History and Anthropology

ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20

From excess to encompassment: Repetition,

recantation, and the trashing of time in Swedish
Christianities

Simon Coleman

To cite this article: Simon Coleman (2018): From excess to encompassment: Repetition,
recantation, and the trashing of time in Swedish Christianities, History and Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2018.1541323

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2018.1541323

Published online: 08 Nov 2018.

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HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2018.1541323

From excess to encompassment: Repetition, recantation, and

the trashing of time in Swedish Christianities
Simon Coleman

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
I explore the conversion of a Swedish Pentecostal Prosperity preacher Pentecostalism; prosperity;
to the Roman Catholic Church in order to examine questions of Roman Catholicism;
analytical perspective, temporal scale, and ethical discernment in repetition; Sweden
the operation of religiously charged forms of repetition. The paper
juxtaposes neo-Pentecostal with Roman Catholic understandings of
temporality through tracing the ideological movements of Pastor
Ulf Ekman over the past three decades, summarizing these
understandings as based around tropes of ‘excess’ and
‘encompassment’ respectively. In exploring repetition as both
theoretical category and ethnographic object of observation, I
distinguish between actively marked repetition and the merely
repetitious, while also drawing distinctions between continuity and
the iterative, oscillatory character of repetitive actions.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot, the end of ‘East Coker’, part of ‘The Four Quartets’

Introduction: the strange case of Pastor Ekman and Pope Francis1

It was a damp day in late October of 2016 when I stepped out of the railway station in
Lund, and was met by an outlandish sight. My way was being blocked by a procession
of festive young people, most of them wearing what looked like small white boats on
their heads. Luckily, I knew what was happening, because I had already spoken to a
border guard at Copenhagen airport. When I had asked him where I could find the next
train to Lund he had smiled and said ‘Oh, are you off to meet the Pope?’ I was actually
in Sweden to examine a PhD thesis, but his question subsequently helped me to realize
that the members of the parade were hoping to see their spiritual hero, while sporting
improvised versions of his headgear. In any case, I could not avoid the papal presence
that day: every road seemed to be blocked off by police, and TV news was dominated

CONTACT Simon Coleman simon.coleman@utoronto.ca

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. COLEMAN

by the story that he was in town to observe the 499th anniversary of a highly significant
event in Christian history. As Breitbart News quaintly (though not entirely accurately) put it:
‘Pope Francis Heads to Godless Sweden to Celebrate Protestant Reformation.’2
The next day my host, a Professor in Mission Studies, showed me round the city’s
famous cathedral, and it was in the latter’s store that I had a second surprise encounter.3
I was gazing out of a window that was half-blocked by a poster of a stern-looking Martin
Luther and wondering what the somewhat choleric reformer would have made of Lund’s
thriving pilgrimage centre, located next door. But my gaze was distracted by two sets of
books nestling next to each other on a table. One was of writings by Pope Francis, while
the other contained copies of a work whose Swedish title translated as: ‘The Great Discov-
ery: Our Way to the Catholic Church.’ This self-description seemed a little immodest, but
was not especially notable; yet, the identity of the authors was remarkable, since it was
the husband and wife team of Ulf and Birgitta Ekman. Ulf Ekman had been among the
most famous – and infamous – people in Sweden when I had first arrived in Uppsala in
the mid-1980s to carry out fieldwork on the Word of Life (Livets Ord), the burgeoning Pros-
perity-oriented, neo-Pentecostal ministry that he had founded in 1983 (author 2000).4 With
a smart tie replacing his Church of Sweden dog collar, a voluble preaching style reminis-
cent of the American Faith Movement preachers who had trained him, and his self-pro-
moted reputation as a ‘worldwide man of God,’ ‘Ulf,’ as he was often simply called, had
attracted enthusiastic followers but also incited a national moral panic throughout the
1980s. Indeed, he had often been accused of being a jumped up, racist, brain-washing,
money-grabbing, almost Fascist figure: deeply un-Swedish, but also irredeemably –
implacably – anti-Catholic.
How, then, to consider these striking juxtapositions from a more analytical standpoint?
This paper focuses on themes of history, revival, and reformation; all read through an
analytical lens of repetition. I examine the past and present not only of Ulf Ekman the indi-
vidual person but also of ‘Ulf’ the cultural and religious figure, whose ‘fame’ (Munn 1986)
has for more than three decades been objectified and circulated by him and others across
national and transnational landscapes of debate. While my account might appear most
obviously to be about two ideological ruptures, historical and biographical – across the
divides of the Reformation (see Martin 1978), but also between Ekman’s neo-Pentecostal
past and his Roman Catholic present – I argue more counter-intuitively that much is to be
derived analytically through disinterring the multivalent forms of repetition and not merely
rupture inherent in Ekman’s embrace of Catholicism; a ‘defection’ apparently surprising
and yet chiming with a contemporary Sweden where public reconciliation between the
Pope and an increasingly ecumenical, now disestablished, Lutheran Church has become
possible, even welcomed. Talk of rupture in the anthropology of Christianity has certainly
been productive in challenging knee-jerk anthropological assertions of local cultural con-
tinuity, at least in the face of intrusions from Western forms of modernity (Robbins 2007;
see also discussion in Introduction). In asserting the significance of repetition in the case of
Ekman’s ‘conversion’ I do not intend to reinforce easy anthropological assumptions about
continuity at cultural or biographical levels; and besides, Sweden hardly offers an example
of a beleaguered culture fighting for its identity in the face of missionary onslaught. Rather,
I examine repetition as a more contingent and exploratory process, a form of cultural work
involving the enactment of forms of activity whose repetitive dimensions are potentially
discernible and yet likely to raise interpretive and ethical dilemmas for both practitioners
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3

