Pentecostal Healing Research Articles

Appropriation and Contestation of Akan Traditional Healing Approaches in the Healing of Mentally Ill Patients at Prayer Camps in Ghana

Abstract Prayer camps are Pentecostal healing centres established across various parts of Ghana. Prayer camps in Ghana have become notable centres offering mainly spiritual help to people with mental health conditions. Arguably, prayer camps serve as a breakpoint or watershed between traditional healing shrines and the ‘gardens’ operated by Spiritual churches, popularly known as Sunsum sorè, in Ghana. Analysing data collected from fieldwork between 2019 and 2021, this article shows that the healing rituals for the mentally ill at prayer camps in Ghana share similarities with traditional healing shrine practices. The article argues that while such practices reveal the appropriation of traditional healing approaches at prayer camps, they also bring the tension and contestation inherent to the concept of appropriation into perspective.

Integrating Pentecostal Healing and Western Medicine: A Case Study

Abstract Medical missions are criticized for having a secularizing effect. Progressive Pentecostals who combine prayer and Western medicine represent one possible solution to this problem. This article explores whether Western medicine and Pentecostal-charismatic healing practices can be sustainably integrated by offering a case study of the medical missiology of Osvald Orlien. The article shows that Orlien’s model provides a theological conception of holistic health, a fusion of Pentecostalism and the African worldview, and the formation of a Pentecostal theology of medical science that affirms natural laws and human reason. Orlien offered a holistic theology of healing and an account of moral virtues that could be intelligibly defended. He encountered opposition from both Pentecostals who rejected Western medicine and rationalistic skeptics who refused Pentecostal healing practices. The case study also identifies key factors contributing to sustainable, institutional integration of medicine and charismatic practices in the Congolese context.

Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: mediating presence and distance

ABSTRACT This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences.

Healing in the Pentecostal tradition: A Scandinavian perspective

ABSTRACT Divine healing has been, and still is, a key feature of global Pentecostalism. Yet, scholarly studies on this important aspect of the Pentecostal movement have mostly been limited to a North American perspective on predominantly North American forms of Pentecostalism. This paper provides a revised perspective based on theological reflections, historical and empirical insights from a Scandinavian context. The study offers observations and reflections upon different streams in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements of Norway and Sweden, including classic Pentecostalism, the Word of Faith Movement, and the so-called ‘third wave’ which is seen as an extension of the Charismatic Movement. The essay suggests a broader theological and historical re-envisioning of Pentecostal healing practices and prepares the ground for further systematic theological inquiry on a global scale.

Sickness and Healing in the Old Testament and Pentecostalism: Then and Now

Sickness and Healing in the Old Testament and Pentecostalism: Then and Now

Medical pluralism, Pentecostal healing and contests over healing power in Papua New Guinea.

This paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Lelet of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. It draws on qualitative interviews with Pentecostal Christians intended to examine their understanding of Christianity and how this relates to their cultural practices - in this case, how their Pentecostalism affects their therapeutic beliefs and practices. The frequent observation that therapeutic repertoires are becoming less discrete is substantiated by the Lelet case, for in their search for therapy, the Lelet often cross the borders of different repertoires, seeing no contradiction, for example, between combining a vernacular therapy with biomedicine. With the advent of Pentecostalism, the issue has become far more complex. The Lelet therapeutic culture remains pluralist, but the research shows that Lelet Pentecostals are increasingly viewing their own Christian-based forms of healing as in competition with other therapies, especially vernacular therapies. This competitive outlook has brought a demonization of vernacular therapies, which are labelled 'satanic' and their use discouraged. In fact, Pentecostalism is refashioning the realm of therapy: rather than border crossing and mixing of therapeutic repertoires, the situation is increasingly dominated by notions of mutual exclusivity. In order to comprehend the full complexity of medical pluralism, it is now necessary not only to examine how the borders of the different therapeutic repertoires are blurred, destabilized or reconfigured but also how they may be demarcated and policed. In other words, we argue that medical pluralism is being eroded by its interaction with Pentecostalism.

