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

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.