Religeopolitics and Evangelical Place-Making: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study of Transnational Mission Partnerships

Abstract

Evangelical churches increasingly engage in transnational partnerships that shape spiritual identity and moral belonging across borders. This study investigates how such partnerships function not simply as organizational strategies but as lived spatial practices grounded in faith. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interviews with Canadian and Mexican participants in a long-term church-planting relationship, the article explores how theological commitments, emotional ties, and embodied rituals generate spatial meaning. Participants framed their engagement not through institutional goals, but through metaphors of family, covenant, and companionship, suggesting a grassroots geopolitics rooted in care, hospitality, and spiritual presence. The findings reveal that space is produced not only through ideology or policy, but through practices like shared meals, cross-cultural mentorship, and prayerful presence—acts that reconfigure belonging along theological and affective lines. The article introduces the concept of religeopolitics to describe this phenomenon, arguing that evangelical actors are not merely influenced by global geopolitics but actively create alternative spatial imaginaries through faith. Foregrounding religious subjectivity in spatial production, this article advances scholarship on lived religion and critical geopolitics, highlighting how spiritual communities shape geopolitical belonging through theological imagination, relational duration, and embodied moral practice.

1. Introduction

Geopolitical analysis has significantly expanded in recent decades, moving beyond classical statecraft and territorial conflict to include the affective, cultural, and everyday dimensions of political life (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Dittmer and Gray 2010). Classical geopolitics, emerging in the early 20th century through figures like Halford Mackinder, Friedrich Ratzel, and Nicholas Spykman, framed geography as a strategic determinant of political power. It emphasized control over space—particularly land and sea routes—as essential to national security and global dominance. These spatial imaginaries profoundly shaped statecraft during the World Wars and Cold War, influencing policies of containment, expansion, and territorial management. While this tradition brought enduring insights into the relationship between geography and power, its focus on state actors, territorial control, and militarized strategy left little room for non-state, embodied, or religious forms of spatial agency. Critical geopolitics emerged in response to this narrowness, interrogating how geopolitical knowledge is constructed, represented, and circulated (Ó Tuathail 1996; Agnew 1994; Kuus 2008).

Building on this critique, feminist and popular geopolitics have emphasized embodiment, emotional geographies, and symbolic practices as key sites of geopolitical meaning-making. Yet, despite this diversification, religion remains underexamined within critical geopolitics. While traditional geopolitics has contributed significantly to the analysis of territorial strategy, state sovereignty, and international conflict, it often brackets the everyday, affective, and spiritual dimensions through which power is lived, exerted, and negotiated. When addressed, it is often through instrumental or securitized lenses: as ideology, identity, or threat—particularly in post-9/11 contexts (Agnew 2006; Megoran 2015; Hurd 2008). These framings risk flattening religious life into strategic discourse, overlooking how faith-based actors inhabit, transform, and contest geopolitical space through lived practice.

A small but growing body of scholarship has begun to challenge this neglect. Foundational work in religious geopolitics has shown that theological narratives, sacred texts, and ritual practices play a role in shaping territorial imaginaries and political belonging (Dijkink 2006; Wallace 2006; Yorgason 2006). Others have emphasized how congregations and religious networks act as agents of spatial production, embedding theological meaning in built environments, transnational relationships, and moral geographies (Wuthnow 2009; Wilford 2010; Koopman 2011). More recent contributions have aligned with feminist and affective geopolitics by highlighting how religious actors generate alternative spatial orders through care, hospitality, pilgrimage, and emotional investment (Pain and Smith 2008; Anderson 2009; Córdoba Azcárate 2024).

Despite these advances, religion remains marginal in critical geography’s engagement with space, power, and world-making. Much of the field remains structured by secular assumptions, privileging institutional, state-based, or materialist models of spatial agency (Kuus 2008; Dalby 2002). Even where religion is acknowledged, it is often as backdrop rather than as constitutive force. What remains underdeveloped is a framework for understanding how faith is not simply mapped onto geopolitical space, but actively generates it—through relational presence, moral obligation, and sacred imagination.

This article addresses that gap by introducing the concept of religeopolitics: a framework for analyzing how religious actors enact geopolitical agency not through coercion or statecraft, but through lived faith, moral obligation, and spatial presence. It draws inspiration from feminist geopolitics’ focus on vulnerability and everyday life (Hyndman 2001), affective geopolitics’ engagement with moral atmospheres (Anderson 2009), and phenomenological approaches that attend to how space is inhabited and interpreted through relational and theological meaning (Smith et al. 2009; Casey 1996). As an interdisciplinary heuristic, religeopolitics bridges political geography, religious studies, and phenomenology to understand how power, identity, and territory are shaped through theological practices. It extends related ideas such as spiritual geopolitics and moral geography by foregrounding faith itself as a spatializing force—positioning believers as world-makers who produce alternative moral geographies through covenant, care and calling.

To clarify the conceptual contributions of this framework, several key terms merit definition. Geopolitics, in this article, refers not solely to statecraft or territorial contestation, but to the broader processes through which power, identity, and spatial meaning are constructed and contested (Agnew 1994; Kuus 2008; Dalby 2002). Spatial meaning denotes how physical and social environments acquire significance through interpretation, ritual, and relationship (Lefebvre 1991; Kong 2001; Tweed 2006). Geopolitical belonging describes how individuals and communities locate themselves within these contested spatial orders, not just legally or nationally, but morally and spiritually (Wuthnow 2009; Dijkink 2006). Embodied presence refers to how physical acts—such as caregiving, hospitality, and shared rituals—produce spatial effects that exceed symbolic intention (Csordas 1994; Anderson 2009; Hyndman 2001). Building on this, theological spatiality names the infusion of space with sacred purpose through faith-based imagination and calling (Wallace 2006; Wilford 2010; Hovland 2016), while affective territoriality captures how emotional ties, such as kinship and solidarity, reshape experiences of proximity and place (Pain and Smith 2008; Anderson 2009; Koopman 2011). These concepts collectively support the analytic of religeopolitics, which centers faith not as a worldview mapped onto space, but as a spatializing force in its own right.