and observers. Central to this argument is a focus on the ideological and discursive stand-
points that are necessary for constructing and interpreting repetition. In other words, I ask
under what circumstances actors and analysts might plausibly assert that such repetition
has taken place.5 Note, for instance, that Ulf and Birgitta’s book was called ‘The Great Dis-
covery’ (Den Stora Upptäckten 2015) and not, say, ‘The Great Invention’: their claim was
that as new Catholics they were learning to reinforce underlying patterns in their own
lives that reinvoked significant aspects of the long durée of Christian history. In learning
how to assign a positive value to such cycles in religious history they were unconsciously
echoing a point made by the literary scholar Kawin (1972, 4) that the merely repetitious
implies a lessening of emotional, social or cultural impact with every re-occurrence,
whereas the repetitive contains the possibility of creating an equal or steadily greater
force on each occasion.6
The notion of multiple iterations (Butler 1993) implies by definition the existence of
gaps between bouts of repetition – mini-ruptures co-existing with bouts of apparent stabil-
ization:7 how significant such gaps might be, and how they might contribute to structural
or ideological oscillations between seeming opposites (Leach 1954; Gellner 1981), remain
empirical questions. A focus on repetition encourages ethnographic exploration of its cul-
turally specific morphologies, motivations, and indexical qualities. At the level of individual
behaviour, is it to be interpreted as deliberately enacted or not?: we might for instance
invoke hermeneutic, Geertzean (1973) distinctions between blinks and winks, as well as
a Freudian interest in determining when the voluntary and controlled turns into the obses-
sive-compulsive. As Geertz also points out, we should be alert to occasions when con-
scious repetition represents not flattery but mockery, mimesis blurring into satire
(Taussig 1993). More broadly, there is the question of how repetition at the tiny scale of
the gesture relates to wider forms of cultural and societal reproduction (Goffman 1956).
Here, Urban’s (1994) remarks on links between repetition and ‘replication’ are useful
(see also the discussion in Tomlinson (2018)). Urban’s analysis of sung discourse includes
the contention that: ‘Repetition is internal to the communicative unit, replication external,
involving the reproduction of the unit over time. But the former is linked to the latter. If
something can be repeated internally, it can be replicated externally’ (ibid., 146). Extrapo-
lating from this analysis, we might link micro- with macro-sociological reproduction,
exploring – through the idiom of temporality – how everyday performativity contributes
to different and wider ‘chronotopic registers’ (Palmié [2016]; drawing on Wirtz [2016]). Also
important to Urban, as well as to my analysis, is a consideration of the relationship
between model and copy, in other words appreciation of the need to trace what is held
steady and what is allowed to vary as the copy appears to draw on and yet also
modifies the original. My point here is not merely the Deleuzian (1968 [1995]) one that
all repetitions are inherently different from each other, but also that the decision of
what to keep ‘constant,’ to the extent that it is consciously motivated, is also likely to
be significantly politicized.
Given such a plethora of ethnographic and analytical questions to choose from, I
emphasize two interconnected aspects of repetition as praxis. One is not merely the com-
mission but also the recognition of repetition: what comes to be acknowledged as salient
repetition, and the ethical value ascribed to its existence (reminiscent of Bandak’s discus-
sion, in this volume, of the specifically moral investment in temporality). The other is how
repetition might be interpreted in such a way as to neutralize its potentially negative –
4 S. COLEMAN

‘repetitious’ – aspects. Thus, part of my approach in discussing Prosperity-oriented Chris-

tians involves reflecting on how they link marked forms of repetition with positively valor-
ized notions of excess (Coleman 2011), in other words breaking boundaries of expectation
and recurrence through actions that mark out present action as perhaps resembling earlier
behaviour, yet still going beyond what has been done before. But my ultimate focus is on
the apparent abscondment of their acknowledged leader and founding figure in Sweden –
‘Ulf’ – whose actions have risked precipitating not only a radical reinterpretation of his per-
sonal ‘fame’ but also a potential crisis of charismatic reproduction. As Pentecostal figure-
head, Ekman both embodied and catalyzed a space–time of charismatic self-other
relationships through his movements across Sweden and the world, becoming his own
productive medium of circulation. By doing so, he helped to reproduce minor versions
of the Swedish ministry in almost fractal fashion across Eastern Europe (Coleman
2015a). Such actions were made possible in part precisely because of the nimbleness of
Pentecostal ministry-making in contrast to the utterly baroque institutional arrangements
of the Catholic Church – the latter a Church whose temporal currency tends to be
measured out not in charismatic minutes or seconds but rather in decades or even centu-
ries. However, as noted, my argument will be that Ulf Ekman’s abandonment is both less
and more than it initially seems, if viewed through an analytical lens of repetition and not
merely rupture.8 In one respect it involves a partial reiteration of key neo-Pentecostal, Pros-
perity tropes of ‘excess,’ sometimes uncannily relocated within Catholic idioms of
expression;9 in another respect it both counters and re-appropriates such charismatic
excess by deploying an alternative discursive trope: that of institutional ‘encompassment’
– the invoking of a temporal scale that does not deny the value of charismatic activity, but
assimilates it within a broader and more comprehensive framing of Christian history, in
which Catholicism is placed at the top of a hierarchy where depth is valued more than
the enthusiasms of the present.10 Encompassment is therefore less concerned with the
boundary-breaking qualities of excess and more oriented towards subordinating such
action to a higher spiritual ideal, thereby containing it. In these terms, encompassment
not only shifts the chronotopic register through which charismatic Christianity is to be
assessed (annulling its threat to a Catholic worldview), it also redefines the ontology of
Church history itself.
The broader analytical aims of this argument are two-fold. First, at an ethnographic
level, I explore the value not only of looking at temporality as analytical object (see for
example James and Mills 2005), but also of engaging in long-term fieldwork that chroni-
cally reframes the perspective of the analyst toward both present and past observations.
Second, I contribute to debates within the anthropology of Christianity concerning
assumed distinctions among different theological orientations, and most specifically the
frequent pitching of Pentecostalism against Catholicism (compare Coleman 2014).
Instead, I seek to trace significant articulations between the two, which shift between
mutual affinity and reciprocal appropriation.
I divide the paper up into sections that proceed from each other both logically and
chronologically. I begin by presenting Word of Life attitudes toward temporality and rep-
etition – attitudes that Ulf Ekman embodied in his Prosperity-oriented, charismatic
persona for many decades, promoting forms of spatial and temporal ‘excess’ that chal-
lenged but also drew upon established configurations of reformed Christian worship in
Sweden. This section provides the necessary context to comprehend the significance of
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5

Ekman’s more recent shift from neo-Pentecostal to Catholic sensibilities. I then analyze
expressions of mutual denial and appropriation between these two positions –
expressions that draw on fundamentally chronotopic grounds of justification. Finally, I
point to broader issues concerned with perspective, repetition, and the anthropological
analysis of Christianity.

Making history: not farming but sailing

On Sunday 12 December, 2010, one of Ulf and Birgitta’s sons, Benjamin, gave a short
speech at the Word of Life to mark his father’s 60th birthday.11 Benjamin was already
well-known to the ministry as the editor of the Word of Life magazine Keryx (Greek for
‘Herald’), and his skilful way with words was displayed in a talk that both celebrated
and gently teased his father. Benjamin began by sketching out a contrast between the
archetypal figures of the ‘farmer’ and the ‘sailor,’ observing that the former stays at
home and tills the soil, while the latter travels the whole world, from Polynesia to
America, so that when he returns home ‘he does not come back the same.’ Benjamin
explained that his ‘papa’ was definitely ‘more a sailor than a farmer.’ Indeed, he noted,
Ulf grew up in the port city of Gothenburg, watching the ‘big ships’ go out into the
world, and it soon became clear that the son’s talk would be full of images of movement,
progression, and ambition. Benjamin observed that his father would tell stories when
taking the family on car trips, recounting the lives of Swedish kings while illustrating
not only that ‘history – it plays a role’ but also that ‘village life in the “People’s Home”
of Sweden was not for[Ulf]: the world is big.’ As he concluded, Benjamin addressed Ulf
directly, predicting that while it might be true that ‘you’ve reached 60 years and
become an old man’ nonetheless ‘I don’t think you’ll stop being a sailor, an explorer’12
given that ‘as T.S. Eliot says in the Four Quartets, “Old men ought to be explorers.”’
Benjamin’s speech was well received, prompting laughs of affectionate recognition
from the hall. He had succeeded in weaving numerous Word of Life tropes into an intimate
biographical sketch: valorization of mobility; scaling up of missionary agency and desire;
frustration with the post-war image of Sweden as secular, socialist, Social Democratic
‘People’s Home’; and aspiration to keep exploring even later in life. The mention of
history also seems significant – a celebration of royal activity rather than the more
prosaic development of a welfare state. Yet, in the light of what was about to happen, Ben-
jamin’s appeal to tropes of voyaging now seems both ironic and prophetic. Some three
years later, in November 2013, the Ekman family announced that Benjamin had converted
to Catholicism; and on 9 March 2014, Ulf told the congregation that he and Birgitta were
also moving to the Roman Church. Within a month photos appeared of the couple
meeting Pope Francis. Benjamin’s voicing of T.S. Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic musings on time
and redemption had proven highly appropriate in describing an ‘old man’ who was,
without doubt, ‘still moving.’
To comprehend the significance of Ulf’s shift to Rome at this stage in his spiritual career
we need to go back many decades, to the first time he became a famous figure, defying his
country’s apparent apathy toward religion. In his memoirs, Ekman claims (2013, 36) that as
a young Lutheran priest he had started with an ‘episcopal’ view of Church organization,
even if ‘it didn’t sit especially deep within me.’13 He subsequently came to support the
independence of the congregation while acknowledging the need for apostolic oversight.
6 S. COLEMAN

