This is a historical study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), an indigenous and fast-growing Pentecostal church in Nigeria. The recent explosion in the church is presented here as a response to both local and external stimuli. The ingenuity of the church leadership is further reflected in the way it appropriates crucial moments from its collective past as a means of keeping the establishment mobilized. On the whole, the RCCG presents an interesting ambivalence. On one hand it tries to distill a distinctive religious ethos, while on the other hand it epitomizes the different nuances in Nigerian Pentecostalism. The implication of this situation on the internal stability of the church is further probed in this study.

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Over the past two decades Nigeria has become a hotbed of Pentecostal activity. It is the view of this study that Pentecostal visibility in Nigeria has been enhanced not just by Pentecostals’ aggressive utilization of media technology for proselytization as claimed by previous scholars, but also by their appropriation of public spaces for worship. This study not only focuses on the church in the cinema hall, but also on churches in nightclubs, hotels, and other such places previously demonized as ‘abode[s] of sin’ by classical Pentecostals. This paper argues that users’ perception of public spaces having rigid meanings and unchanging usage was responsible for much of the tensions experienced. It would be more useful for academic analysts and various ‘publics’ to construe such spaces as dynamic sites, at once reflecting mutations in the public sphere, responsive to local and global socio-economic processes, and amenable to periodic reinventions and negotiations.

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