Revealed Medicine as an Expression of an African Christian Lived Spirituality

Abstract

Tropical Africa is often mediated through televised news programs and the printed press as a region where plagues, famine, and wars dominate the suffering populations. Very seldom we see reports on other parts of the social realities in which people live. During my years in both Congos, I have met people from various Christian denominations and visited fast growing Christian congregations that engage in a diversity of activities for the benefit of the societies in which they operate. Some denominations run schools and hospitals in areas where governmental health-care and schooling does not suffice. Many parishes have health centers and nutrition projects for those that have lost everything except their lives. Quite a few of these centers have been established on the basis of revelations and dreams. As will be shown below, the Kongo people traditionally live in two worlds: the “day world” and the “night world.”1 What is experienced in the night world may well be realized in the day world. Dreaming of a health clinic may result in the construction of one. In this chapter, based on fieldwork carried out in Brazzaville, in the Republic of Congo, I present the results of my studies of a method of healing that was revealed during and after the spiritual Revival of 1947 (described below), in today’s Evangelical Church of Congo: a method referred to as the Revealed Medicine. Between 1982 and 2010, I periodically lived and worked in Brazzaville as a missionary pastor and teacher in the Eglise Evangélique du Congo (eec). Like many other Westerners I have suffered from malaria, parasites, wounds, and other illnesses, and I have met with several people suffering from diseases that I have never even heard of. Naturally I have been interested in finding out what people do to get well. There are a few state-owned hospitals in Brazzaville and