‘How are your healing groups going?’ the present archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, enquired rhetorically in a charge to service chaplains in 1979. ‘The renewal of the Church’s ministry of healing’ the bishop of Selby has even more recently written, ‘is one hard obstinate fact that future historians will be unable to ignore when examining the Christian scene in the present century.’ The bishop, who is co-chairman of the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, particularly singled out for praise the pioneers of this renewal: ‘individuals like James Moore Hickson, George Bennett and Dorothy Kerin’ as well as such later contributors as Leslie Weatherhead from the free churches, and more recently Cameron Peddie in Scotland and the American Dominican, Francis MacNutt. The bishop has further argued that ‘these powerful initiatives given to the healing movement by individual leaders were matched by the leadership of the Churches’, an assertion which is backed by citing the discussions devoted to the subject at the Lambeth conferences of 1908, 1920, 1930 and 1958. The first two of these conferences were presided over by archbishop Randall Davidson, who in the bishop of Selby’s book is presented as a crypto-champion of spiritual healing.

I begin this paper with some broad generalisations about the history of anglicanism in relation to healing. I shall contend that in East and Central Africa over the last hundred years there were simultaneously present and interacting with each other a number of tendencies which in Europe had developed over a much longer period. Thus in some ways the religious history of colonial Africa is an intensification and telescoping of the religious history of Europe.

I am assuming, then, that in England by the end of the 17th century anglicanism had come to repudiate ‘enthusiasm’ and the visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit, partly for reasons of social control. I am assuming that this more or less closed the door on spiritual healing within 18th century anglicanism and produced the characteristically ‘cool’ anglican tone. Wesley brought back into the Church of England a universe of spirits and spiritual healings and exorcisms but all this went off into early methodism and out of the 19th-century Anglican church. In this 19th-century church, before it reached out into Central African mission, a number of superficially contradictory developments took place. There was an interaction of church and medical ‘establishments’ which led to anglican involvement in public health programmes and to an intellectual commitment to the ‘divine’ origins of modern medical science. At the same time there was a revival, particularly in the countryside, of communal rituals designed to create feelings of solidarity despite the realities of class division.

Spiritual healing has always been at the core of the religious activities of Nigerian Prophetic Churches. The idea that healing-prayer succeeds where Western medical treatment fails is common among these Churches. This paper examines the notion and nature of healing in ‘The Brotherhood of the Cross and Star’, a prophetic movement in South-Eastem Nigeria.

Christianity has been identified as both the cause and the catalyst of social change in Africa. The emergence of independent Churches founded by Africans in protest at some of the features in Mission Christianity clearly constitutes an important part of the history of the Church in Africa, particularly in Nigeria. Broadly, independent Churches in Nigeria, (which date back to the 1880s) are of two kinds. The first type are those which seceded from mission churches (but retained their liturgies and church government) in protest agains the refusal of the latter to allow Africans any significant say in church government. These are the ‘African Churches’. The second type, with which the BCS could in someways be idenified, are the ‘aladura’ (literally “those who pray” or praying) Churches. These are pentecostal and lay stress on divine healing, prediction and the acquiring of spiritual power. They are mostly founded by individuals who claim to have received a divine call to prophetic ministry and are often referred to as ‘spiritual’ or ‘prophetic’ churches by virtue of this stress on spiritual and or prophetic power.

At present, roman catholics number just under 7% of the total population of Sri Lanka. The dominant religious groups in the country are the Sinhalese buddhists and the Tamil hindus with 65% and 25% respectively of the population. The remainder consists of muslims (around 7%) and a few protestants. Here, unlike sub-Saharan Africa, European religions were introduced into a context dominated by other world religions with long literary and intellectual traditions. Furthermore, religion enters so intimately into the culture of various groups in the island that it is difficult to demarcate an area of thought or activity which can be clearly labelled as ‘religious’.

In many ways modern society resembles a large stone in an overgrown garden. The stone stands apart from the weeds. Its outline is clear and its surface smooth and clean. But if we turn the stone we find another world. This is a realm of slime with a host of creepy crawlies scrurrying to escape the light. Attempting to penetrate beyond the official rational scientific culture of modern society which, like the top-side of the stone, is visible to all, is similar to the act of turning the stone to expose its repulsive underside. Beneath the ordered exterior of our official culture is a disorderly and, to the rational mind, shocking vision of reality.