A global sense of religious place: the production of religious and spiritual sites through local–global entanglements and global mobilities

Places of worship in the Christian tradition are often considered to retain fixed and static identities. However, circuits of globalization and global mobilities are increasingly present within such sites and drawn upon to construct new forms of place and geographies filtered through the individual church’s channels of mobilities. Following on from the new mobilities paradigm and relational approaches to ‘place’, this paper explores how the global and the local become implicated in places of worship. Using participant-observation and diary-interview methods based in Baptist churches in Bristol, UK, and framing the findings through Urry’s framework (Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity, 2007), the research examines the multiple interdependent mobilities of imaginary travel, communication, virtual travel, and corporeal travel. Whilst global mobilities were present within the sites, locality and local mobilities also featured prominently. The combination of interdependent mobilities, produced unique place identities in each of church that engaged with the global yet retained local circuits and community identity