Recently, buzzwords such as transnational communities and diaspora have been critically discussed in regard to their tendency to reproduce bounded units of analysis such as ethnic groups or countries of origin. In particular, authors such as Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen (2006) have pointed to the prevalent assumptions that migrants live and worship within distinct ethnic communities.In regard to churches founded by African migrants, they argue that many authors see a church’s membership as a measure of whether a church is international or not and do not pay sufficient attention to the self-definition of the churches as having international outreach. In their view, this “ethnic lens” obscures the diversity of migrants’ relationships to their place of settlement and to other localities around the world.
Taking up this recent discussion, the paper presents preliminary research on churches founded by African migrants in London and Berlin and their place-making practices. Due to the difficulty of finding a location which is affordable and tolerant of noisy worship, more and more churches founded by African migrants in London and Berlin rent old warehouses, garages, and industrial depots from which they organise their transnational networks. The paper will argue that in order to reveal the diversity of relationships formed by and through churches with their local settings, the countries of origin of their members, as well as with multilateral transnational networks, we need to take into account their situational positioning within a specific historical, national and geographical context, and their engagement in different forms of identification, boundary-drawing, and representational practices, which are strongly shaped by mechanisms of racial and socio-economic exclusion.