By integrating Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with critical geopolitics, this article contributes to ongoing efforts to pluralize geopolitical analysis, challenging secular and statist assumptions about who produces space and how. It is intended for scholars across critical geopolitics, religious studies, and practical theology—particularly those unfamiliar with how these domains intersect. For critical geographers, the article demonstrates that faith-based practices are not peripheral to spatial politics but are constitutive of it. For scholars of lived religion, it offers spatial theory as a lens for interpreting how theological imagination and ritual presence shape territory and belonging. In bridging these domains, the article affirms the agency of religious communities—not as ideological instruments, but as moral cartographers of global belonging. That is, they do not draw territorial boundaries in the conventional geopolitical sense, but trace lines of responsibility, presence, and care. Through prayer, accompaniment, hospitality, and covenant, they inscribe alternative moral geographies onto the spaces they inhabit. It concludes by proposing religeopolitics as a theoretical and methodological framework—developed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis—that illuminates how faith becomes a form of spatial world-making.

2. Materials and Methods

This study focuses on a long-term church-planting partnership between Canadian and Mexican congregations within the same evangelical denomination. The case was selected for its sustained, grassroots character and its clear articulation of theological, relational, and spatial motivations for mission. The partnership was initiated through a now-dissolved parachurch network that connected like-minded churches across borders and fostered transnational collaboration. Over time, the relationship deepened through shared ministry trips, mutual discipleship, and collaborative outreach. While the Canadian church provided initial financial support and pastoral mentoring, decision-making and contextual leadership remained embedded in the Mexican congregation. Participant recruitment was voluntary and non-hierarchical; no individuals were assigned by denominational authorities or mission agencies. All participants were recruited through congregational networks and invited to participate based on direct involvement in the partnership. Studying this transnational case, rather than a domestic one, brings into view the affective, theological, and political dynamics that emerge when spiritual responsibility and mission unfold across uneven but covenantal terrain.

To explore how participants interpreted and enacted this partnership as a lived theological and spatial experience, the study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). IPA was selected for its emphasis on lived experience, meaning-making, and the co-construction of understanding between researcher and participant (Smith et al. 2009). The aim was not to generalize findings but to offer a nuanced, idiographic account of how evangelical actors perceive their mission partnership as a form of spatial and theological agency.

Unlike grounded theory, which aims to build generalizable theoretical models, or ethnography, which prioritizes cultural description, IPA is uniquely suited to interpreting the personal, affective, and theological dimensions of space as they are lived and narrated by participants (Smith et al. 2009; Eatough and Smith 2008). Its attentiveness to lived experience allows for the interpretation of spiritual space not merely as a social construct but as an existential and relational horizon—consistent with the ontological assumptions of faith-based spatiality.

Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Canadian and Mexican participants between 2018 and 2019. Participants included clergy and laypersons, men and women, from both urban and peri-urban congregational contexts. All participants had direct experience with the partnership and had either hosted or been hosted by their transnational counterparts. Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish, depending on participant preference, and ranged from 45 to 90 min in length. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and, where applicable, translated into English for coding.

Following the IPA protocol outlined by Smith et al. (2009), the analysis proceeded through several iterative stages: initial close reading of transcripts, exploratory coding, development of emergent themes, and clustering of themes into superordinate categories. Particular attention was paid to participants’ use of metaphor, affective language, and theological framing. The analysis was abductive in nature—drawing interpretive insight both from the participants’ own framing and from relevant theoretical literature on spatiality, affect, and religious practice.

The final analysis yielded three superordinate themes—theological spatiality, affective relationality, and embodied practice—each of which is supported by direct quotations and interpretive commentary. All coding and analysis were conducted manually using qualitative research software (NVivo was not used), ensuring intimate engagement with the text at each stage.

The author previously served as a participant observer in the Canadian partner congregation and was known to several interviewees. While this insider position offered deep contextual insight, care was taken throughout the IPA process to bracket preconceptions and foreground the participants’ voices. Reflexive memos were maintained throughout analysis to ensure transparency and epistemic humility.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) was not used to generate data, code, or analysis in this study. GenAI tools were used solely to support minor text formatting and citation verification during manuscript preparation. All interpretive analysis and writing were conducted manually by the author.

3. Results

This section presents the principal findings of the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) conducted on interviews with Canadian and Mexican participants involved in a transnational evangelical church-planting partnership. As outlined in the introduction, this study explores how lived faith practices—particularly within the context of transnational mission—function as a form of spatial and moral agency. The results illuminate how participants experience and narrate their engagement not as organizational strategy but as covenantal relationship, spiritual kinship, and shared moral responsibility across borders.

The analysis generated three superordinate themes that reflect distinct but interwoven dimensions of this religeopolitical dynamic: Theological Spatiality, Affective Relationality, and Embodied Practice. These themes demonstrate how theological imagination, emotional attachment, and everyday action converge to produce a grassroots geopolitics shaped by presence, prayer, vulnerability, and mutual care. Each theme is presented below with representative quotations and interpretive commentary, highlighting how transnational mission is lived, felt, and enacted in specific places and practices.

3.1. Theological Spatiality

The first theme to emerge from the interpretative phenomenological analysis is theological spatiality, which captures how participants infused physical and social space with theological meaning. While participants occasionally reflected on the visibility, accessibility, or reach of church-planting locations, even these considerations were grounded in a theological imagination of calling, presence, and divine purpose. In this sense, mission was not framed primarily through institutional growth or strategic replication, but through relational and spiritual terms that wove practical strategy into a sense of vocation.

A Mexican worship pastor articulated the partnership as “una familia… amistades íntimas… que caminamos juntos a una misma idea” (“a family… intimate friendships… walking together in one vision”). This shared language of pilgrimage emphasized theological solidarity over organizational control. “No se trata de ser jefes” (“It’s not about being bosses”), he added, underscoring a vision of leadership marked by mutuality, not hierarchy. Canadian leaders mirrored this ethos: “We’re not here to drop in and drop out. We’re here to walk alongside,” signaling a sustained spatial and moral commitment rooted in shared faith.

