life according to God's plan. Pentecostal FBO workers thus consider themselves as missionaries; they see development work as a frontier project, the township as the shifting terrain to be conquered and its inhabitants as the souls to be saved.

If in this sense Pentecostal FBO work can be regarded as conversionism writ large this does certainly not imply that beneficiaries readily perceive it on the same terms. It appears problematic to me to argue, as Bornstein (Reference Bornstein2005) does, that in faith-based development religious faith works through ‘lifestyle evangelism’ as such arguments largely ignore whether these activities have religious impacts on beneficiaries or not. It rather seems that the main effect of Pentecostal discourse is to enjoin upon their beneficiaries certain vocabularies of behavioural change; vocabularies whose deployment mimics the dramatic enactments of Pentecostal faith but in the first place signifies ‘conversions to personal progress’. Contrary to Bornstein, I also contend that the concrete field of work does make a difference to the ways Pentecostal discourse may shape it.Footnote ¹⁹ It was, for instance, very obvious that despite many difficulties Pentecostal FBO workers appreciated engaging with HIV prevention since sexuality was high on their moral agenda. Furthermore, Pentecostal FBOs were particularly eager to do counselling as it was through counselling that they could build the kind of personal relationships in which the Pentecostal psychologising rhetoric of ‘personal change’ was expected to bear fruit (Burchardt Reference Burchardt, Becker and Geissler2009).

The clear distinction between the impact of Pentecostal discourse on internal processes and on relationships with beneficiaries breaks down the moment one acknowledges the multiple ways in which clients may become volunteers, and volunteers turn into employees and begin professional careers in the field of FBOs. The best illustrations of Pentecostal patronage in FBO work are the cases of HIV-positive people becoming fulltime employees of FBOs on the basis of a personal conversion. Importantly, from the point of view of clients, dividing Pentecostal patronage into material and authentically religious motivations and resources may constitute an artificial dichotomy.

Thembisa, for instance, the LHCC worker mentioned above, came into contact with the organisation in the context of a Pentecostal crusade a year after being diagnosed HIV-positive during the antenatal exams that were related to her second pregnancy. At the time, she was already enrolled in an HIV/AIDS support group and had some income through her work as a social worker in an orphanage. However, later she was laid off and through the crusade became a client of LHCC programmes where the staff quickly saw her commitment to personal improvement. In an act of radically breaking with the past, she converted to Pentecostalism, left her partner, quit her biomedical treatment and was ‘born again’: in her view without HIV:

Importantly this is not to suggest that such conversions were purely instrumental or opportunistic but rather that Pentecostal development work constitutes the assemblage of spiritual and material opportunities in the context of which they ‘made sense’. For clients such as Thembisa, material and spiritual resources converge in an overall idea conversion to personal progress and autonomy. For her, this even implies that she should be able to live without ARVs.

Thembisa's trajectory is certainly a typical one but must be contrasted with that of many clients who do not have the cultural, religious and material resources to engage with LHCC on the same terms. These clients certainly welcomed LHCC programmes, but the Pentecostal discourse on self-activation and self-improvement remained opaque to them. They demonstrated a kind of religious commitment to LHCC Christian principles but mainly with a view towards securing continued admittance. Alcoholics and substance-users, for instance, would refrain from drug consumption at the premises of the centre but continue outside. Likewise, clients would live as unmarried couples outside the premises but not show their intimate relationships while participating in programmes. They would participate in prayers in earnest but rarely initiate spontaneous prayers themselves. In conversations outside the premises, they also sometimes voiced misgivings about the ‘holiness’ of LHCC workers.

In an important article, Richey (Reference Richey2012: 829) has demonstrated how participation in ARV treatment programmes in South Africa in practice often hinges on the fulfilment of certain requirements by clients. Richey writes: ‘Clientship implies the exchange of political rights for social benefits, and while it involves bargaining, and thus some degree of autonomy between the parties, its distinctive meaning derives from unequal constraints on that autonomy.’ In a similar way in both LHCC and the FBOs linked to Jubilee, clientship implies the exchange between religious commitment and social benefits. While membership and participation in FBOs are organised in concentric circles (leadership – permanent employees – temporary fulltime employees – part-time employees – interns – volunteers – clients) the social benefits accruing from involvement are vertically correlated to these circles.

In the organisations I studied, status promotions from client to volunteer or volunteer to employee were always framed as, and made dependent upon, ‘having matured in the faith’ (see van Dijk Reference van Dijk, Corten and Marshall-Fratini2001) while the degree of maturing was seen as a matter of Pentecostal habitus. When accompanying professional Think Twice educators to life-skills trainings they would invariably initiate prayers asking God to help them open the hearts of their clients, a practice I rarely saw when interacting with volunteers. The Pentecostal habitus was expressed with the naturalised and taken-for-granted deployment of certain idioms of which the personal dialogue with God and the belief in callings, and God's plan were most salient.

It is also because of these differences in attachment to ‘faith’ amongst FBO workers and beneficiaries that, more than belief, it is religious belonging that binds them. Since in FBO work, Pentecostalism operates by mediating connections between resources flows and religious identities in terms of unequal reciprocity and, as Richey put it, ‘unequal constraints on autonomy’ I suggest that Pentecostal involvements in the HIV/AIDS world foster clientship rather than citizenship. In addition, Pentecostalism shapes organisational dynamics by prioritising religiously based transnational networks (mainly with US partners) and selecting activities that lend themselves to be linked to Pentecostal ideologies of self-improvement and activation.