Faith-healing ministry in Africa: a Catholic bio-socialethics (original) (raw)
Related papers
An Understanding of Healing in African Christianity: The Interface between Religion and Science
2019
Most of African Christian Churches place a lot of emphasize on healing practices as a response to the teaching of Jesus Christ. This explains why churches or crusades that practice healing in Africa are very popular and command the greatest numbers of adherents. According to these churches, the Lord commanded them to heal, and so they heal. Although some of these churches do not discourage the use of modern medicine, they are convinced that spiritual healing is a higher method than the effort to compete with God and yet there are others that completely discourage the use of modern medicine. Seen from the modern Kenya where science is understood to be the foundation of development and progress and religion as an important stand. This paper assesses African Christian Church believe on the relationship between religion and science. It also explores African Christian Church’s attitude spirituality has had on African Christian Church healing practices.
2020
Measures of Humanity [1] Suffering and the alleviation of suffering -healing -have long been at the forefront of religious and scholarly attention. The study of suffering and healing in Africa has proven particularly rich, because of the health challenges to this vast continent and the creativity of its experts in the healing of diseases and social ills. In this article, based on a keynote lecture to the 2010 Kripke Center conference on Religion, Health, and Healing, I present broad themes that characterize not only the unique perspectives of health and healing drawn from African traditions, but also the perspectives of classical and religious Western traditions that have taken their place alongside, or have blended with, these African traditions. African suffering and healing -as suffering and healing everywhere -occur in a historical, ever
The Challenge of Trado-medical Practices to the Church in Africa
not yet, 2022
Illnesses are perennial challenges that have confronted human society from time immemorial. Humankind does not take sicknesses for granted. They sought healing anywhere they can get it, when people are sick, they pursue healing by all means and at all cost to get relief from sickness, not minding whether the source of healing is biblical or not; all they want is healing. The methods of achieving wholeness does not matter to them once they get healing they are satisfied. Some Christians condemn other sources of healing aside from prayer and faith in God’s word. They engage those that sought healing from other sources as unscriptural and fake, unspiritual, carnal and faithless individuals. This becomes a challenge. This paper tackles the challenge posed by Yoruba Trado-medical practices to the church in Africa. It discusses various implications of these and then look at the challenge of integrating orthodox and traditional medicine in the concluding part. The methodology adopted is eclectic. Whereby the writer combines participation and observation techniques with interview and literary methods. He uses the tools of intercultural hermeneutics to investigate various healing methods and their implications to the church in Africa. This study recommends that since the use of material objects is paramount in these practices and the Bible did not condemn the use of means to achieving wholeness, it is wrong for any Christian to cast aspersion or stigmatize any user of means as carnal and unspiritual. This paper encourages the church in Africa to make use of natural herbs and products around them for therapeutic purposes, for they are cheap and available at all times.
2019
Sickness is a problem that has not escaped any society and thus is on the agenda of every culture. Since time immemorial cultures have searched for answers to the questions raised by the phenomenon of sickness but none have provided solutions, as it has become clear that sickness is part of our human existence. Many people have resorted to religion in search consolation in times of affliction and the Roman Catholic Church is not immune to this expectation, as we see many leaving the church in search of healing in the African Traditional Religions and other Christian churches because they feel that the church is inadequately dealing with the problem. In this study the author undertakes a research journey within the Diocese of Witbank of the RCC to investigate as to why the church's healing ministry is not effective. Through engagement with participants in the research field and relevant literature the author discovered that the RCC is seen to be suspicious of the African worldview and consequently does not take its members' fears and frustrations around the phenomenon of sickness serious as it judges them to be superstitious. This suggests that there is nothing that Western Christianity can learn from African cultures maintaining its superior attitude and further alienating indigenous communities. The author suggests that in order for the RCC to responds with relevance to this problem it needs to reconcile the Christian worldview, which is western, with the African worldview. He puts high on the agenda of Christian theology the urgent call to African theologians to develop an African theology that will give birth to a genuine African Christianity. In conclusion as a solution the author proposes an integrated and intercultural healing ministry for the Diocese of Witbank. This model is aimed at appropriating African values, idioms and language in the RCC to create an atmosphere where the church is seen as a welcome guest who comes bearing gifts but at the same time expects to be taken care of by its host.