Such a shift in views justified his authority as a priest-turned-pastor who would, in due
course, co-ordinate a trans-national network of ‘Word of Life’ ministries that members esti-
mate as covering some 250,000 people worldwide, but it also had wider political signifi-
cance, since a powerful motivation for the setting up of the Word of Life had been
desire to be free of the State – ‘theologically, ideologically and economically’ (ibid.). (At
that time in the 1980s, the Lutheran Church was still established, a State-supported insti-
tution.) But Ekman’s new, freer style of worship also suggested obvious parallels – and
competition – with the Swedish Pentecostal movement. Indeed, the Word of Life’s
members often viewed the new ministry as reactivating a once powerful older movement
that had become trapped by involuted routines (Coleman 2011, 428). Revival in the form
of an unfettered and energetic ministry could therefore work through three complemen-
tary temporal registers: recalling the ‘first days’ of the early New Testament Church; rein-
voking a Reformed sensibility in its aspect as a protest movement; and alluding to the early
history of Pentecostalism in Sweden before it had been compromised by ecumenism and
bureaucracy.
Thus, back in the 1980s, when I interviewed supporters and opponents of Ekman’s min-
istry, I had learned to anticipate a recurring local explanation for the newly-founded
group’s ability to attract young Christians to its ambitious missionary practices, religious
entrepreneurialism, and extravagantly tongues-speaking worship: a common refrain was
‘det ligger i tiden’: literally ‘it lies/is located in the time’ but more idiomatically ‘it’s a
sign of the times.’ I realized that Ekman’s ministry, incongruous though it might originally
have seemed in secular Sweden, had caught something of the spirit of the period and
translated it into neo-Pentecostal idioms: embodying the potentialities of transnational
cultural influence and neo-liberal ambition (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) in an increas-
ingly fragile Social Democratic political context, a place where ‘the People’s Home’ no
longer seemed financially or electorally secure, while injecting American-inspired, Prosper-
ity-oriented, charismatic enthusiasm into an ossifying Pentecostal infrastructure. Indeed,
some Pentecostalists explicitly ‘went over’ to the new movement and became
members, while others visited it occasionally and often surreptitiously in order to keep
in touch with the latest revival.
Such cultural, ecclesiological, and political critique occurred not merely at the level of
theology, but also through forms of micro-gesture and ritual engagement (gabbled
tongues, hopping or running, loud vocalizations) that were both easily legible and pro-
foundly disciplining in the context of a new movement that was attracting opprobrium
from many sectors of society. Its temporally-loaded style of hyper-energetic worship
and confident comportment became as much a part of Swedish Prosperity practice as
talk of riches or healing. In Word of Life rhetoric, other denominations might already be
halfway to the ‘graveyard,’ but it was the duty of Bible School students not to stay in
Uppsala but to go out and start new congregations wherever they found themselves.
The revivalist energy that these rhetoric and sensory body logics (Brahinsky 2012) pro-
duced deployed specific forms of ‘excessive’ repetition, whereby Pentecostal habitus
blended with Prosperity enactment of super-abundance. One way to convey this point
is to depict an ethnographic scenario from the mid-1980s. After many months of listening
to preachers talk, sometimes for hours, I thought I had become inured to anything they
could throw at me. But this occasion turned out to be different. The visiting American Pros-
perity preacher Sam Whaley was talking, and I mentally checked off the well-worn
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7

Prosperity tropes that he was drawing on: ‘growth in the Spirit’ – check; ‘conquering the
world’ – check; taking ‘control of all circumstances’ – check. His sermon felt like the
tedious ticking of a watch. I found myself at a dangerous point in fieldwork, that
moment when you think you know what people are going to say next, and wonder
whether you have been there long enough. But the situation had further perils – ontologi-
cal as well as epistemological. For the first time I began to feel physically uncomfortable
listening to a sermon at the ministry. Whaley was saying nothing out of the ordinary –
and that was precisely the problem. The sheer repetitiveness of his message was
getting to me, the fact that he was mouthing material that could have come from any
other preacher in the room, either that day or the year before. Nobody else seemed both-
ered. There were all the usual signs of recognition, enthusiasm and assent. But I had had
enough. I left the hall.
When I think back to this case of my ritual abscondment I reckon that what separated
me from many others in the room was their much more honed ability to become caught
up by familiar verbal and visual tropes. Whaley’s meta-message was that repetition enacts
its own illocutionary force, so that sheer weight of words could enthuse many listeners – a
rather different stance toward reiteration than might be evident in, say, the ‘rote’ recitals of
the Lord’s Prayer all-too-evident in other kinds of churches. Pentecostalism is often com-
pared to jazz given its verbal riffs on common themes, but an equally apt musical parallel
in this Prosperity case is the repetition that is endemic to the minimalism of a Phillip Glass
or a John Adams, the playing on the same note that irritates some and mesmerizes others,
and is sometimes paralleled in charismatic circles when musical chords and congrega-
tional prayers come together in crescendos that repeat notes even as they steadily
increase in volume and speed (thus reducing the already short gaps between recurrences).
I am summarizing a particular phenomenology of engagement founded on at least
three dimensions, all of which provide repetition with a ritual, experiential and ethical
value, while distinguishing its consciously articulated expression from ‘mere’ continuity:
mimesis, expressed through ways in which believers echo preachers and sometimes
each other in word and gesture; accumulation, expressed through the sense that repetition
of language is never just repetition – it is also a building up of force given that spoken
words – negative or positive – are considered to retain their performative power, so
that a prayer repeated 17 times has 17 times the power of a prayer uttered just once;
finally, the creation of excess – not only that which seems redundant to the uninitiated
or the skeptical, but that which also self-consciously goes beyond ‘reasonable’ expec-
tations. The notion of excess creates an ideal of ‘the normal’ (whether secular, common-
sensical behaviour or conventional Pentecostal forms of worship) in order to transcend
it, so that bursting out of confines becomes a habitual, chronic approach to the world
for the born-again person Taken together, these dimensions of repetitive praxis work
through conjoined idioms of massed bodies, amassed discourse, and shattered social or
cultural boundaries, alongside trajectories of exchange and excess (Coleman 2015b). Spiri-
tual blessing in these terms is given to confident believers who speak their faith to and
‘over’ others not only in the church but also in the street or Internet. Such methods of
‘reaching out’ (‘att nå utt’) frequently invoke scalar expansion across boundaries of self
and other, sacred and secular, at a number of levels (ideological, spatial, material, linguis-
tic) – exceeding or overflowing boundaries of the secular, the polite, the expected. In the
1980s and 1990s, Word of Life supporters would often contrast their own deportment with
8 S. COLEMAN

what they saw as characteristically modest or self-effacing forms of self-presentation in

