spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

5.3 HEALING AND DELIVERANCE
In the following paragraphs the deliverance ministry, the centre of church life in Southern
Africa, will be discussed in greater depth by exploring some of the main features of this faithbased
healing practice. The similarities with the African traditional worldview, the concept of
spiritual warfare, the reality of evil forces, the quest for power, images of Jesus Christ, the gifts
of the Spirit and elaborate healing rituals are important constituents of the church-based healing
discourse (cf. Anderson 2002; Gräbe 2002:242; Jenkins 2006:98-124; Asamoah-Gyadu 2004,
2005, 2007).
5.3.1 Rapprochement with African world views
Faith communities that have developed a concrete healing or restoration ministry, are usually
influenced by African traditional religious views, precisely because these churches focus on
illness and healing. The reason is that these healing churches have been very successful in
attracting large crowds of believers, because they respond to a lack created by the missionaryfounded
churches. Generally, the missionaries greatly underestimated the meaning of belief in
spiritual forces, and they simply dismissed it as African superstition. In the perception of
Africans who converted to the Christian faith, there was a discontinuity between the gospel of
the European missionaries and the worldviews generated by the African traditional religious
context. However, based on the promising message of the emerging healing churches, a certain
continuity materialized within the discontinuity of African traditional religion and the Christian
tradition. This continuity was experienced in the parallels between church-based healing
ministries and traditional thinking about health, illness and healing. Clive Dillon-Malone
(1983:206) asserts in his research on the ‘Mutumwa’ churches in Zambia that “while the new
biblical consciousness has become the legitimating framework within which healings take place
and the biblical Holy Spirit the new source of power for such healings, yet the manner in which
illnesses are perceived, as well as the therapeutic procedures availed of to overcome them, fall
squarely within the more traditional indigenous African medico-religious consciousness”. The
rapprochement with African traditional religious thinking is represented in three areas that are
intricately linked: the attribution of evil, the concept of the cosmic struggle and the concept of
salvation.
Spiritual evil
In the traditional African religious frame as well as in the religious frame of the AICs and the
PCCs, the existence of evil is attributed to powerful spiritual forces, who influence and control
all aspects of human life. In everyday life, one has to reckon with ancestor spirits, and
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