A PROPOSAL ON INVESTIGATION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE MINISTRY OF DELIVERANCE IN THE LIFE OF A CHRISTIAN

Abstract

The study will investigate the effectiveness of the ministry of deliverance in the life of a Christian. The following objectives will be used for the study; To discuss the concepts of ill-health, healing and deliverance as well as church growth, to examine the belief and practice of healing and deliverance in Christian life and to ascertain the relationship between healing and deliverance and church growth in Christian life. The method of data analysis that will be used by the researcher is the simple percentage. More so, percentage and degrees of the responses will also be used in the analysis. Here, the ratio of those whose responses were not in the affirmative will be found and conclusions will be drawn there upon. Representations of the level of responses will be made in tabular form. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software will be used to test the hypotheses

Introduction

The phenomenon of deliverance has become very common and central to the religious activities of most churches.  Kwabena J. Asamoah-Gyadu explains deliverance from a charismatic point of view as ‘the deployment of divine power and authority in the name or blood of Jesus perceived in pneumatological terms as the intervention of the Holy Spirit to provide release for demon-possessed, demon-oppressed, broken, disturbed and troubled persons in order that victims may be restored to proper functioning order, that is, to health and wholeness and being thus freed from demonic influence and curses, they may enjoy God’s fullness of life understood to be available in Christ. From this Charismatic Pentecostal perspective, healing and deliverance, is considered to be an avenue as well as the practice which employs certain Christian religious activities with the purpose of responding to the human existential needs

The Pentecostal “healing and deliverance” ministry has become popular in African contexts such as Nigeria because it takes the African worldviews of mystical causality seriously. This Christianity promises Christian alternatives to the search for security that drives people into the courts of other religious functionaries’. Contrasting the African nature of Charismatic Pentecostal churches with the western mission churches, Allan Anderson argued that the Charismatic Pentecostal churches are motivated by a desire to meet the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of Africans, offering solutions to life’s problems and finding ways to cope with the threatening and anxieties of a hostile world. Some scholars have described Nigerian Charismatic Pentecostal Churches as some of the fastest growing churches in the past three decades. This rapid growth, according to Anderson, is attributed to the churches’ focus on making meaning of the contemporary existential problems that confront Christians through their contextualization approach. For these scholars, the Charismatic Pentecostal churches are experiencing this rapid growth because most of them are able to fashion out programmes that respond to the contextual needs of both members and non-members One common practice in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which is fast spreading across Nigeria and the continent of Africa, is healing and deliverance. The extensive practice of healing and deliverance by Charismatic and Pentecostal churches is asserted to be one of the major contributing factors to church growth among these kinds of churches. Most of these Charismatic and Pentecostal Churches have been noted for exploring healing and deliverance as an evangelistic tool for the establishment and growth of their church denominations. The Global Evangelical Church (GEC) has also adopted appreciable levels of the Charismatic and Pentecostal features which are evident in the congregation of its religous activities. These activities include revival meetings, all-night prayer meetings, corporate prayer, Bible study, evangelism and mission, healing the sick, and casting out of demons. Most congregations of the GEC have a specific day set aside for the practice of healing and deliverance

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