spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

that nearly every faith community in Southern Africa concedes that the church has a contribution
to make to the process of healing and wholeness of humanity.
5.1 CHURCH-BASED HEALING DISCOURSE IN GENERAL
The church-based healing discourse is, generally speaking, linked to particular churches in
Africa: the African Instituted Churches (AICs) and the Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches
(PCCs). After a brief description of the typology of these churches, and after focusing on the
impact HIV/AIDS has had on faith healing, the theme of exorcism and deliverance is introduced,
since exorcism is generally considered to be the core of church-based healing activities.
5.1.1 Typology of churches
What kind of churches are involved in the church-based healing discourse? Following the
research trends, there are two prominent ecclesiological movements that determine the discourse.
The first is the movement of the African Instituted Churches (AIC). Depending on one’s
perspective, the acronym AIC can also stand for African Indigenous Churches, African
Independent Churches or African Initiated Churches. The AICs are churches that came into
existence at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the missionary-founded churches.
They were founded and are run by Africans, who succeed in making the message of the Gospel
relevant to the African indigenous worldview. The AIC movement is often perceived as an
authentic African expression of Christianity (see Omenyo 2000:233), because the AICs created
space for certain spiritual or pneumatic elements that are of great importance within the African
context but that were not allowed to exist within the missionary-founded churches. The Aladura
Churches (meaning ‘praying people’ in Yoruba) in West Africa, and the Zion/Apostolic
Churches in Southern Africa are important representations of the AIC movement 30 .
The explosive growth that features the AIC movement also turns out to be one of the main
characteristics of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches (PCC). The PCCs constitute the
other dominant theme within the faith-healing discourse. The Pentecostal movement can be
divided into two sub-divisions: the first one embraces the classical Pentecostal denominations
(like, for example, the Assemblies of God), that have been present in sub-Saharan Africa since
the onset of the twentieth century. The second sub-division is the neo-Pentecostals, the younger
30. A lot has been written about the AIC movement in its various forms. See, for example, Hayward 1957; Sundkler
1961, 1976; Baëta 1962; Webster 1964; Turner 1967; Barrett 1968; Oosthuizen 1968; Peel 1968; Daneel 1987;
Gifford 1991; Oosthuizen & Hexham 1992; Bediako 1995; Kitshoff 1997; Pobee& Ositelu II 1998; Anderson 2000;
Jenkins 2006; Kalu 2008.
122