Swedish social life (Coleman 2000). Bible School students were originally instructed to
read a core text by the American preacher Copeland (1985) whose title translates literally
if unidiomatically as ‘The Laws of Overflow.’14 The latter implied self-extension and -objec-
tification alongside self-reward: the social, material and spiritual productivity of such
action redounding back to the believer as well as to the world.
Such forms of excess were also discernible in two further spatio-temporal media of
extension and fractal accumulation, especially in the Word of Life’s first three decades
of existence. The first was the mobile figure of Ekman himself, or rather ‘Ulf’: the sailor
not the farmer; growing a little greyer, yet accumulating both gravitas and charisma,
becoming in his supporters’ eyes a ‘great man of God’ through his reputation as a preacher
throughout the global Faith landscape, extending his ministry’s influence beyond the
frozen spiritual peripheries of Scandinavia and promoting the development of Word of
Life offshoots in the Baltic States.15 In Bowler’s (2013) history of the American Prosperity
Movement, one of the few non-US-based prosperity preachers to appear in her dense
network diagrams of star speakers at Faith conferences is Ulf Ekman.
The second medium of extension, complementing that of Ekman’s restless movement,
is that of history – or rather the development of a very specific relationship to the past in
the context of a Christian legacy moulded by both the Reformation and the later emer-
gence of Pentecostalism. For Word of Lifers, especially in the early years of the ministry,
the Swedish Pentecostal movement represented both a model to follow and a stark
warning about the perils of complacency: the cultural respectability of the contemporary
movement, its stolid ritual forms, its talk of regular but hardly radical ‘revival,’ expressing
sterile forms of recurrence – in Kawin’s (1972) terms the diminishing power of the rep-
etitious16 rather than the productive, accumulative force of the repetitive. The problem
for Word of Lifers was thus how to deploy broadly Pentecostal idioms of revival and
urgency without being trapped by such semiotic forms into merely echoing rather than
exceeding their ambition. Elsewhere (Coleman 2011), I have called the resultant strategy
‘historiopraxy,’ a term intended to indicate an engagement with the past that goes beyond
historiography to physically perform the relationship between past and present, while also
looking proleptically to the future, and so helping to constitute and discipline the believing
body (ibid., 434) through temporal idioms. The concept has similarities with the phenom-
enologically-rooted notion of historicity developed by Hirsch and Stewart (2005, 262),
which they see as a ‘performative condition, rather than an objectively determinable
aspect of historical descriptions.’ Such performativity implies the possibility of invoking
the past without being weighed down by it, not least in the context of a movement
oriented toward the ‘End Times’ and determined to spread the Word sufficiently to encou-
rage Jesus to return. One historiopraxic strategy, already mentioned, involved the literal
speeding up of Pentecostal bodily expressions such as glossolalia, alongside aggressive
forms of missionizing in public space, ‘overflowing’ expectations inherent in conventional
behavioural frames – such as, for instance, voicing discordant religious language in a
regular work meeting, or praying loudly and quickly in a service in the local Pentecostal
Church, disrupting its more sedate rhythms: embodying an alternative charismatic chron-
otope through dysrhythmic and excessive action.
Other strategies have pointed to wider frames of activity and salvation, such as the
remarkable Operation Jabotinsky, which the Word of Life has promoted since the 1980s
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9

in combination with American colleagues, recalling the work of a Russian Zionist who
founded the Jewish Self Defense Organization in Odessa as a reaction to pogroms, and
who developed evacuation plans for the Jews from Eastern Europe in the 1930s before
his death in 1940. Jabotinsky personified salvation history in action: in turn, his heroic res-
cuing of the Jews might be echoed and surpassed by the Word of Life in the present. The
ministry’s work to ‘repatriate’ tens of thousands of Jews located in Russia by transporting
them to Israel enacts an acceleration of history in its flow toward the end of the current
dispensation and the ‘Last Days’ (compare Coleman 2011, 441). Ekman’s personal connec-
tion with the Holy Land was consolidated when he spent a few years living in Jerusalem in
the early 2000s, setting up the ministry’s Bible study centre there, and even today the
Word of Life’s weekly ‘Israel Report’ is emailed to sympathizers, presenting a pro-Zionist
summary of news of the Holy Land, and encouraging readers to search for signs of millen-
nial times in current events.
Hovland (forthcoming) has examined the complexities of attempting to characterize
Protestant attitudes toward repetition. While a valuing of spontaneity and sincerity is
often evident (for example Reinhardt 2017), positive orientations toward replication can
also be detected, ranging from mimicking biblical characters, mass reproduction of
goods such as Bibles, and connecting the past with the present by ‘walking where
Jesus walked’ in the Holy Land (Kaell 2014; see also Coleman 2002; compare Haeri
2013). Under certain circumstances, therefore, repetition may itself be productive of Pro-
testant sincerity (Hovland forthcoming), and at the Word of Life we see how ‘mere’ recur-
rence is mitigated through practices and rhetorics of accumulation, the invoking but also
exceeding of past revivalist efforts, and indeed perceiving ‘Ulf’ as the personification of
global mobility and ambition. We are inevitably led, therefore, to consider the conse-
quences of Ekman’s recantation, and decision to orient himself toward an apparently
very different ecclesiastical time-scape.

Wasting time and suicidal signs

On Sunday, 9 March 2014 – not quite the Ides of March – Ulf Ekman stood on the podium
at the Word of Life, in the same place that his son Benjamin had occupied a little over three
years earlier. This occasion was rather less festive, however, as Ekman was announcing that
he was leaving not just the congregation but also the movement: his movement, the
reflection of his charismatic image. He began with a note of reassuring continuity: ‘First
I want to say that it’s so fantastic to know that things continue to go so well for our won-
derful congregation.’ He also gave thanks to all the ‘wonderful donors’ for the Sports Hall
that the congregation was constructing: classic Prosperity fare, indexing progress through
the harvesting of gifts and consequent expansive materiality. Then things became compli-
cated. Ekman explained that his encounters with the Catholic Church over the years were
‘not so strange since it is the world’s biggest Church.’ Furthermore, his new experience of a
Church he had previously derided was an important part of his personal ‘growth.’ Accord-
ing to the new Ekman – the one now being ‘born again’ out of Pentecostalism – not only
did Roman Catholicism express ‘a continuity that goes back to the Apostles and to the time
of Jesus,’ its members ‘read and use the Bible much more than we often do.’ Ekman
finished with Ephesians 3:18–21 (NIV), invoking ‘this love that surpasses knowledge’ and
a reference to ‘Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.’
10 S. COLEMAN