Partnership sites—such as a café near a metro station in Mexico City—were likewise framed not as neutral venues but as sacred environments. A volunteer described his role simply: “Mi papel sería compartir la esperanza en la cafetería” (“My role is to share hope in the café”). These physical spaces were not understood as peripheral to mission but as consecrated through hospitality, prayer, and embodied presence. One participant emphasized this grassroots sacralization by describing his church’s origin as the outworking of divine intention: “Así es como nace nuestra iglesia. Nuestra misión, nuestro anhelo, será que mañana… podamos también plantar otra iglesia y después plantar otra y otra y otra, y poder hacer cumplir la palabra de Dios en nuestras vidas.” (“This is how our church was born. Our mission, our desire, is that tomorrow… we can also plant another church, and then another, and another, and another, and be able to fulfill the word of God in our lives.”). Space here is not abstract or functional—it is the product of theological vocation unfolding across time and place.

A café worker described his role in explicitly missionary terms: “Quizá no me han enviado a un lugar muy lejos, pero al final se misionera acá porque tengo que compartir la palabra de Dios… más que un barista es el compartir la esperanza a quienes no la conocen.” (“Maybe I haven’t been sent somewhere far away, but in the end, I am a missionary here because I have to share God’s word… more than a barista, I am here to share hope with those who don’t know it.”). Here, mission was understood not as distant travel but as proximate, faithful presence in everyday labor. Even a commercial site like a café became a sanctified zone, where spiritual vocation infused the physical task of service with eternal significance.

Another congregant echoed this emphasis on missionally infused geography by reflecting on the importance of visibility and accessibility: “This place… it’s close to a subway and it’s close to transportation… you must see—you want to plant a church, you have to think how many people or how many families can be impacted with this address and this locale.” Rather than being strategically neutral, the siting of the church was spiritually intentional—locating proximity as part of God’s provision.

For one church planter’s wife, returning to Mexico from Canada was itself a spatial calling: “Dios decidió traernos de regreso con un propósito distinto” (“God decided to bring us back with a distinct purpose”). The move, while geographically local, was theologically framed as missionary obedience, re-rooting their family in a neighborhood and church context understood as divinely appointed.

Participants also described how ordinary environments—homes, workplaces, neighborhoods—could be reoriented toward spiritual purpose. As one participant put it, “Yo creo que como iglesia… podemos afectar nuestra escuela, nuestro trabajo, nuestros compañeros… eso va a propiciar que haya consecuencias a nivel ciudad.” (“I believe that as a church… we can impact our school, our work, our coworkers… and that will bring about consequences at the city level.”). Another added, “Cada persona que está a mi alrededor Dios la puso para poder compartirle de Cristo” (“Every person around me, God placed there so I could share Christ with them”). Through this lens, the spatial imagination of mission was not confined to explicitly religious sites but extended into the everyday, turning the mundane into a theater of divine presence.

This interior transformation was also described in terms of self-denial and spiritual reorientation. As one café worker explained: “Yo creo que mi mayor necesidad primero es reconocer que necesito a Dios y morir a mi mismo… seguir dando pasos agigantados, no por mí, no por lo que Dios hace para… plantarse en mi Iglesia.” (“I believe my greatest need is first to recognize that I need God and die to myself… to continue taking giant steps—not for me, but for what God is doing to establish his Church.”). For this participant, church planting was not merely an organizational task but a personal act of obedience, rooted in spiritual surrender and shaped through place-based commitment.

Even short-term encounters were infused with sacred significance. One volunteer described the emotional impact of being hosted by Canadian church members: “Yo pude ver su amor por nosotros aunque no nos conocían.” (“I could see their love for us even though they didn’t know us.”). These visits, he said, made him feel “muy amado” (“deeply loved”)—a spiritual affection that reshaped physical gathering spaces into environments of divine hospitality and transnational care. Similarly, another congregant described how Canadian men “sacrificaron… dejaron a sus familias” (“they sacrificed… they left their families”) to build a café for the church in just three days. Their labor, he emphasized, “no pensaron en ellos, pensaron en cómo agradarle mejor a Dios” (“they didn’t think of themselves, they thought about how to better please God”), transforming construction into worship and reconfiguring space into sacred infrastructure.

Participants often spoke of “a place with a mission” or “seeing God’s hand” in shared endeavors, indicating a theological grammar through which space is morally charged and spiritually interpreted. Evangelical actors in this study did not merely operate within preexisting spaces—they actively reconfigured them through worship, community, and calling. Drawing on Wuthnow’s (2009) concept of moral geography and Tweed’s (2006) notion of dwelling, these narratives reveal how mission sites function as sacred borderlands—environments where covenantal identity and divine purpose converge.

In this light, theological spatiality reveals how faith-based actors generate geopolitical meaning not through policy or institutional reach, but through prayer, presence, and spiritually saturated relationships. These spaces become transformative: they are simultaneously local and transcendent, relational and territorial, grounded in the ordinary but infused with sacred intentionality.

3.2. Affective Relationality

The second theme, affective relationality, captures the emotional bonds, spiritual kinship, and mutual encouragement that sustain the partnership between Canadian and Mexican churches. Rather than describing their relationship in strategic or organizational terms, participants consistently emphasized a sense of familial connection—grounded not in institutional obligation but in shared faith and friendship.

One Canadian leader explained: “We text, we pray, we encourage each other. We feel connected as extended family.” This language of hermanos, familia en Cristo, and “cousin churches” emerged repeatedly across interviews. Affective ties were not based on cultural similarity but on what another Canadian participant described as a “deep spiritual friendship,” rooted in prayer, presence, and mutual reliance.

