The Virtues of Obedience
In this article, I examine the overlapping of the ethical and the institutional in Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, a Pentecostal-charismatic Bible school linked to the Ghanaian denomination Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI). I reconstruct ethnographically the process of learning and embodying the virtue of obedience at this school, and show how God’s sovereign will is refracted through a disciplinary apparatus with various organizational inflections, some of them highly managerial. Universal Christian virtues embedded in obedience, such as “humbleness”, “excellence”, and “loyalty”, are cultivated by students through a disciplinary apparatus that lends to LCI’s pastoral body a distinctive corporate identity. These processes of simultaneously intensifying and standardizing Pentecostal piety require a closer understanding of how ethical subject formation and institutional allegiances can be juxtaposed while still retaining their ontological distinctiveness for practitioners. I stress some contributions this debate may have to the anthropology of ethics and of Christianity.