Judging from the reactions from some of the congregation, played out in social media
and recounted to me subsequently, the announcement was not a complete surprise: Ben-
jamin had already gone, and Ekman had been making reconciliatory noises about Catholi-
cism for years.17 However, to some of the congregation, this apologia seemed the ultimate
in betrayal. As one Pentecostal friend put it to me a few months later: how could Ekman
throw away his life’s work, abandoning all those whom he had originally enticed into the
ministry? And yet, he added, Ekman had made such shifts before. My friend was right.
Ekman had originally defied his Socialist youth and secular parents by becoming a
Lutheran priest, and then infuriated the Swedish Church by becoming a Prosperity
preacher. Now he had one more ace up his sleeve. His action – brave or irresponsible,
depending on one’s standpoint – confirmed my growing suspicion that Ekman was a con-
temporary Nordic trickster figure: always moving (‘sailing’), ironically predictable in his
shifting away from expectations, crossing boundaries that were not conventionally
crossed, and yet always keeping a firm eye on the broader Zeitgeist.18
From a sociological standpoint, we should avoid the temptation to over-dramatize
Ekman’s significance – to feed his own myth-making: after all, he had merely been the
leader of what by African or Latin American standards was a mini- rather than mega-
church, with around 2500 congregation members, located in an obscure corner of the
global charismatic map. But Ekman did turn the Word of Life into one of the most signifi-
cant charismatic ministries in Europe. Though often labelled a charlatan he was also
termed one of the most significant figures in Scandinavian church history of the twentieth
century.19 A piece in Dagen, the well-respected newspaper of the Swedish Pentecostal
movement, claimed that Ekman’s decision was unique in its implications, perhaps equiv-
alent only to Queen Christina’s conversion to the Catholic Church 1654, and in effect con-
stituted a ‘rejection’ (underkännande) of the entire Reformation.20
The specific manner of Ekman’s leaving the Word of Life, though a scandal, was very
different from the tropes of evangelical disgrace that had seen the exit of numerous
pastors in the United States. After all, he was not being embarrassed by some financial
or sexual exposé. In addition, when he made his announcement he had in a sense
already left, having gone into retirement and handed over the reins to Pastor Joakim
Lundqvist. But the point is that Ekman chose to leave the Word of Life twice; first
quietly, and then by committing an act he knew would cause offence and pain to suppor-
ters who thought they had developed a personal relationship with ‘Ulf,’ and in some cases
modelled their spiritual lives on his own. His abandonment thus operated at two levels: it
threatened personal ties that had accumulated over more than three decades of ministry
in Uppsala; and it undermined his hard-fought-for position as a worldwide man of God.
Ekman also wrote a public letter to his ‘international partners’ in the Faith Movement,21
emphasizing that his decision to go to Rome came as a result of his growing knowledge
of Catholicism and a desire ‘to help all believers, including you who are a part of our
network, to have a deepened understanding of the Body of Christ and relate stronger
[sic] to God’s people in the historic churches.’ In his eyes, the move did not imply ‘a sever-
ing of ties’; and yet, from another perspective, that is precisely what it did mean: more
rupture than Rapture.
Two classic anthropological images of sacrifice readily came to my mind in contemplat-
ing such moves. One was of the priest at Nemi (Frazer 1890), a prowling guardian of the
sacred whose assassination was required for societal regeneration and priestly succession
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 11

to occur. Ekman’s actions were in line with certain elements of the Frazerian model, given
the probability that his reputation would cast a shadow on the efforts of his less illustrious
replacement, but there is little evidence that Lundquist was publicly troubled by the pres-
ence of a man who had voluntarily gifted him such a high profile position. The other
sacrificial image provided a variation on the plotline of Marshall Sahlins’s Islands of
History (1985) – an ethno-historical whodunnit that asks not only why Captain Cook was
killed but also whom his murderers thought they were killing, before suggesting contro-
versially that the English sailor, unwittingly apotheosized, fell victim to a ‘play of Hawaiian
categories, or more precisely to their interplay with his own’ (ibid., xiii). Sahlins’s argument
(ibid.) emphasizes the ‘active’ history evident in the Hawaiian cultural order, the flexible
empiricism of a symbolic system that ‘submits … received categories to worldly risks’
(ibid.) while also allowing historic and heroic subjects to be creative in their construing
of ongoing values. Again, we see parallels with as well as distinctions from the death of
‘Ulf.’ The Swedish pastor’s recantation constituted a discursive event that threatened to
put the momentum of his previous work at risk, creating a crisis of local charismatic repro-
duction. What did his founding of the Word of Life now mean, in the retrospective light of
his exit? Unlike the hapless Cook or the twitchy priest at Nemi, Ekman had entered quite
consciously into a form of semiotic suicide, sloughing off his Prosperity persona. Ekman
has since been able to discuss his figural demise, and it is striking that temporality is a
recurring theme of his interviews, articles and sermons. Thus his reference to Catholic ‘con-
tinuity’ in his March 2014 address is echoed in the following words from an extensive tele-
vision interview broadcast a little later:
I constantly go back to the Church as a historical reality … .Revivalist movements … live very
much in the “now” and there is always a form of elitism—one is the latest, so to speak, yeah?
This is not in the Catholic Church at all—it has existed for two thousand years. There is some-
thing that goes deeper.22

If Ekman is speaking a language that juxtaposes biographical with ecclesiastical process,

he is also proposing a rewriting of the ontology of ecclesiastical time and the acknowl-
edgement of a different form of temporal capital. The direction proposed is recapitulative:
backward rather than proleptic, toward the historical past rather than the apocalyptic
future. Spiritual depth is achieved less through a charismatic hyper-production of the
present and more by acknowledging the significance of many centuries of existence. Else-
where, he proposed a particular teleology of Christian engagement. When asked whether
he now desired all Christians to become Catholic, Ekman responded: ‘I believe that it is
Jesus’ wish that everybody should be as one, and that such unity should be concrete.
And I believe that it is the Catholic Church that possesses the fullest expression of such
unity.’ 23 In repeatedly making this claim, Ekman emphasizes that he is not attempting
to take former followers with him, nor to start a new movement. Even so, the metaphor
of unity does powerful discursive work, not only replacing the ‘End Times’ urgency of Pen-
tecostal rhetoric with an alternative objective, but also implying that any negative assess-
ment of Ekman’s action is an attack on harmony – itself a reiteration of contemporary
Catholic calls for concord among Christians (for example Bandak 2013). Pastor Lundquist
has consistently refrained from offering public critique of Ekman’s trajectory, stating that
the latter’s recantation was a matter of individual conscience with no implications for the
ministry.
12 S. COLEMAN