Participants also described how these bonds were maintained across distance. “Even though we’re not physically close,” one Canadian pastor noted, “we’ve been down there enough that we can see the faces when we pray.” Emotional connection here served as a kind of affective cartography, mapping spiritual nearness across geographical separation. One worship leader similarly reflected, “You go down and you build relationships. And when you come back, it’s not just, ‘Oh, that was nice.’ It’s, ‘I care about that family. I pray for them.’” These comments suggest that emotional attachment itself became a spatial practice—a way of extending relational presence across borders.

This dynamic of emotional-geographical convergence was not unidirectional. A Mexican congregant described the transnational partnership as a source of comfort: “Desde que empezamos a tener contacto con la iglesia en Canadá, nos sentimos más acompañados” (“Since we began to connect with the church in Canada, we’ve felt more accompanied”). Others described the comfort of knowing they were being prayed for—“even when you don’t ask”—as a sustaining force during times of ministry fatigue or isolation. Another worship pastor echoed this: “Tal vez ayudan mucho las redes sociales para pensar en ellos… ver que están creciendo… eso ayuda a pensar en ellos y orar por ellos para que Dios los siga bendiciendo” (“Social media helps a lot to think of them… to see that they are growing… that helps us think of them and pray for them so that God keeps blessing them”).

These affective circuits of care—woven through WhatsApp, prayer, and digital presence—enabled participants to feel relationally “close” even across borders. “Tal vez una vez por semana,” one pastor shared, “veo las predicas, los eventos, y oro por ellos” (“Maybe once a week, I watch the sermons, the events, and I pray for them”). In this way, attention and intercession became spatial practices, tethering communities together in mutual awareness and care. Even digital glimpses of another church’s growth catalyzed spiritual solidarity. This emotional and theological attentiveness, practiced regularly, was not incidental—it was formative.

Participants also described how affective depth was fostered through mutual vulnerability. Reflecting on the impact of Canadian visitors, a Mexican worship pastor noted: “No vinieron con ideas de sentirse superiores… incluso algunos confesaron sus problemas y pidieron ‘ustedes oren por mí porque necesito oración en esta área de mi vida’” (“They didn’t come with a sense of superiority… in fact, some confessed their struggles and asked, ‘Please pray for me because I need prayer in this area of my life’”). This act of shared weakness reconfigured typical power dynamics. “They make me feel like, ‘You are part of me. I need you, and you need me to go together to share the gospel.’” Such statements foreground a theology of mutual dependence, where affective openness becomes both spiritually formative and geopolitically significant.

Other participants emphasized the emotional impact of hospitality. “Como latinos somos muy hospitalarios, y que vengan, y nos conozcan, ya coman con nosotros, y nos cuenten sus vidas para nosotros es de gran impacto” (“As Latinos we are very hospitable, and for them to come, to meet us, to eat with us, and to share their lives with us—that has a big impact on us”). These moments of embodied fellowship demonstrate how hospitality becomes a spiritual and emotional force that transcends institutional alignment and generates lasting transnational bonds. One worship pastor recalled, “They stayed after the service. We drank coffee and they asked us how we were doing—not just ministry, but our families. One said, ‘Can you pray for my anger?’ That was unexpected. But it made us feel united.”

While theological spatiality grounded mission in sacred geographies and divine intention, affective relationality demonstrates how those spaces are animated by lived human connection. If space provides the frame, relationship provides the lifeblood. Together, these themes illustrate that transnational mission is not simply a deployment of resources, but an enfolding of lives—emotionally, spiritually, and materially. Participants did not simply go to a place; they became bound to others through that going.

In recent scholarship, emotions are increasingly recognized as geopolitical forces that shape imaginaries, allegiances, and mobilities (Pain 2009; Massaro and Williams 2013). Within this frame, affective relationality is not ancillary to geopolitical formations but constitutive of them. Participants in this study engaged in what might be called emotional placemaking, building transnational solidarities through affection, vulnerability, and shared moral commitments. These affective geographies render distant others spiritually proximate, reconfiguring notions of territory not through formal borders but through networks of prayer, hospitality, and mutual concern.

Such testimonies reframe partnership as an affective infrastructure of mission—where warmth, care, and prayer form the connective tissue between congregations. These relational expressions do not merely accompany geopolitics; they generate it. Through shared communication, embodied presence, and covenantal trust, participants constructed a map of belonging that redefined proximity—not as physical distance but as spiritually saturated nearness.

In IPA terms, affective relationality illuminates how mission partnership was experienced as a felt, lived connection. In religeopolitical terms, it shows how emotional attachments are not merely interpersonal but territorial, animating a transnational network through affective presence. Love, encouragement, and mutual intercession were not “soft” supplements to mission—they were spatial forces, shaping the contours of an alternative moral geography.

3.3. Embodied Practice

The third theme, embodied practice, highlights how participants lived out their missional identity through physical, relational, and ordinary actions. Rather than treating evangelism as programmatic or event-based, participants consistently framed mission as something woven into the rhythms of daily life—performed through parenting, serving, mentoring, praying, and showing up faithfully in their communities. This grounded and lived spirituality reveals how theology is not merely believed but enacted.

A Mexican pastor’s wife summarized this incarnational view succinctly: “Evangelizo a mis hijos todos los días” (“I evangelize my children every day”). For her, discipleship began at home, and parenting itself became a site of theological expression. Likewise, a Canadian worship pastor framed spiritual obedience as extending across all areas of life: “We’re just trying to be present in the mission God gave us. Whether that’s on stage or in the hockey rink, it’s the same obedience.” Ordinary places—homes, cafés, hockey arenas—were thus reimagined as sacred spaces of witness. This everyday enactment of mission did not rely on formal status or programs but emerged from faithful attention to the places participants already occupied.

Many participants described physical acts of care as central to their spiritual vocation. One Canadian leader recalled hospital visits that led to prayer and deeper connection; another mentioned how simple invitations turned into years-long discipleship. A Mexican church member working in café ministry echoed this integration of labor and love: “Mi papel sería compartir la esperanza en la cafetería” (“My role is to share hope in the café”). Even tasks traditionally considered hospitality or service were reframed as spiritual practices—part of a larger vocation to make Christ known through presence.