The perils of ‘yo‐yo’ thinking: Positioning culture in Pentecostal healing

AbstractLike other Pentecostals, the Lelet of central New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, are urged to reject significant aspects of their cultural tradition in order to become born‐again Christians. Most Lelet Pentecostals say that all use of magic must be abandoned. I use the example of healing to show how commitments to break with the past are influenced by life’s exigencies, such as illness. Pragmatic responses to illness may see people move between forms of therapy that are considered mutually exclusive – that is, between Christian healing and magic. Some judge this wavering derisively as “yo‐yo” thinking. I suggest that a more subtle and open‐minded appreciation of the Pentecostal stress on breaking with the past is to see this as situational – that is, as necessarily influenced by contingencies. Despite the rhetoric of absolute rupture being widely proclaimed, putting this into practice while negotiating the exigencies of life is a decidedly more complex and fluid matter. Lelet pragmatism sometimes stands in the way of the radical idealism of Pentecostalism.

The Failure of Therapy: Belief, Embodiment and the Limits of Pentecostal Healing in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT I explore the view that efficacy in Pentecostal healing depends on confidence, or unwavering belief. My focus is on emic notions of failure – how people explain failures of therapy in their own terms – rather than on failures in the procedure employed or the inadequacies of the healer. Although anthropologists have criticised the notion of belief, my ethnographic example suggests that it remains useful, particularly since in this case it is central to the assessment of failure. The Pentecostals discussed here see belief in a more material way, as embodied and intimately bound up with the reformative project of becoming a born again Christian.

Divine passibility and pentecostal healing: Towards an ethical framework of praying for the terminally ill

ABSTRACTDivine passibility was one of the theological linchpins in the modern era due to the horrific events of the two World Wars. One of the most influential theologians of that period, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, remarks that in the midst of suffering ‘only a suffering God can help’. Such a position contributed to Moltmann’s groundbreaking work, The Crucified God, where Moltmann amplified divine passibility as the true nature of a loving God and he did this as a polemic against a triumphalist culture. Within this framework, I wish to reflect and connect the ideas of Moltmann on a suffering God to Pentecostal triumphalism in a healing context, specifically during prayer for the terminally ill. Hence, this paper is a theological critique of the triumphalism found in Pentecostal approaches to praying for the sick. This critique helps provide a pastoral response to Pentecostal ministers who wish to accommodate Bonhoeffer’s remark in circumstances that are commonly triumphalistic in nature, where sickness is often spoken against. I will argue for an alternative and liberative approach, a position that will postulate that ‘only a suffering God can help’ and where the most often quoted verse ‘by his wounds we are healed’ (Isa 53:5), seen in the context of divine passibility, could become a reality for the terminally ill.

Protestant Techniques of Care: The Hindu, the Pentecost, and the “Secular”

Modern techniques of caring for the self through staying healthy rely on an ethic of choice, often evoking critiques of the (neo)liberal subject. This sense of choice has carried frequently overlooked Protestant commitments from Luther to Kant and Locke to 19th-century American health reformers, premised on a refusal of ritual, mysticism, and the priest as the source of truth. This article explores how these implicit commitments shape the relation to other religious traditions in countries like Trinidad. Campaigns against chronic disease in Trinidad carried out in public health venues and churches echo multinational health projects in pronouncing, "We all want a healthy life." The article draws on a Caribbean ironic sense of secularity to analyze the way that the threat to this "want" found in other religious traditions such as Pentecostal healing and Hindu ecstatic practices reveals Protestant commitments masked within a modern global "secular" care of the self.

Secularist understandings of Pentecostal healing practices in Amsterdam: Developing an intersectional and post-secularist sociology of religion

The past decades have seen an intensification of debate around migrants, gender and sexuality. For the Netherlands, several authors have pointed out how this has given rise to a form of sexual nationalism whereby the idea of being a modern, progressive country is strongly linked to a program of liberal sexual values and offset against a presumably ‘backward’ migrant who is ‘still’ religious and traditional. In this article, the author analyses how these dynamics played out in the controversy around HIV-healings or homo healings supposedly taking place in Pentecostal churches in Amsterdam. Media attention highlighted the theme of homosexuality while forgetting the interests of women. This article shows that the sexual nationalism scheme was also operative here, and proposes further developing existing approaches as intersectional ‘post-secularist’ sociological perspectives aimed at unearthing the ways narratives of modernity, secularization and sexual nationalism structure attitudes towards migrant and religious actors both in social scientific research agendas and among societal actors.

