EMQ » Oct – Dec 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 4
A Disabling Theology
Summary: The theology of the prosperity gospel in African churches often mirrors animistic beliefs especially as it relates to people with disabilities. It undermines God’s sovereignty and excludes disabled individuals from ministry. We must confront these harmful views and fully integrate people with disabilities into church life and global missions.
By Jackie Nyamutumbu Kimani
I didn’t know what to think about a church building with wheelchairs and crutches as wall decor. A decade earlier, I had left my home country, Zimbabwe, as a cultural Christian. I was now back home as a zealous, biblical Christian missionary, excited to become more informed about my country and continent’s religious scene by visiting different churches regardless of their theological leaning.
The wheelchairs and crutches that hung on the church walls of one of Zimbabwe’s most popular self-proclaimed prophets all supposedly belonged to now-healed people. They were meant to showcase the prophet’s healing power. Faith healing is a major aspect of the inner workings of the prosperity gospel in Zimbabwe and across Africa. And reports from crusades and services of people with disabilities receiving healing draw crowds.
However, these wheelchairs and crutches reflected more than just a belief in faith healing. They pointed to a deeply held worldview and theology about disability that functions within these prevalent prosperity gospel churches. The prosperity gospel has had numerous effects on Africa’s development, theology, and society which are now being studied and explored.
However, people with disabilities are frequently forgotten, hidden victims of its emphasis on healing, health, and financial prosperity. The hope of miraculous healings by prosperity gospel teachers leads many people with disabilities to spend money and time pursuing healing they never receive.
While little is mentioned about it, this view of people with disabilities and its resulting exploitation mirrors the animistic worldview of African Traditional Religions (ATRs). The same disregard and abuse many people with disabilities experience in their traditionally religious families in Africa is the same treatment they can experience in prosperity gospel churches.
Ultimately, unless the unbiblical worldview of both ATRs and health-and-wealth churches is reversed, people with disabilities from Africa will remain marginalized from the church and from opportunities to serve God in ministry locally and abroad. If we are to see people with disabilities serve in global missions, we need to critically explore how the theology of disability affirmed and held by prosperity gospel preaching churches reflects the animistic worldview of many African societies, does not align with the biblical truth, and denies that people with disabilities deserve a place in the church of God.
Africa’s Animistic Worldview on Disability
Many African societies religiously function in an animistic paradigm. Animism has been defined as, “[the] belief that personal spiritual beings and impersonal spiritual forces have power over human affairs and, consequently, that human beings must discover what beings and forces are influencing them in order to determine future action and, frequently, to manipulate their power.”[i]
This implies that people’s circumstances are an outcome of their ability to appease, displease, or control spiritual beings through rituals, actions, or sacrifices. Animism is a worldview through which people interpret the rest of the world. It influences every aspect of life including how people with disabilities are regarded. Often, disability is viewed as a curse from a god or the ancestors for sinful or shameful behavior, or it is seen as a result of witchcraft or bewitching that someone does against you or your children.[ii]
Whichever way it comes, disability is considered something negative, or the consequence of something negative, that needs to be eradicated. This can lead people to kill or neglect infants with disabilities. Children allowed to live into adulthood can face ostracism, discrimination, and few opportunities to thrive in or contribute to, their societies.[iii]
In many communities, significant progress is being made and more people are sensitized to issues affecting people with disabilities. Yet the animistic worldview still holds many people in African captive to the idea that disability is a consequence of punishment and sin.
The Prosperity Gospel: the New Animism
Because the prosperity gospel’s theology of disability parallels many pre-existing animistic views, it is adopted easily in Africa. When someone asks why someone has a disability, much like Jesus’s disciples in John 9:1–2, the answer provided in prosperity gospel churches seldom reflects Jesus’s response – “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3, NIV). Instead, it tends to echo the African animistic view.
In my home country, Zimbabwe, many so-called prophets claim to have insight into the spiritual reasons why people are not married, why they are sick, why their relatives died, and so forth. The causes cited for these problems are bewitching, God’s curse due to a sinful life, or a lack of faith. These stem from similar roots as those of animistic belief, which put the onus of life’s outcomes on a spiritual force or spirit. These same responses are the ones given for why a person has a disability. This communicates to people attending prosperity gospel churches that truly faithful Christians should not have disabilities.
