| dc.description.abstract | COVID-19 changed the religious landscape across many regions of the world. In Kenya, public gatherings were prohibited at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. Further into the pandemic, face-to-face religious services were forbidden across the entire country. Due to such radical measures taken by the Kenyan government, there was an increased adoption and utilisation of virtual spaces in religious contexts in Kenya. Facilitating rituals in virtual church services is a major shift and a Kenyan reality that has the potential to transform lives either negatively or positively. This chapter explores the adaptation of the Eucharist ritual within a Pentecostal Church, namely, Christ Is the Answer Ministry (CITAM), as a specific way to respond to the pandemic. It adopts grounded theology, with the goal of engaging creative and original findings on ritual practice in the virtual space. Methodologically, the chapter emphasises how grounded theology is compatible with grounded theory as a method for discovering hidden patterns and meanings and as a way to unearth stories informing rituals in the virtual space. The chapter further engages multidirectional flows, thus emphasising what the ritual has gained as opposed to what the ritual has lost, as generated from fieldwork. | en_US |