KESEMBUHAN, PENEBUSAN, DAN KEBAIKAN ALLAH DALAM TEOLOGI PENTAKOSTAL

This paper is about to criticize the Pentecostal theology about the healing. The theology believe that the miracle of healing can happen because Jesus died on the cross. He was able to heal all sicknesses and to free people from the shackles of the devil. Furthermore, the concept of God is a good God also used to refer to the belief that God has a strong desire to heal. But in reality, many Christians experience sickness is not healed. So the doctrine of the Pentecostal healing actually makes conflicted for people who have never experienced the healing of sickness, although he has been obedient and trust in the Lord. The author tries to reconstruct the Pentecostal theology of healing that could accommodate such a struggle. At the end of writing the author makes a conclusion that in sickness and suffering severe, the work of the Holy Spirit as the agent of transformative Suffering can not be separated from his work as the agent of the transformative life. The Holy Spirit as the agent of transformative Suffering can wear sickness and suffering experienced by believers to proclaim the work of his reform, which is a new birth. The new birth here interpreted as the transformation of the Holy Spirit in their lives so that their lives can sincerely declare lives according to the values of the Kingdom of God which contains joy, faithfulness, patience, love, truth, peace. These values are stronger than mere physical healing function experienced by a person.

Book Review: Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing, written by Joseph W. Williams

Book Review: Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing, written by Joseph W. Williams

Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing. By Joseph W. Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing . By Joseph W. Williams . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesHistorians of pentecostalism have wrestled to understand how a movement that began in the early twentieth century with a pronounced antipathy to many features of modern American culture transformed into one that moves easily in culture's broad terrain, even as it retains distinctive elements. In the realm of healing, in particular, early pentecostals advocated divine healing by faith through Christ's atonement while ardently rejecting physicians, drugs, and all other aspects of modern medicine. But within two generations, leading pentecostals proclaimed God's superintendence of medical advances and promoted a union of spiritual and medical healing. By the turn of the twenty-first century, prominent pentecostal voices urged the faithful to embrace naturopathic healing regiments, weight-loss and other dietary innovations, and mental healing programs with deep roots in metaphysical religiosity, all baptized with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing conviction that God could bring healing directly through prayer. What had been a movement radically set apart from the world had come to embrace the world's practices and values and combine them with their own. Or so it seemed.In Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing , Joseph Williams offers a fresh, nuanced, and dynamic reading of pentecostal healing. Williams argues that the divine healing of early pentecostals was not so separate as the faithful liked to think. Instead, it contained areas of meaningful overlap with alternative healing programs rooted in metaphysical spirituality. The mental healing of New Thought and Christian Science resonated with pentecostals' conviction that divine healing was guaranteed to those who had faith, which entailed pronouncing and acting out healing after prayer despite contrary symptoms. In concert with naturopathic healing, early pentecostals warned against dietary overindulgence and promoted fasting as a spiritual discipline with significant health benefits, including as a preparatory step for divine healing. Like metaphysical believers of various stripes, pentecostals tended to depersonalize the divine and minimize the gulf between nature and supernature. In relation to healing, God's declared intentions to heal the faithful were fixed in his Word, so the issue became how to tap into this source and actualize divine health. The pentecostal conception of the Holy Spirit as an immanent source of power and abundance often relied on natural and impersonal metaphors, like hydraulics and electricity, further emphasizing shared convictions with metaphysical believers. Although early pentecostals routinely anathematized metaphysical healers along with regular doctors, Williams highlights significant commonalities that linked their healing programs.Many historians have noted that treatment via orthodox medicine in the early twentieth century remained a crapshoot, but by mid-century diagnostic and therapeutic advances had enhanced the social and cultural standing of physicians. Simultaneously, pentecostals were climbing the social ladder and beginning to make peace with the surrounding culture. In this context, Oral Roberts played a crucial mediating role by envisioning the union of divine and medical healing. Even as the Latter Rain movement and postwar healing revivals hearkened back to radical early days of pentecostalism, rife with demonic etiology and anti-medical rhetoric, Roberts represented a larger development in pentecostalism that sought not only peace but union with medicine. …

