The “Pastoralneur”
As part of our research on community care, we interviewed many leaders who also held religious roles in Catholic, Anglican, Muslim, and Evangelical organizations. We were not seeking to interview religious leaders per se, but in our search for people doing “good work” for community care, we found many of them also led within religious communities. They did not describe these as separate parts of their lives—religious leadership over here, care providing over there—but as linked aspects of their single role.
Recently I was rereading some of the transcripts, and I stopped short at a comment that had gone past me before. This was from a leader who wore multiple hats: he was a pastor at an Evangelical church started in Uganda, he was the director of a primary school connected to the church, he was the founder of a small NGO with a child sponsorship program, and the treasurer of a community savings organization. While these kinds of activities were common to many of the leaders we talked to—operating schools, starting savings groups, founding NGOs, leading congregations, and connecting local children to foreign sponsors—this leader was uniquely doing them all at once.
He said in his interview with Josephine Nabakooza, “There is a new word which has just come in, ‘a pastoralneur.’ It is like, to succeed in pastoral work because you are addressing people’s needs. To do that, you need an entrepreneurial spirit to be able to address community’s problems. In my own approach, when I came in here, I am not only a leader or a pastor for the local church. I am a pastor for the whole community.”
As a qualitative researcher, I love uncovering new vernacular that reveals something about social change. I have been studying the connection between religious life and community problem-solving in Africa for some time, and the term “pastoralneur” so perfectly expresses how these two things—religion and economic relations—have become bound up together in this region.
It also made me think again about why so many people have been gravitating to Evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Uganda and elsewhere. Scholars have many theories about this, and no doubt diverse factors are involved. But one simple reason is such churches have more freedom from external oversight. Leaders don’t have to be trained, vetted, or ordained by formal bodies; congregations aren’t subject to foreign hierarchies; and group activities don’t need approval from international higher-ups. The Pentecostal pastoralneur has more room to move, respond, and adapt to communities’ needs. In the end, that freedom might be more practically useful than the resources afforded by being part of a global organization (e.g, the Catholic or Anglican Church).