This sense of embodied calling extended into material and communal space. One Mexican participant spoke powerfully of a short-term mission team from Canada who built a café for their church: “Vinieron varios hombres de Canadá… construyeron esa cafetería en tres días… lo hicieron por amor a la iglesia… querían algo agradable para el Señor.” (“Several men came from Canada… they built the café in three days… they did it out of love for the church… they wanted something pleasing to the Lord.”). Their construction work was not simply functional; it was received as a spiritual gift. The café itself became a kind of embodied infrastructure of mission: “Un lugar como una cafetería podía atraer a personas para poderles presentar el evangelio” (“A place like a café could attract people so we could share the gospel with them.”).

Here, theological purpose took material form—faith translated into wood, labor, and shelter. Physical space was not incidental but constitutive of witness. This same participant reflected on how participation in a local church pushed her beyond her comfort zone: “El pertenecer a una iglesia local me empuja a convivir con toda la familia… a través de ese ministerio también conozco otras familias.” (“Belonging to a local church pushes me to connect with the whole church family… through ministry I get to know other families too.”). In this account, embodiment is social as well as spatial. Theological identity is forged not only through labor but through time, relational effort, and mutual hospitality. These are not grand events but small, sustained practices—sharing meals, serving in ministry, offering presence—that bind the local church together as a visible sign of the gospel.

Participants often spoke of mission not as enthusiasm but as endurance. A Mexican pastor voiced the challenges of ministry in resource-scarce contexts: “We’re constantly burning through people and equipment.” This weariness, though painful, was not framed as failure. Rather, it became part of the sacred terrain on which mission is lived. Another participant expressed a similar dynamic in how her singleness enabled deeper commitment: “El ser soltera tiene muchos beneficios… me considero alguien que tal vez podría dar mucho más por la Iglesia.” (“Being single has many benefits… I see myself as someone who can give much more to the Church.”). Here, availability becomes offering. The participant understood her time not merely as discretionary but as stewardship—an embodied resource to be poured out in ministry.

Embodiment also carried missional implications beyond the church walls. One participant emphasized: “Cuando tengo la oportunidad de hablar de Jesús a otras personas, lo hago… todos somos misioneros porque tenemos un mandamiento de crecer y discipular.” (“When I have the opportunity to speak about Jesus to others, I do it… we’re all missionaries because we have a command to grow and disciple.”). Mission was not for the elite few; it was an ongoing way of being in the world. This democratization of evangelism emphasized posture over position—obedience over office. Whether in a café, at a child’s bedside, or among coworkers, participants framed evangelistic calling as continuous and embodied.

IPA analysis confirms that such practices were central to how participants understood and lived their faith. Evangelism was not only spoken but enacted; not merely internal but spatial. In religeopolitical terms, these narratives illustrate how faith reshapes geography—not only metaphorically, but tangibly. Acts of care, presence, construction, parenting, and sacrifice inscribed a new moral map across the local and transnational spaces the churches inhabited.

Embodied practice, then, is not peripheral to geopolitics—it is the ground on which it unfolds. Faith lived in flesh and action becomes a means of reorganizing social space, redrawing the boundaries of community, and revealing an alternative way of belonging. Whether hammering boards for a café, mentoring a teen, or visiting the sick, participants revealed a theology that touches ground—where mission is made real through hands, habits, hospitality, and holy repetition.

4. Power, Asymmetry, and Shared Agency in Transnational Mission

The preceding findings illustrate how participants enacted a lived theology of space, relationship, and practice. Yet these practices unfolded within a context of structural and geopolitical inequality. Canadian and Mexican churches did not approach mission from equal footing; differences in financial capacity, mobility, institutional visibility, and theological resources shaped the partnership from the outset. This section analyzes how asymmetries of power and positionality were navigated—not simply as background conditions, but as constitutive features of the partnership’s religeopolitical space. Drawing on critical, feminist, and affective geopolitics, this section interprets how power functioned within the partnership, how participants resisted paternalistic dynamics, and how spiritual agency emerged across asymmetrical terrain.

4.1. Material and Institutional Imbalances

As numerous scholars have noted, religious networks operate within and often reinforce uneven global structures (Wuthnow 2009; Brouwer et al. 1996; Miller and Yamamori 2007). In this study, Canadian churches possessed clear advantages in financial support, short-term mobility, digital platforms, and theological education. They were able to send mission teams, support building projects, and sustain long-term pastoral staff with relative ease. Mexican partners, by contrast, described navigating resource scarcity, visa limitations, and infrastructural precarity—common realities in South–North ecclesial partnerships.

Participants were aware of these dynamics. One Canadian pastor noted, “It’s something we have to watch—that we’re not just coming down with all the answers.” A Mexican leader similarly emphasized, “No se trata de ser jefes” (“It’s not about being bosses”), directly challenging potential hierarchies. Yet these asymmetries extended beyond material resources to include representational power—Canadian churches had more access to online visibility, denominational networks, and English-language theological media.

These dynamics unfold within what postcolonial scholars call the lingering “coloniality of power” (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000). Even well-intentioned partnerships navigate hybrid “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994), where care and inequality intertwine—echoing Said’s (1978) insight that benevolence itself can reproduce the imaginative geographies of dominance. These interpretive frames help situate the partnership within broader histories of transnational mission, where spiritual solidarity is negotiated amid uneven global structures. As Koopman (2011) argues in her formulation of “alter-geopolitics,” even well-meaning alternative security projects often operate within existing hierarchies of visibility and mobility.

This echoes broader critiques within critical geopolitics, which challenge the “territorial trap” of state-centric power while remaining alert to how geopolitical agency is unevenly distributed (Agnew 1994; Kuus 2008; Dalby 2002). Within this partnership, while spatial practice was framed in relational and spiritual terms, the background structure of asymmetry continued to shape who could travel, who could narrate, and who could fund.