Ekman’s post-Word of Life existence has so far confirmed his claim to have no interest in
setting up a rival power base. He has remained highly active, nonetheless, fulfilling invita-
tions (often with Birgitta) to speak at conferences and seminars across the world, while
often identifying himself with Catholic charismatics. Speculation has been rife that he
might become ordained, but he has so far remained a lay figure (while choosing a
modern Pope, John Paul II, as his patron saint).
At the same time, Ekman’s apparent dissociation from Pentecostalism has raised more
subtle questions about both recantation and repetition, implying that the two can co-exist.
A recent video (2017) of him preaching to a Catholic Charismatic Renewal conference in
Melbourne contains reflections on one of the central questions of his ecclesiastical life:
‘What is the Church?’24 His response is phrased partly through his post-Prosperity temporal
idiom: ‘There’s something in this church that is so stable, so strong, that it will take us from
generation to generation. It has to be discovered–rediscovered – in every generation. It
has to be entered into in every generation.’ In these terms, a Catholic sensibility cultivated
through continuity, rediscovery is the Holy Grail, as different generations stumble on the
same truths, just as: ‘I like the term “Ever Ancient Ever New.” “Ever Ancient, Ever New.”
Amen?’ This venerable but ever-fresh dispensation is found to have greater depth than
a Pentecostal valorization of immediacy and the proleptic. Yet, to anybody aware of
Ekman’s past, some of his language takes on an uncanny air, creating an oxymoronic
sense of the strangely familiar. When Ekman tells his Catholic audience ‘Faith overcomes
the world’ he is both summarizing part of 1 John 5 and invoking a central trope of Prosper-
ity discourse (and the title of one of his best-known books as a Prosperity Pastor [Ekman
1985]). Even his gloss on an iconic image of stability taken from Matthew 16, of the Church
built on Peter the rock, is accompanied by a metapragmatic comment that recalls the tone
and vocabulary of his former spiritual life: ‘This is the most positive verse in the Bible.’
It is not surprising that a pastor who spent three decades developing the language of
Swedish Faith discourse should still be partially possessed by it as he projects himself into
a different ecclesiastical time- and land-scape; and yet his words point to a broader dimen-
sion of Ekman’s orientation toward his former faith, and one that transcends either habitus
or satirizing mimicry. His reinterpretation of Pentecostalism is being articulated not only
through Catholic lenses, but also through modified Pentecostal ones. Recall Ekman’s
words to the congregation on March 9: his semi-boast of Roman Catholicism’s temporal
depth and continuity alongside his reminder that Catholicism is the world’s biggest
Church, full of people who read the Bible even more than ‘we.’ Alongside such recantation
is a kind of strategic recall, a repetition and appropriation of characteristically Prosperity-
oriented rhetorics and metaphors of performativity, scale, and agency: collective and per-
sonal growth; extraordinary fidelity both to the first Church and to biblical text; and
exceeding conventional human measures. The implication is that Ekman’s decision to
go beyond his own congregation’s imagination is actually a means of staying true to
Word of Life principles of reaching out and moving on. Robbins (2004) has emphasized
the power of Pentecostal rhetoric to adopt local spiritual categories while changing
their moral charge, but here we see a Pentecostalist language of appropriation directed
at transcendence of its own spiritual primacy.
In his simultaneous rejection and deployment of Pentecostal categories of time and
agency, Ekman not only displaces ‘Ulf’ by arguing that his Pentecostal persona has not
gone far enough in seeking a true understanding of the Church, but also creates a
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13

hybrid spiritual voice, 25 inhabiting both Catholic and Pentecostal dispositions. Ekman is
producing a new, boundary-crossing spiritual voice that can be seen as either daring or
despicable.26 Here, I find Hamann’s (2008) deployment of the term ‘chronological pol-
lution’ useful in thinking through the implications of such cultural disorderings and reor-
derings of temporality. Hamann focuses on extraordinary Muslim, Christian, and Native
American encounters in the spatio-temporal realm of the sixteenth-century transatlantic,
and shows how the attempt to privilege certain expressions of time inevitably prompted
the need to reject or discard others. For instance, he discusses (ibid., 806) colonial mem-
ories of Central Mexican ‘New Fire’ ceremonies, in which household objects were dis-
carded despite being physically intact because their perceived vitality had worn out
and they were becoming matter out of time.
Ekman also finds himself at an intersection between different temporal worlds and
scales: an ‘old man’ who when much younger founded a ‘revival’ that is now growing
arthritic. Rejecting the option of starting another revival in the same idiom, Ekman has
also ditched certain aspects of his spiritual past while retaining others. Though his discov-
ery of ‘depth’ in Catholicism is presented by him as a logical next phase in his spiritual life,
his current reputation among Word of Life supporters is unsurprisingly more equivocal. I
paid a visit to the ministry in early May of 2017 when I called in for a Sunday morning
service, which happened to be based around the theme of shifting generations. I listened
to a relatively youthful-looking Joachim Lundquist emphasizing that the Word of Life was a
‘church for the generations,’ a place for ‘all ages.’27 At the same time, we could be sure that
‘God is doing something new.’ Even if in our generation people ‘don’t [necessarily] pray in
tongues out loud’ we should not worry, he assured us, since there are always novel ways to
find the divine. His words were suggestive: the dwindling of classic Pentecostal signs of
revival was not a cause for despair but a call to search for new ways to reach God, and
perhaps a widening of temporal frames through which to interpret the life of faith. In
this interpretation (filtered through my analysis), the loss of power of the old Pentecostal
signs of life was less a matter of regret and more a challenge to seek fresh semiotic
expressions of enthusiasm – though certainly not a call to go all the way down the
route Ekman had chosen. I found still more significance in my discussions with congrega-
tion members that morning. The former pastor’s name was not volunteered by my inter-
locutors but dropped into conversation by me, the inquisitive ethnographer. In response, I
found not explicit revulsion but expressions of relative indifference, a sense (three years
after his exit) that Ekman was yesterday’s man. Chatting to a bookstore volunteer
before the service, I asked about ‘Ulf’ and was told: ‘It is Joachim now.’ To be sure, a
few of Ekman’s books were still for sale – ones he had written before his conversion.
Then when I went outside the store to look in the remaindered box I found a discounted
copy of the text that was most particular to ‘Ulf’ – his personal memoirs, detailing his foun-
dation of the Word of Life, now displaced to a tatty wooden crate along with other mis-
cellaneous volumes. Almost, indeed, a form of waste.

From excess to encompassment

Leaving crude psychoanalytic interpretations aside, we might construe ‘old man’ Ekman’s
dismantling of younger ‘Ulf’ by referring to features of his biography: movements from
early Socialism to Lutheranism to Pentecostalism to Catholicism form a repeated
14 S. COLEMAN