Pentecostal Healing Prayer in an Age of Evidence-Based Medicine

Although testimonies of divine healing figure prominently in pentecostal missions, pentecostals are frequently reluctant to subject testimonials to empirical investigation. In an age of evidence-based medicine, many people insist on medical corroboration before giving claims credence. Hence, pentecostal resistance toward medical validation comes at a price of reduced missionary impact. Investigation of healing claims reveals medically unexpected healings for which there is no obvious medical explanation, and recoveries that can be explained naturalistically or seem not to have occurred. Since fraudulent cases tend to attract the most notice, they are widely perceived as normative in the absence of countervailing examples.

Pentecostal Power

This article interprets pentecostal divine healing practices as a strategy for mobilizing spiritual power, and as a complement to or replacement for political power. Although sometimes engaging in political activism to remedy the causes and symptoms of social and physical ills, pentecostals often privilege spiritual approaches to addressing ailments that are envisioned as ultimately spiritual in causation, and hence uniquely ameliorated by spiritual means. Divine healing practices—which invoke supernatural power to move the material world—sometimes function as an alternative to political, medical, or economic power. This is particularly the case for many two-thirds-world pentecostals who are relatively poor, uneducated, socially disenfranchised, and predominantly female. Pentecostalism has exhibited exponential growth because many people perceive pentecostal healing practices as embodying divine love and divine power. This article explains the appeal of pentecostalism to politically disempowered individuals and communities, and women in particular, considers both the empowering and oppressive potential of healing practices, and contemplates other possibilities if pentecostals do not offer spiritual avenues to empowerment.

Space in Pentecostal Healing Practices among Ghanaian Migrants in London

In this article I analyze different spatial practices related to Pentecostal healing, drawing on fieldwork with Pentecostal believers who have migrated from Ghana to London, UK. I explore the relationship between space and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit by looking at how points of contact with the divine are created in the personal life of people and at the sites where the casting out of demons takes place. Unlike in other spirit-centered healing traditions, the Christian Holy Spirit is not conceived of as embodied in specific places, but rather is spatially unbound. To manifest, however, the Holy Spirit requires specific spatial qualities and esthetics.

Spirit cure: a history of Pentecostal healing

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter One: Pentecostal Healing in the Early Twentieth Century Chapter Two: Mid-Century Transitions Chapter Three: Making Medicine Spiritual Chapter Four: Minding the Spirit Chapter Five: Perfect Bodies, Plentiful Profits Conclusion: Pentecostal Healing in the Late Twentieth, Early Twenty-first Century Epilogue: Healing the Wounds of the Modern World Notes Index

Pentecostal healing as an expression of godly love: an empirical study

This study examines questionnaire data collected from a congregational survey of worshippers among the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) Pentecostal denomination (N = 1522). It is part of a larger study that considers the influence of a perceived relationship of love with God upon benevolent attitudes and action. This paper explores the influence of religiosity and socialisation upon healing experiences and practices. This is because engagement with healing practices is regarded by Pentecostals as a form of benevolent action. A causal model is presented that suggests healing experience can be explained by means of specific background variables (gender, age and ethnicity directly; marital status and education indirectly), religiosity (Sunday worship and all-age Sunday school) and socialisation factors (significant others and perceived influence of a direct encounter with God). The significance of these findings for understanding healing practices among Christians in relation to religion and health is subsequently discussed.

Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing. Edited by Candy Gunther Brown. New York: Oxford, 2011. xxii + 400 pp. $29.95 paper.

Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing. Edited by Candy Gunther Brown. New York: Oxford, 2011. xxii + 400 pp. $29.95 paper.