Finding a place for Jesus as healer in Reformed mission in Africa : original research
Hts Teologiese Studies-theological Studies, 2011
Africa is a continent plagued with many sicknesses and diseases. Self-evidently health and healing would be major concerns and interests of the inhabitants. Reformed mission has formed a strategic alliance with scientifically tested medicine in the past. Africans do not find this alliance sufficient. They, however, need a medical mission that could deal with 'African sicknesses'. The question is whether we need an alliance with traditional medical practitioners. Because traditional healing is linked to traditional religion, we are confronted with difficult missiological questions. The solution offered in this article concentrates on two dimensions, (1) an openness to and a respect for African culture and religion and (2) a radical rediscovery of Jesus as healer.
Verbum et Ecclesia, 2016
There are different streams of healing praxis in Africa today, namely African traditional healing, biomedical healing and spiritual healing (which includes the more recent �touch your TV screen� healing method) among others. These streams offer contemporary African people diverse alternatives with regard to healing. As much as the hegemony of Western biomedicine, as endorsed by missionaries in the past, can no longer serve as a norm in the area of healing, we can also not use the African traditional healing methods and or any other alternative presented to Africa without discernment. This suggests therefore that Reformed mission ecclesiology and missionary practitioners should critically engage the African context, worldview and culture on the matter of healing. It should also engage other forms of spiritual healing methods on offer in the African soil.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The use of an indigenous knowledge system when coming to healing in the Afr...
Introduction In defining chaplaincy as a theory and practice of clinical pastoral care and cure of souls within multidimensional contexts of African Christianity is using clinical and pastoral psychology for meeting African Christians at their multiple points of need. Chaplaincy is a resource for practical theology, therefore the task of this book is explore clinical and pastoral theology for the postmodern context, with a special interest to the Third World. African Christians and other persons and their world of embeddedness are complex, multidimensional, and living in ever changing needs and longing. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has shifted the contexts of Third World ministries, as the affected and infected ask the caregiver to enter into their new experience. The tragedies of death have continued to challenge the clinical caregiver to understand the psychological trauma and the need to respond in ways that will enhance growth in persons but within the reality of the pedagogy of the poor and oppressed. The meaning of being persons and personages, created in the " image and likeness of God, " is challenged as the disabled persons continue to increase in African Christian contexts. The dimensions of humanness in the African worldview must be attended with the understanding that, Africa is no longer a " dark continent. " The Relational Self-in-Community is living in a diverse continent that has a vibrant and abundant life. Yet the challenges of colonization and Christianization, and life after political independence, and the need for the decolonization of the personal, communal and national souls call for a new paradigm in clinical pastoral theology. The African traditional life and its core value of interdependence, and the value system with the sacred and secular life at the center contribute to well being. The African continent has not been spared from the blessing and curses of modernity and post modernity in the midst of reconstructionism and deconstructionism to enhance a new way of life. Existence in the African context has not been spared from suffering in terms of conflict, division, and confusion, in religious, political and religious wars. Neither has Africa been spared from the sins of theory and practice of clinical pastoral theology, include additions, subtractions, division and complication. Therefore chaplaincy as a discipline of clinical pastoral psychology has the task of not only understanding the multiple human needs in terms of the classic pastoral functions of healing, sustaining, guiding and reconciling but also in getting wholistic solutions to human problems of living and their resultant relational problems. There are multiple levels of suffering are experienced such as dislocation, rootlessness, hopelessness and loneliness in the midst of technologies of communication and advanced materialism. This means that, anxiety about daily existence is a common experience. The pastor as chaplain or an institutional chaplain has the challenge of to provide an in-depth care that facilitates cure to the wounded souls.
Finding a place for Jesus as healer in Reformed mission in Africa
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2011
Africa is a continent plagued with many sicknesses and diseases. Self-evidently health and healing would be major concerns and interests of the inhabitants.Reformed mission has formed a strategic alliance with scientifically tested medicine in the past. Africans do not find this alliance sufficient. They, however, need a medical mission that could deal with ‘African sicknesses’. The question is whether we need an alliance with traditional medical practitioners. Because traditional healing is linked to traditional religion, we are confronted with difficult missiological questions.The solution offered in this article concentrates on two dimensions, (1) an openness to and a respect for African culture and religion and (2) a radical rediscovery of Jesus as healer.