4.2. Relational Resistance to Paternalism

Despite these structural asymmetries, participants described relational dynamics that subverted or reframed traditional donor–recipient models. One key mode of resistance was vulnerability. As one Mexican worship pastor recounted, Canadian visitors shared their struggles and asked for prayer. “No vinieron con ideas de sentirse superiores… incluso algunos confesaron sus problemas,” he said (“They didn’t come with ideas of superiority… some confessed their problems”). Such admissions challenged hierarchical expectations and created mutuality in prayer.

Hospitality was another site of resistance. Mexican congregants hosted Canadians in their homes, cooked for them, and shared stories. “Que vengan, y nos conozcan, ya coman con nosotros… eso es de gran impacto,” (“That they come, and get to know us, and eat with us… that has a great impact”) said one host. Hospitality, as feminist geopoliticians argue, is not a neutral practice—it enacts spatial intimacy and ethical proximity, reshaping who belongs and who leads (Pain and Smith 2008; Hyndman 2001; Massaro and Williams 2013). In this case, the home became a geopolitical site—a space where relational authority could challenge economic imbalance.

These dynamics align with Hovland’s (2016) notion of “affective belonging,” in which emotional and spiritual ties complicate assumptions about institutional power. Rather than reinforcing vertical flows of mission, participants constructed horizontal relationships grounded in prayer, accompaniment, and care. One Canadian pastor captured this when he said, “We text, we pray, we encourage each other. We feel connected as extended family.” The affective register became a medium of resistance—blurring traditional binaries of sender and receiver, host and guest.

4.3. Suberting Dominant Geopolitical Orders

Beyond resisting paternalism, participants also enacted alternative spatial logics that subverted dominant mission paradigms. The global evangelical movement has often been organized around growth metrics, strategic expansion, and resource deployment (Im and Stetzer 2016; Stetzer and Bird 2009). Yet in this partnership, participants consistently prioritized presence over productivity. “They didn’t come with plans,” one Mexican participant noted. “They just came to be with us.”

This spiritual geography contests the neoliberal logic of scalability and efficiency. Rather than reproducing institutional models, participants described mission in terms of companionship, faithfulness, and covenant. As Massey (2005) argues, place is not static but produced through interrelations and trajectories. In this context, partnership sites—homes, cafés, churches—became what Wuthnow (2009) calls “moral geographies,” shaped not by territorial control but by lived ethical relationships.

These practices constituted a kind of grassroots spatial diplomacy—a religeopolitical formation that operated beneath formal institutions but carried geopolitical significance. As Anderson (2009) and Córdoba Azcárate (2024) note, emotional atmospheres and embodied presence can generate alternative worldings that unsettle conventional maps. Here, the geopolitical was not defined by strategy or territory, but by prayer, sacrifice, and solidarity.

4.4. Shared Agency as Relational Politics

Crucially, participants did not understand agency as rooted in equality of resources or positional symmetry. Rather, they enacted a model of shared agency grounded in covenant, care, and spiritual interdependence. Prayer emerged as a key modality—transcending borders not only symbolically but affectively and relationally. One participant explained that she regularly watched Canadian sermons and prayed for their growth. Another noted, “You are part of me. I need you.” These testimonies suggest a mode of agency enacted through mutual attentiveness and presence.

Such accounts challenge liberal assumptions that power must be symmetrical to be shared. As Mahmood (2016) argues, agency should not be defined solely in terms of resistance or autonomy but must include the ethical capacities to inhabit—and sometimes submit to—normative frameworks. In this study, Mexican and Canadian participants did not always have equal access to resources or representation, but they constructed mutual agency through moral presence, relational obligation, and theological imagination.

This aligns with feminist and affective geopolitics’ emphasis on non-sovereign forms of power—those enacted through care, vulnerability, and embodied practice (Hyndman 2001; Koopman 2011; Massaro and Williams 2013). Rather than viewing partnership as the balancing of power, participants framed it as the negotiation of presence. Whether serving coffee, discipling children, or praying across borders, they participated in a shared calling rooted not in parity, but in covenant.

In religeopolitical terms, this constitutes a non-statist form of geopolitical agency: one embedded in faith, relationship, and embodied acts of solidarity. These practices did not erase asymmetry, but they offered a way of living faithfully within it—co-producing space through companionship rather than command.

5. Discussion

The preceding findings—theological spatiality, affective relationality, and embodied practice—demonstrate that transnational evangelical partnerships are not merely vehicles of religious outreach or institutional expansion. Rather, they enact a relational and theologically charged form of spatial politics that challenges secular, strategic, and statist accounts of geopolitical agency. Although the present study foregrounds relational and phenomenological dynamics, further work might explore how these forms of shared agency interact with structural or postcolonial dimensions of global religious networks. In this section, I interpret these findings in conversation with recent scholarship in critical geography, religious studies, and phenomenology to develop the theoretical implications of religeopolitics as a conceptual framework.

The first theme, theological spatiality, illustrates how participants infused mundane spaces with sacred purpose, producing a lived moral geography (Wuthnow 2009) through theological narratives of calling, presence, and partnership. While critical geography has long emphasized that space is socially produced (Lefebvre 1991), much of this scholarship remains grounded in materialist or institutional accounts. In contrast, participants in this study redefined space through metaphors of pilgrimage, hospitality, and spiritual kinship—framing homes, cafés, and worship sites as sites of covenantal practice rather than logistical assets. As one Mexican participant explained, his café ministry was not about serving coffee but about “sharing hope” through presence and prayer—reframing the space not as a commercial venue but as a sacred site of witness and care. In doing so, he subtly contested the spatial logic of capitalist function and reasserted a theological vocation within a global economy of inequality. This reimagining of space as mission reorients agency from Western funders or church strategists to local practitioners who shape meaning on the ground. This aligns with Kong’s (2001) claim that religion is often under-theorized in spatial disciplines and supports Tweed’s (2006) argument that religious actors dwell in space by “crossing and dwelling,” inscribing meaning on the landscape through movement, memory, and ritual. These acts of theological spatialization thus produce not only sacred meaning but also political agency, as they redefine whose voices and visions shape place. In reframing commercial or neutral sites as covenantal and consecrated, participants re-inscribe space with values that challenge dominant logics of economic function or institutional control. The production of sacred space, in this sense, becomes a grassroots geopolitics of moral authority.

