Ministries on Whatsapp: Evangelical Transformations Based on Intersectional Uses of Social Media in Brazil

The growth of evangelicals in Brazil in recent decades has awakened perspectives that seek to explain how these groups have become protagonists in the contemporary political scene. Considering the relationships that these groups historically establish with digital media, this paper concerns an ethnographic work about how Pentecostal women are engaged in “digital ministries”. As part of my PhD Thesis in Social Anthropology, this research concerns an ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2022, when I carried out interviews and participant observation on churches and prayer groups on WhatsApp with female Pentecostal pastors and missionaries who lives in the suburbs and favelas of Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil. As a central part of the field camp, my interactions on WhatsApp “prayer groups” included Brazilian immigrant women who live in different regions of Europe (mainly in Italy and Spain), living together a social media daily life with different religious activities, like pray together and answer to a female pastor preaching’s. The main questions drawing my attention involve how non-institutional forms of religious life are organizing mediated strategies of communication and changing evangelical relations in Brazil. The search results emphasize particular forms of agency among evangelical women and the emergence of new Pentecostal careers in Brazilian urban areas. Above all, I investigated what elements make evangelical women assume the self-evidence of WhatsApp in their religious routines. What kind of challenges do these digital mobilities brings to religious authorities? I sought to understand how the centrality of WhatsApp in the daily lives of these women has defined new evangelical transnational careers for women pastors who choose not to lead an institutional career in a church, but digital Ministries. Among "prayer groups" on WhatsApp, itinerant preaching in multiple churches, they are creating female digital evangelical routines that have been deepened during the new coronavirus pandemic.