Divine Healing Without Medicine

Bengt Sundkler surveyed the independent churches of South Africa in the 1940s and found that they divided broadly into two streams. The Ethiopian churches had separated from mission bodies over African leadership and otherwise kept mission doctrine and forms. The Zionist churches, which drew their name and some of their early practice from an American healing movement based at Zion City, Illinois, had built something different, and healing stood at its centre. A Zionist prophet diagnosed the cause of an illness, which was understood to lie in a spiritual disorder, a broken relationship, or the malice of another person, and then prescribed a remedy from a repertoire that included prayer, the laying on of hands, immersion in running water, blessed water taken by mouth, ash, and cords or cloth worn on the body.

The prohibitions came with the therapy: pork, alcohol and tobacco were refused, and in many churches so was medicine. Sundkler's reading was that these churches had recovered a role the mission churches had abandoned, the diagnosis and healing of affliction as a religious rather than a technical matter, and that this was the principal reason for their growth. The Zion Christian Church, founded by Engenas Lekganyane in 1924 and now the largest of them, kept the healing centre and the dietary discipline and built around them the annual Easter gathering at Moria that draws hundreds of thousands.

J. D. Y. Peel's study of the Yoruba Aladura churches found the same structure in west Africa, arrived at independently. The name itself is the doctrine: aladura means owner of prayer, one who prays. The movement's founding episodes were healings during the influenza pandemic that reached western Nigeria in 1918, a catastrophe in which mission clinics and the older Yoruba remedies both plainly failed, and in which prayer groups formed inside Anglican and other mission congregations before separating from them. What distinguishes the resulting doctrine from ordinary faith healing is that it refuses two systems rather than one. The mission hospital was refused because healing power is God's and does not require a drug to operate. The older Yoruba remedy, and the charm or medicine bought from a herbalist or diviner, was refused because its power was held to be the wrong power altogether, so that the convert who abandoned charms for prayer had made a religious change and not merely a medical one. The strictness was never uniform across the movement.

The Christ Apostolic Church has held the position most firmly, refusing medicine as a matter of doctrine; other Aladura bodies, and in southern Africa many Zionist churches, came to accept medical treatment alongside prayer without giving up the claim that the real cause of an affliction is spiritual and that the real cure is therefore religious.