Affective relationality, the second theme, contributes to ongoing debates about emotional geographies and moral atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Pain and Smith 2008). Participants described their partners as hermanos, familia en Cristo, and “extended family,” revealing an emotional register that exceeds functional cooperation. One Canadian worship pastor even described the transnational pastor as someone he texts and prays with regularly—”we feel connected as extended family,” he said—underscoring the emotional depth of these relationships. These ties were maintained not through formal agreements but through prayer, encouragement, and spiritual accompaniment—what Koopman (2011) calls “transnational moral spaces.” Such relationships enact an affective territoriality, a form of belonging that binds people across borders through shared convictions and mutual care. This challenges dominant framings in both religious geopolitics and missiology, which tend to emphasize strategy, growth, or ideological export rather than emotional investment and theological kinship (Stetzer and Bird 2009; Reimer and Wilkinson 2015). The relational language used by participants—kinship, family, accompaniment—does not simply reflect emotional intimacy, but reconstitutes the terms of belonging across borders. This affective territoriality blurs the boundaries of national and institutional identity, enabling a form of geopolitical community grounded not in jurisdiction or citizenship, but in shared spiritual obligation. It represents a soft, yet politically meaningful, infrastructure of transnational solidarity.

The third theme, embodied practice, highlights the material and bodily dimensions of mission partnerships—hospital visits, meals shared, hands laid in prayer. These acts of presence illustrate a lived theology of spatial vocation: faith enacted not through abstract belief but through caregiving, hospitality, and discipleship in place. These findings resonate with feminist geopolitics’ emphasis on the everyday, the intimate, and the vulnerable as sites of geopolitical significance (Hyndman 2001; Massaro and Williams 2013). Yet, as Bielo (2011) and Csordas (1994) suggest, these practices also constitute religious formations—embodied performances that make theological meaning tangible. Participants in this study expressed faith not as a worldview to be asserted, but as a relationship to be inhabited, placing their bodies, time, and emotions in service of transnational belonging. As one pastor’s wife explained, “I evangelize my children every day,” pointing to how parenting itself became a spiritual act, rooted in place and relationship. These embodied acts are not politically neutral; they occupy and redefine space through the logic of presence rather than power. When mission is enacted through caregiving, mentoring, or domestic faithfulness, participants contest the privileging of strategic visibility and institutional authority. Embodied practice thus becomes a political geography of faith-in-action, reshaping spatial order from below.

These embodied acts are not only spiritually meaningful but also politically consequential. Practices such as caregiving, hospitality, and presence function as grassroots forms of geopolitical agency—not through statecraft or institutional diplomacy, but through the negotiation of relational and territorial meaning across asymmetrical borders. As feminist and affective geopolitics have shown, power operates not only through sovereign authority, but through everyday negotiations of proximity, vulnerability, and obligation (Hyndman 2001; Pain and Smith 2008; Anderson 2009). In this context, care becomes a relational infrastructure that binds communities across national boundaries, while hospitality becomes a spatial intervention—reconfiguring who belongs, who speaks, and who is heard. Covenant, similarly, invokes not only theological fidelity but also an alternative ordering of space rooted in mutual responsibility rather than hierarchy. When participants frame mission as “walking alongside” rather than “sending,” or describe a café as a place to “share hope” rather than serve product, they are practicing a form of spatial diplomacy—one that operates beneath formal politics but actively shapes the moral geographies of transnational religious life.

One of the central contributions of this study is its demonstration that grassroots evangelical practices reimagine geopolitical space through modes of engagement that contest dominant imaginaries of territoriality, sovereignty, and development. Rather than reinforcing bordered logics or operating within state-based frameworks, participants enacted a moral geography rooted in covenant, kinship, and spiritual reciprocity. Canadian participants, for instance, rejected donor–recipient binaries and spoke instead of “coaching” or “walking with” their Mexican counterparts—language that challenges technocratic or neo-colonial paradigms of aid. Mexican participants likewise resisted identity frameworks that cast them as dependent or passive. Instead, they interpreted their role in the partnership as one of active witness, spiritual stewardship, and missional leadership—refiguring spatial hierarchies through theological agency.

These relational practices—hosting teams, sharing meals, preaching across borders—subvert dominant geopolitical imaginaries by relocating power in the domain of spiritual presence, not institutional control. They produce space not through enclosure or policy but through prayer, mutual recognition, and embodied accompaniment. This lived theology exemplifies what this study terms religeopolitics: faith enacted as spatial production through everyday acts of care, prayer and covenant. Together, these themes support the central theoretical claim of this article: that faith-based actors generate geopolitical meaning not only through discourse or ideology, but through the spatialization of lived belief—an insight made visible through the interpretative lens of IPA, which traces how participants make sense of faith-in-action and how theological belief becomes political geography.

These findings also contribute to broader efforts to rethink the spatialities of religion beyond institutional or symbolic models. Scholars such as Wilford (2010) and Kong (2010) have emphasized the need to attend to how religious actors actively configure space through moral regulation, social intimacy, and ritual inhabitation. In this study, space was not merely the context in which mission occurred, but the medium through which theological relationships were forged. Relational acts—praying together, visiting hospitals, sharing food—did not supplement theology; they were theology in practice. These insights align with Csordas’s (2007) notion of religious embodiment, which understands spiritual meaning as emerging through bodily discipline, social practice, and material placement.

