Becoming Christians. Prayers and subject formation in an urban church in China

Jianbo Huang, East China Normal University Professor and Chief of the Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University. He received his PhD in anthropology from Minzu University of China (MUC) in 2003. His research interests include the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of China, Christianity in China, Chinese folk religions, marginal peoples studies and Han peoples studies. Among his main publications (in Chinese) are A Concise History of Anthropological Theory (2014), Local Cultures and the Becoming of Faith Communities (2013), Faith, Politics and Lives in a Rural Community (2012) and Rural Church in the Cities: a Study on the Migrant Workers’ Church in China (2013). Mengyin Hu, East China Normal University PhD candidate at Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University. Her main research interests are the anthropology of Christianity, Tibetan Catholicism, ethics and morality, agriculture and the environment. She has conducted fieldwork in the Tibetan area of northwestern Yunnan Province.Prayers in Christianity are often considered to be a theological or pastoral topic; while social scientific studies generally tend to reduce them, like prayers in other religious contexts, to the status of psychological responses bringing comfort to the practitioner, or a collective construction connected with social and cultural institutions. However, what prayer actually is, and what it means to Christians who practise it remains an open issue for further, more intensive and thorough study. Based on fieldwork in an urban church in China, this article provides some perspectives on contemporary Chinese Christians and their prayer life, attempting to elaborate its possible significance, especially in terms of subject-formation processes within these Christians. Meanwhile, this article argues that, in working towards a better understanding of Christians, it is more efficacious to take ‘Christians’ as those who are, rather than a given or acquired identity, or a status of being, engaged in a process of becoming through a practice, or set of practices, which in this case is prayer,. Moreover, in the case of this Chinese Christian church, the practise of prayer also indicates some reflections on the cultural and religious diversity of contemporary Chinese society