Gendered Narratives of Illness and Healing: Experiences of Spirit Possession in a Charismatic Church Community in Tanzania

At the Gospel Miracle Church for All People, healing sessions form the dramatic climax of services, where women in spirit trances become the focus. They scream, resist, and are held down during intense intercession prayers and laying on of hands. Female choir members and pastors wrap cloth around their waists as a practical and symbolic act, entering spiritual warfare on behalf of those possessed. The congregation participates in communal prayer while also spectating with fervent intensity, as public possession invites contemplation and identification among onlookers.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Church services at the Gospel Miracle Church for All People (gmcl)1 follow a dramatic pattern that is always very similar: the culmination point comes after the sermon and offering with the healing session in which women lost in spirit trances become the focus of the congregation’s attention. Usually they scream, resist, and try to escape, and several people are required to hold them down and still during the loud and vivid intercession prayers and laying on of hands. As the prayers commence, and Prophet Mpanji, leader and founder of this community, encourages people to join him in prayer and spiritual warfare (vita vya kiroho), female choir members and pastors wrap large pieces of cloth around their waists to protect their clothing. It is a practical act, since healing prayers are physical and messy. The patients roll around on the mud floor and as the holy water is thrown on them sludge builds up that covers their clothes and bodies and also spatters the prayer servants for whom assisting in the healing session is physically demanding. Dressing for a prayer session is also a strongly symbolic action: they are entering a war on behalf of their sisters who are forced to live with malicious spirits and long for redemption. Meanwhile the congregation is invited to join communal prayer for the spirit possessed, as well as being urged to destroy evil forces in their own lives. More than that, they are also spectators whose fascination for the on-going drama is obvious and who watch events with fervent intensity. When spirit possession becomes public it invites “contemplation, interrogation, identification, and edification for those around them”, as Lambek writes.2