Spiritual mothers and daughters: intergenerational relationships among women in African Pentecostal churches in the UK

African Pentecostal churches in the United Kingdom are important spaces where intergenerational relationships shape women’s spiritual, social, and theological formation. Drawing on thirty semi-structured interviews with women who attend, or have attended, African Pentecostal churches of predominantly West African background in the UK, this article explores the relationship between spiritual mothers and spiritual daughters. It examines how older and younger women negotiate gender, spiritual authority, holiness, respectability, and religious identity in diaspora contexts. Using womanist theology and African women’s theologies, the article shows how biblical interpretation and cultural traditions shape expectations placed on younger women, especially around modesty, marriage, submission, leadership, and bodily discipline. The findings suggest that spiritual mothers both preserve and police: they transmit faith, cultural memory, and communal belonging, while sometimes reproducing patriarchal expectations that constrain younger women’s agency. At the same time, younger women develop emergent theologies of holiness, mutual submission, self-definition, and spiritual wholeness. The article contributes to Practical Theology by showing how faith is lived, transmitted, contested, and reimagined across generations in diasporic Pentecostal communities.