"Pray Earnestly": The Textual Construction of Personal Involvement in Pentecostal Prayer and Song

This article addresses how a perceived tension between the spontaneous personal and the shared textual elements of religious language is resolved in the context of Pentecostal services recorded at two Assemblies of God (AG) churches in California and Michigan. In an analysis of prayer and the metapragmatic commentary that surrounds it, I argue that the balance between spontaneously created prayer and invocation of fixed text plays on an opposition that goes beyond ritual or religious language; rather, it is best understood as characterizing two opposing text‐building or entextualization strategies. Using evidence from AG prayer, sermons, and songs, I show that the preferred entextualization strategy highlights the situatedness of the text in a particular context and as emanating from a particular speaker. My findings have significance not only for research on religious language, but also for further understandings of entextualization and the discursive means of constructing personhood and affect.