By foregrounding the lived experiences of mission participants, this study also extends recent work on evangelical transnationalism. While some scholars have framed transnational evangelical networks as globalizing agents of American-style Christianity (Miller and Yamamori 2007; Brouwer et al. 1996; Christerson and Flory 2017), the participants in this study articulated a more reciprocal and locally rooted expression of faith. Their accounts reflect a horizontal ecclesiology that resists both top-down mission strategy and cultural assimilation. Drawing from Hovland’s (2016) analysis of “affective belonging” in mission communities, the affective and theological connections expressed here point toward a form of transnationalism built not on programmatic expansion but on mutual discipleship and shared vulnerability.

This relational mode of mission complicates dominant cartographies in both geopolitical theory and mission studies. The spatial imaginaries evoked by participants—kinship, pilgrimage, accompaniment—resist the bordered logic of conventional geopolitics and instead evoke what Massey (2005) describes as a global sense of place: porous, lived, and produced through interconnection. These spaces of encounter are not apolitical; they carry deep theological significance while also functioning as relational infrastructures that support shared agency across difference. In this way, mission becomes a form of spatial diplomacy—not in the institutional sense, but as the moral negotiation of presence, care, and responsibility within and across communities.

This approach also contributes to debates within missiology and evangelical subculture. Rather than viewing mission as organizational reproduction or theological export (Haskell et al. 2016; Im and Stetzer 2016), participants enacted mission as mutual transformation—embodied in spaces of hospitality, resilience, and relational care. These forms of mission complicate traditional binaries between sending and receiving, instead producing horizontal spiritual geographies shaped by accompaniment and mutuality.

While the findings affirm the spatial agency of evangelical communities, it is also important to note the limitations of the study and its participants. The partnership was relatively homogeneous in theological orientation, and while participants emphasized mutuality, structural asymmetries in resources, mobility, and institutional influence—particularly between Canadian and Mexican partners—were not always critically examined by those involved. Moreover, the theological frameworks expressed were rooted in a particular evangelical worldview, which may not translate across broader religious or cultural contexts. Acknowledging these dynamics adds necessary caution to the claims advanced here and invites further research into how religeopolitics manifests in more diverse or contested contexts.

While these findings offer valuable insight into the relational and spatial dynamics of a single transnational evangelical partnership, they also reflect the interpretive boundaries of a theologically cohesive community. The shared evangelical worldview among participants facilitated a high degree of narrative and theological resonance, which in turn enriched phenomenological depth but limited interpretive contrast. This theological homogeneity should therefore be read not as a flaw but as a defining feature of the case’s idiographic design: a close, context-specific window into how faith is lived and spatialized within one denominational culture. Future research might explore how religeopolitical dynamics manifest across interdenominational or interfaith collaborations, where competing truth claims or divergent ritual practices could reshape the affective and spatial contours of mission.

Finally, religeopolitics speaks to broader questions in the sociology of religion and spatial theory. It challenges the secular framing of space as empty, neutral, or bounded by the state (Agnew 1994; Kuus 2008), and foregrounds how affect, theology, and presence generate spatial imaginaries that operate at multiple scales. These imaginaries were evident in participants’ narratives of walking alongside one another, praying across borders, and inhabiting roles of spiritual kin—not in abstract, but in repeated, small-scale acts of care. Such practices invite scholars to attend to the small-scale, affective, and embodied ways religious communities continually remake the spaces they inhabit.

6. Conclusions

This study has examined how evangelical mission partnerships across national borders function not simply as organizational arrangements or cultural exchanges, but as spatial–theological practices that actively generate new forms of geopolitical belonging. Drawing on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of interviews with Canadian and Mexican church participants, the article identified three core dynamics—theological spatiality, affective relationality, and embodied practice—through which participants reimagined space, community, and mission in relational and sacred terms.

In doing so, the article responds to longstanding critiques within critical geopolitics regarding the marginalization of religion in spatial analysis (Megoran 2008; Agnew 2006; Hurd 2008). While recent work in feminist and affective geopolitics has highlighted care, vulnerability, and moral attachment as constitutive of political space (Hyndman 2001; Pain and Smith 2008; Anderson 2009), the role of theology, spiritual practice, and sacred imagination has remained largely undertheorized. This study brings these dimensions into sharper focus, showing that religious actors do not merely interpret or navigate space—they co-produce it through faith-based presence, ritual action, and covenantal ties that stretch across borders.

The findings challenge secular assumptions that religious life is ancillary to geopolitical processes. Instead, participants in this study reveal that prayer, testimony, hospitality, and mutual encouragement are not peripheral to spatial politics—they are spatial politics. Such practices embody what Massey (2005) calls a “global sense of place,” in which connection and belonging are forged through interaction and meaning-making, rather than bounded territory. They also echo Wuthnow’s (2009) account of moral geography, where religious values are inscribed into physical and social landscapes—not through dominance, but through shared vocation and collective memory.

The concept of religeopolitics clarifies how faith becomes spatial: it captures the quotidian, relational, and embodied dimensions of spiritual life that shape how believers construct moral maps and engage in transnational relationships. By focusing on everyday interactions, emotional ties, and theological narratives, this framework extends critical geopolitics beyond its secular and state-centric assumptions, positioning religious communities as active agents of territorial imagination and moral world-making.

This framework also contributes to scholarship on evangelical subculture and mission (Reimer and Wilkinson 2015; Stetzer and Bird 2009; Haskell et al. 2016), offering a corrective to portrayals of evangelicalism as primarily ideological or expansionist. The participants in this study did not frame their partnership in terms of proselytism, growth metrics, or institutional replication. Instead, they emphasized accompaniment, shared calling, and embodied witness—revealing a more nuanced and affectively rich understanding of evangelical presence in the world.

Ultimately, this article affirms that religious actors are not merely subjects of geopolitical narratives, but authors of alternative spatial imaginaries. Through acts of faith, presence, and partnership, they inscribe theological meaning onto everyday places—generating moral geographies that both reflect and reimagine global belonging. Attending to these practices expands the scope of geopolitical inquiry and invites new conversations across theology, geography, and the social sciences about how belief becomes space, and how space becomes sacred.