Paper short abstract:

For young Christians in London divine experience is considered to be beyond the senses. In grappling with the limits of the flesh the young worshippers entangle the material with the divine to allow for a copresence (Beliso-De Jesus 2016) which is in the world but is not of it.

Paper long abstract:

In one of London's charismatic Christian youth churches it is often taught that if you are doing it because it feels good, you are doing for the wrong reasons. For the young members the senses are not conduits to mediate divine experience but worldly impediments to its authenticity. Instead, a relationship with God requires the faithful to draw upon a divine knowledge and cultivate a spiritual sensorium which is embedded in a global aesthetic of charismatic Christian faith.

Engaging with existing debates concerning the mediation and materiality, this paper will discuss how the young Christians' concerns with 'the problem of presence' (Engelke 2007) is reflected in their embodied worship practices and material engagement with a global Christian aesthetic. Their church transcends its west-African base through global, media, and transnational religious connections while encouraging deeply personal religious relationship with the divine. This, I argue, locates the divine simultaneously interior and exterior to the young worshippers and enables their senses to take on a divine capacity which transcends the body and the individual.

I ask how this might be understood as encouraging a copresence between divine and human actors which does not rely on mediating a transcendent God, but materially knowing the divine through an embodied, immanent and spiritual presence. Overall this paper will reflect the entanglement of the transcendent and the material as the young members of this church learn how to feel God without relying on the limits of their physical senses.

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