pattern of rupture, with each phase marked by fresh injections of outward energy and
inner conviction. Such has been the life of a chronic ‘sailor’ rather than a ‘farmer,’ and
one who has proved adept at ‘moving on’ while nonetheless taking elements of his
immediate past along with him. One of Ekman’s constancies has been his capacity to
engage in risks, daring others to deny the connections that he discerns between appar-
ently different ideological phases of his life. His ‘signs’ thus remain controversial but, in
Sahlins’s terms, distinctly vital. Witnessing the bureaucratization of his own charisma,
Ekman opted not for Pentecostal revival … all over again (for example Austen-Broos
1981, Carpenter 1997), but a retemporalization of his significance, investing Catholic tra-
ditional authority with a long-standing charisma that he only discovered late in life.
Like many successful leaders, Ekman displays a good nose for reading signs of the
times. His latest move has come in a Sweden very different to that of the early 1980s:
in a country where the Swedish Church is now disestablished, the pilgrimage routes pro-
moted by organizations such as Lund Pilgrimage Center reflect a new openness to popular
‘catholic’ pilgrimage practices among Lutherans and even those of no faith. Responding to
Pope Francis’ visit to Sweden, the Holy See’s statistics office released figures as to the
numbers of Roman Catholics in the country, and estimated some 113,000 people,
around 1.15% of the population:28 not many, but enough to help fill the football
stadium in Malmö that Francis visited after his trip to Lund, and reflective of a country
more open to religious diversity and migrants than in the recent past. Coincidentally,
that figure constitutes almost exactly the same as the number of registered Pentecostalists
in the country, but such national considerations provide only part of the background to
Ekman’s framing of his contemporary significance. In his post-announcement television
interview, he noted in passing that he was probably better known abroad than in
Sweden. Similarly, his move to Rome has opened up a landscape of speaking engage-
ments and other invitations far beyond Scandinavia: his global landscape is now measured
out in Catholic parishes rather than Pentecostal ministries.
Ekman’s self-retemporalization can be read as a response to changes in circumstances
in his life, at the Word of Life, and in relation to Sweden as a whole, but might also be
understood as engaging in complex forms of recapitulation. He does not discount his Pen-
tecostal past, but rather projects it into a broader, more encompassing, Catholic temporal
frame, attempting to augment his spiritual reputation through presenting his new status
as an ideal of positive repetition. He both ‘others’ and redefines his previous charismatic
agency and identity before re-embracing them (compare LiPuma 2000, 19), and his
language implicitly retains some of the performative energy and rhetoric of his past
(oral) life: its emphasis on overcoming, positivity, engagement. Even as the independent
authority of the free-wheeling pastor cedes to the ultimate legitimacy of the Pope,
Ekman points out that he and Birgitta have been ‘called’ finally to work within a Church
that dwarfs all others. As he noted in his fateful March address:
In … contacts with different Christians we have come into contact with the Catholic Church in
a special way. That’s not so strange since it is the world’s biggest church … . There are Catho-
lics everywhere. It is also the Church that goes back to the most ancient time, to Jesus and the
apostles.

Time, space, scale, networking, influence, direct relationships with biblical figures: the cul-
tural capital of ambitious Pentecostal mission is invoked but folded into a larger Christian
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 15

spatio-temporal pattern and organization – what Ekman also calls the ‘treasures’ he has
discovered in Catholicism; and one of the ironies of Ekman’s reference to ‘contacts’ here
is his claim that the very global mobility that enabled him to become a ‘great man of
God’ also put him in touch with other ways of being Christian, beyond the parochial
ecclesiastical landscape of Sweden and even Pentecostalism. In leaving ‘Ulf’ behind
Ekman is exceeding but also encompassing his former persona (indeed, Catholic encom-
passment becomes a form of exceeding);29 and he does so by mobilizing the affordances
of a faith that, as Mayblin, Norget, and Napolitano (2017, 7) have recently put it, is:
‘spatially and organizationally elastic in that it can stretch to contain a bewildering
variety of devotional structures and theological positions without breaking’ (see also
Mayblin 2018).
While Pentecostalism often reproduces itself fractally through schism and/or the frantic
founding of new churches, Catholicism is more likely to create chains of immanent
mediation, forming what Mayblin et al. (ibid., 21) call ‘an alignment of ‘living signs’ and
the individual agents who populate them,’ so that the ecology of the faith becomes
deeply ‘historically layered’ (ibid.).30 Such signs retain their vitality precisely through
their flexibility. This point might also be made by reconsidering the tropes of excess
and encompassment. Excess – incidentally from the Latin excedere, to go out or surpass
– is a trope designed to create the idea of a boundary precisely in order to transcend it.
In temporal terms, such imagery invokes the idea of constant progress, while in spatial
terms it favours the restless, fractal creation of networks of like-minded but ever-expand-
ing populations of believers. Encompassment (a ‘drawing in’) neutralizes the heterogen-
eity of its contents by drawing a boundary around them, while also potentially
suggesting the existence of a central point from which all else can be measured. Moreover,
as Dumont (1966) has pointed out, encompassment gives access to culturally specific con-
ceptualizations of hierarchy. It therefore appears that Ekman is indeed locating Pentecost-
alism within Christianity as one part that forms and even helps to reproduce the whole –
even as he asserts that its contribution to that body must pay deference to an older,
equally spatially diffused but temporally more capacious version of the faith.31

Coda: Christianities, temporalities, virtualities

Our study of Ekman’s relationship to ‘Ulf’ leads us finally back to the question of Pentecost-
alism pitched against Catholicism. We might argue that a long-standing hybrid of the two
has existed in the form of charismatic Catholicism (for example Csordas 1997), or that both
contain certain elements of both ‘excess’ and ‘encompassment.’ We might also make the
argument, largely ignored in this paper, that powerful resonances exist between Prosper-
ity and Roman Catholic attitudes towards materiality. However, here I point us toward par-
ticular debates concerning the anthropology of Christianity. In a piece on ‘Replication as
Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem’ (2016) James Bielo takes as his
central problem the question of how religions ‘actualize the virtual problem of temporality’
and thus use replication as a means of dealing with the ‘multi-directional field’ of time
(ibid., 131). In addressing the problem of how to characterize the sheer variety of forms
of a given religion, Bielo draws on Bialecki’s (2012) Deleuzean (1968 [1995]) argument
that religions might be actualizations of the virtual, in other words realizations in a
given context of more open potentialities. There is arguably a theory of ‘active history’
16 S. COLEMAN

(cf. Sahlins 1985) here, given that religions, including Christianity, become understood as
composed of ‘problems’ that constantly require resolution, permanently producing new
reformations and differentiations. Under such circumstances, temporality itself becomes
seen as a generative virtual problem because ‘the potential relationships between religion
and time are … multiple, from repetition to contracting, expanding, stalling, accelerating,
and decelerating time’ (Bielo 2017, 134).
Bielo’s piece is structured around a comparison between Mormon Trek Re-enactment
and a creationist theme park in outlining ‘temporality as a virtual problem that animates
religious life’ (ibid., 141), but also arguing that rituals of religious replication ‘seek to col-
lapse time by creating affective affinities between past and present’ (ibid., 141). In my
case, the comparisons are formed out of one actor’s conceptualizations and realizations
of Pentecostal and Catholic forms of agency and temporality. Whether fully thought-
through or not, Ekman’s acts of ‘chronological pollution’ resemble multiple actualizations
and juxtapositions of apparently different forms of Christianity whose connectivities
within the body of Christ, he implies, might be closer than first thought. Ekman’s orches-
trations of Christian temporalities appear to have a teleological and even solipsistic
dimension, indexing shifts in his own body. His vision of a more arthritic yet wiser
Church, capable of taking the long view, provides hints of a portrait of himself seeking
or even catalyzing an all-encompassing religious unity toward the end of a long and
storied career. If so, his stance, while seeming to be the product of a serial ‘rupturer,’
has consistently been one where repetition and conversion have engaged in mutually
constitutive relations. Neo-Pentecostal revival, in his hands, became a historio-praxic
use of the past in order to form the present and especially the future, a proleptic rep-
etition that became a transformation. His subsequent abeisance to Catholicism,
however, entailed voicing greater respect toward the past per se as a realm that
needed to be re-experienced and re-enacted and not merely exploited. Much of his rhe-
torical work was therefore devoted to recognizing repetition in a new way – neither
taking it for granted nor denigrating it, but also shifting it from purely Pentecostal
lenses. Temporality retained significance as a form of religious capital, but its fundamental
store of value shifted from a present- and future- to a past-oriented form of ‘currency.’ In
his very mixing of temporalities and Christianities, Ekman has shown himself to be a self-
revitalizing child and sign of his times, taking advantage of the relative openness of con-
temporary dialogue between branches of the Christian faith in order to seek affinities and
articulations where others have only seen boundaries.
While this has been a paper ostensibly devoted to tracing the actions of a single pastor
over the course of a storied career, my aim – without simply accepting the assumptions
behind Ekman’s rhetorical constructions of his accumulating ‘fame’ – has been to place
his actions within a wider set of temporalities. If Ekman’s foundation of the Word of Life
constituted a form of ‘excess,’ invoking but transcending earlier forms of Pentecostalism,
his later conversion to Catholicism involved an attempt to prevent his earlier identity and
fame from simply being wasted: rather, he deployed a version of Catholic historiography
that might acknowledge but also encompass Pentecostal enthusiasm within a metaphor
of temporal depth.
Whether or not Ekman persuaded Word of Life supporters of the logic of his position,
his case is instructive in a number of wider senses. One obvious parallel is with Maya May-
blin’s reference, in this issue, to Roman Catholicism’s notable elasticities in the containing
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 17

