H.C. Stoffels

“Can we dance in this place?”: Body Practices and Forms of Embodiment in Four Decades of Dutch Evangelical Youth Events

This article describes the developments of the EO Youth Day, a Dutch Christian mass event that attracts thousands of young people every year. It is argued that in the course of time, the EO Youth Day has changed from a modest and sober event characterized by a Calvinist outlook to an expressive ‘hip’ event with an evangelical swing. This change becomes especially visible when the first versions of the EO Youth Day in the 1970s are compared with more recent ones—a comparison we shall make in this article. Central to this change is the way the body is addressed and referred to in what we call the ‘forms of embodiment’ offered at the EO Youth Day. Evidence for this is provided by an explorative empirical study of four EO Youth Days—those organized in 1977, 1987, 1999, and 2008.

Click to Connect: Participation and Meaning in an Online Church

This study is a qualitative study into the meaning that visitors derive from participating in the Dutch online church Mijn Kerk (litt. My Church). By focusing on the experience of the individual visitors, the everyday context of visitors is taken into account. What people are looking for online is determined by their relationship with the local church as well as further offline circumstances. This can be roughly divided into two categories: connectedness (with other people) and sustenance (inspiration for everyday life). Within Mijn Kerk visitors both offer and search for fulfillment of these needs, resulting in four typical behaviors: to vent, to encourage, to inspire and to recharge. Being very approachable, relatively anonymous and non-committal, while at the same time offering stability, real personal contact and durable relationships, Mijn Kerk is a unique community online in which people try to overcome the tension between individualism and the desire for connectedness.

God changes people: modes of authentication in Evangelical conversion narratives

Abstract One of the distinguishing characteristics of Evangelicalism is the conversion story. In this article we focus on the conversion stories of interviewees within the setting of several related Evangelical television programs broadcast in the Netherlands since the 1980s. We argue that the conversion story is construed through a particular view on and practice of authenticity. Thus we see that, in the televised conversion story, modes of authentication are at work in what we analytically distinguish as frames, narratives, and strategies of authentication. We argue that the idea of an authentic transformation has changed from a more fundamentalist mode of authentication, emphasizing the subjection of the self to a particular religious narrative, to a more expressive mode of authentication that emphasizes the exploration of the inner, unique self of the interviewee.