PAP1409 - Transnational missions: Atlantic Proselytist dynamics in Church of the Nazarene
The Church of the Nazarene (CN) is a traditional Protestant church, which emerged in U.S, and arrived at Cape Verde in 1901, by hands of João José Dias, a Cape Verdean migrant. The CN was spread to all islands and became the best known Protestant church in Cape Verde. In the 1950’s, the U.S Nazarene missionaries organized the Nazarene Seminar, in the island of Saint Vincent, where dozens of local pastors were trained. Many exercise their pastorate in Cape Verde, others were sent off as missionaries, became leaders of the CN or exercised their pastorate in Portugal, Senegal, Brazil, Sao Tome and Principe, France, Holland, Norway, U.S, Argentina, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In the first seven countries just mentioned the CN's missionary work was started by Cape Verdean pastors and missionaries. The objective of this chapter is to map this Cape-Verdean missionary mobility, or in other words, to map the “South-South” and “South-North” Cape-Verdean missions. How can we understand those mobilities within the flux of colonial and post-colonial history? My proposal aims to present the expansion of Christianity from the southern hemisphere, Cape Verde, demonstrating through my fieldwork the transnational dimension of Cape-Verdean Protestantism along the Atlantic space. For this, I will resort to the mobility and memories of Cape-Verdean Protestant pastors, missionaries and believers of the Church of the Nazarene, to Senegal, Brazil and Portugal, during the twentieth-century up to this day.