Biography
Dr. Minkyu Lee is a researcher at the Institute for African Studies at Yonsei University, South Korea. His work focuses on World Christianity, African Independent Churches, migration and transnational religion, and spiritual ecology. He conducts ethnographic research on Ghanaian Independent Pentecostal Churches in Korea, examining how African migrant communities reconstruct roots, belonging, and healing across borders. Dr. Lee is currently engaged in Africa–Asia comparative research through postdoctoral work associated with the University of South Africa and publishes internationally on African Christianity, theology, and culture.
Paper Abstract
African Pentecostal and Independent Churches, grounded in embodied ritual, communal relationality, and ancestral spiritual imagination, sustain complex ecologies of life that accompany believers through migration, precarity, and social marginalization. This paper examines how Ghanaian Independent Pentecostal Churches in Korea (GIPC-K), particularly Acts Fire Ministries (AFM), reconstruct and reinterpret their spiritual “roots” within a new place-based environment across the Global South. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and Korea—including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography—this study argues that African migrant churches cultivate a distinct ecology of healing, one that is simultaneously transnational, embodied, and deeply relational.
Drawing on Renato Rosaldo’s theory of cultural borderlands and Nina Glick Schiller’s framework of transnationalism, the paper explores how worship practices such as singing, dance, prayer, prophecy, and communal care operate as spiritual technologies for survival and hope. These practices do not merely preserve cultural heritage; they actively generate emerging roots that tether migrants to meaning, belonging, and resilience amid experiences of racialization, labor insecurity, and isolation in East Asia. In this sense, the “roots” carried across borders are dynamic and mobile, producing glocal theologies and alternative forms of community-making.
In resonance with the 2026 conference theme, “Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward,” this paper suggests that African Pentecostal roots are not markers of nostalgia but sources of future-oriented imagination. GIPC-K communities demonstrate how rootedness can move with people, how healing can expand across geographies, and how embodied memory can sustain life amid ecological, social, and spiritual crises. Ultimately, these communities reveal that what we need for survival and flourishing may indeed already lie beneath—and within—our migrating feet.