of difference – a form of ecclesiastical ‘cannibalism’ with the potential to engulf even Pen-
tecostalism. Idiosyncratic and ideologically hybrid as he might seem, Ekman therefore
exemplifies a wider trope within a faith that has consolidated its global presence for
many centuries: that of assimilation or, as I have termed it here, encompassment, with
the latter term meant to invoke the image of encircling another religious form without
destroying it. In this perspective, Pentecostal rupture becomes absorbed within a see-
mingly more powerful reading – and apparently revelatory recognition – of history as rep-
etition at a much greater scale of operation. More generally, Ekman’s case indicates the
work that is often required to make repetition socially and semiotically salient. Rather
like the ubiquitous anthropological notion of ‘context’ (for example Dilley 1999), repetition
provides apparently firm foundations on which other claims can be built; and yet such
foundations can never be taken for granted, and are likely to shift in form and orientation
even as their continuity is asserted.

Notes
1. Shorter versions of this paper were given at the panel ‘Different Repetitions: Anthropological
Engagements with Figures of Return, Recursion, and Redundancy,’ American Anthropological
Association Meeting, Washington DC, 2014 and for the 2017 Society of the Anthropology of
Religion Presidential Panel ‘Religion and Time,’ New Orleans, 15 May 2017. I am grateful for
comments provided at these presentations, and for extremely perceptive readings by
Andreas Bandak and Ingie Hovland, as well as by David Henig and anonymous referees.
2. http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/10/28/pope-francis-heads-godless-sweden-
celebrate-protestant-reformation/
3. My host reminded me that the cathedral had always been a hub for crossings and exchanges:
between Scandinavian mission and Roman Catholic ambition, between Denmark and Sweden.
Indeed the previous day I had taken the train to the city across the iconic Öresund Bridge that
acts as the road, rail, and internet hub between the Scandinavian Peninsular and Central and
Western Europe.
4. The role of Birgitta Ekman remains unexplored in this paper, and deserves separate attention
in its own right. Her charismatic and Catholic personas have attracted far less attention than
those of her husband.
5. While I focus here on marked forms of repetition, I do not deny the significance of less motiv-
ated forms—as explored on a macro-scale in Martin (1978).
6. Implicit in this point is a distinction, also discussed in the Introduction, between ‘mere’ recur-
rence as unwilled or seemingly automatic return, and a more willed and positively desired
form of repetition.
7. As Butler and others indicate, ‘stabilization’ will also inevitably entail a degree of modification.
8. Compare also Mayblin’s exploration (2018) of female Catholic priests who articulate forms of
dissent rather than rupture, leading to disputed claims of spiritual renewal.
9. On the uncanny and repetition, compare Bandak (2018).
10. These terms are my own rather than explicitly stated by informants. However, we shall see
how they receive emic expression through such terms as ‘reaching out’ (excess) and ‘depth’
or ‘unity’ (encompassment).
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMIJXxCJ0A. Accessed 13 October 2017. My translation.
12. ‘Upptäcktsresande.’
13. My translation.
14. Called in Swedish Överflödets Lagar. The English title for the book is ‘The Laws of Prosperity,’ so
the version published by the Word of Life has a slightly different connotation—more directly a
sense of both abundance and going beyond boundaries, which is also sometimes called
‘increase’ by Copeland.
18 S. COLEMAN

15. See e.g. the ministries mentioned at http://www.woli.info/eng/

16. Note echoes with the economic notion of marginal utility.
17. Aletheia, a magazine consistently opposed to Ekman, identified Ekman’s papal interests in
2008, with e.g. the article ‘Ulf Ekman: Påven Ligger Bakom Pingströrelsen’ 18 August 2008,
by ‘MyTwoCents.’
18. In an interview in the newspaper Dagen, Ekman notes: ‘I don’t think all crises are negative.
They force us to take a step toward God.’ http://www.dagen.se/ulf-ekman-darfor-blir-jag-
katolik-1.94507 Interview with Thomas Österberg, 11 March 2013 (My translation).
19. The general secretary of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance referred to him as, ‘the most
dynamic and influential Christian leader we have had in Sweden during the past half
century.’ http://pulpitandpen.org/2017/03/31/false-teacher-of-the-day-3-ulf-ekman/ (My
translation.) The newspaper Expressen published an article ‘Herregud, en sån helomvändn-
ing’— https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/inloggad/herregud-en-san-helomvandning/ on 10
March 2014, noting the figure of around 250,000 explicitly participating in Word of Life enter-
prises around the world.
20. http://www.dagen.se/livsstil/kyrkohistoriker-ulf-ekmans-beslut-ar-varldsunikt-1.95508; ‘Kyrko-
historiker: Ulf Ekmans beslut är världsunikt.’ 13 March 2013. (My translation).
21. https://www.charismanews.com/world/43066-ulf-ekman-resigns-from-david-yonggi-cho-s-
church-board-after-catholic-conversion.
22. http://www.svtplay.se/video/2705275/min-sanning/min-sanning-ulf-ekman-sasong-7-avsnitt-
3. 21 March 2015 (My translation).
23. http://www.dagen.se/ulf-ekman-darfor-blir-jag-katolik-1.94507.
24. CCR Melbourne – ‘What Is The Church?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzto7TENKV8.
Published on 21 Feb 2017.
25. See also of Meyer’s (1999) discussion of hybrid images of the Devil being invoked as West
African Pentecostalists wrestle with both rejecting and retaining spiritual images of the past.
26. The first comment I found under the YouTube video of Ekman’s Australian sermon was: ‘This
man is a liar!’
27. Service attended 7 May 2017.
28. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2016/10/17/161017c.
html.
29. Ekman’s actions also have a flavour of ‘supersessionism’: originally a theological claim by the
Church to have surpassed Judaism in becoming the favoured people of God (moving from Old
Covenant to New), but here applied to Ekman’s own biographical shifts.
30. In this sense, the Pentecostal imminence yields to Catholic immanence.
31. His positioning of himself combines what Ferguson and Gupta (2002, 981) call two principles
key to state spatialization: verticality (lying above society) and encompassment (embracing
localities).

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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