If a church is functioning under the paradigm that disability is a consequence of sin and faithlessness, then emphasizing healing for those with disabilities becomes necessary. Even those who might not believe that disability comes from sin can harbor the belief that a true believer, by faith, should receive healing if they happen to become disabled through some natural circumstance.
In either case, the core conviction remains the same: disability is bad and if someone is faithful, God will surely take the disability away. Beyond the psychological and emotional effects this has on people with disabilities, this false belief about disability held by prosperity gospel churches has two detrimental outcomes on the view of God and the place of people with disabilities in the church.
1. It Reduces God’s Sovereignty
The prosperity gospel’s theology views God as a force that wants everyone to be healthy and wealthy. Therefore, some evil, external force brings about negative outcomes. Due to this view, pain and suffering must be the result of a person’s evil works (or that of an ancestor or evil relative).
This demeans the reality of God’s sovereignty and has big implications for those with disabilities because, in most cases, disability comes with suffering. For many, disability includes physical pain, psychological pain from slander and shame, or the pain of poverty that often comes with because a person is unable to provide for him or herself or is neglected by family.
However, the Bible does not assume that suffering or disability disappears from Christians’ lived experience. On the contrary, the Bible prepares Christians to expect to suffer (John 16:33) and to accept and welcome people with disabilities (Luke 14:13–14) as part of the culture of the kingdom of God.
The prosperity gospel’s view on the need for healing for all people with disabilities does not reflect the character of God. Jesus’s ministry demonstrates that “true healing is about more than a mere physical cure.”[iv]
The biblical stories where Jesus interacts with those with disabilities expose how physical healing was not the end goal of Jesus’s ministry. Though important, it was rather the means he chose to expose the essential need for holistic spiritual healing. God has great purposes even in the lack of physical healing as “health is more than the sum of physical capacities [as] God delights to work through our perceived weaknesses” (2 Corinthians 12:9).[v]
2. It Disqualifies People from Serving in the Church
The prosperity gospel suggests that those who aren’t healthy and wealthy are either disobedient, faithless, or under demonic oppression. This implies that those who should be in leadership, serve in the church, or be ambassadors for God’s Word and kingdom should be those who represent an external form of wellness. This standard immediately disqualifies people with disabilities from ministry and service in the body of Christ.
Contrary to the prosperity gospel, the Bible puts people with disabilities at the forefront of Jesus’s ministry. About two-thirds of Jesus’s recorded miracles cite people with disabilities, meaning most of the recorded interactions Jesus had were with people with disabilities.[vi]
Jesus’s ministry “… reveals that individuals with impairments are incorporated into the canon precisely because of the divine purpose in their impairments.”[vii]
God desires that the world would see his glory through disability both in the Scripture and in our ministries. Thus being disqualified from ministry due to disability or lack of wealth is unbiblical and prideful. Just as Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 12:12–27, we cannot consider any part of Christ’s body as “broken” or “functionally deficient,” implying that they have nothing to give.[viii]
Perhaps in many ways, instead of seeing disabilities as brokenness, God desires to use the reality of others’ impairments to expose the true brokenness that lies within the hearts of other members of the church. Their response to people with disabilities can expose their prejudice and godlessness. The prosperity gospel diminishes people with disabilities’ ability to utilize their gifts and experiences in the church. The church then misses out on many laborers who could be making disciples globally.
What if the progress in fulfilling the Great Commission is being stunted by this wrong theology about disability? Beyond all the other theological pitfalls, there is much to lose in the prosperity gospel’s limited perspective on God’s heart for people with disabilities.
Working Together to Glorify God
The essence of God’s character is love for one another and love for God himself (1 John 4:16). This love is not only about our capacity to give it, but also our right to receive it from others. Christians love “not because people always have qualities Christians admire or enjoy, but because God made each person worthy of love by loving all persons first.”[ix]
The prosperity gospel’s view of people with disabilities does not reflect God’s loving character nor does it propel people to a love of others. Rather, it promotes fear more than faith in a God who can use anyone he made in his image for his glory. The church, including in Africa, must stop emphasizing the need to understand why disability exists. This leads to theologically weak logic and reasoning. Instead, when faced with our suffering or that of others, the church should respond with love and an acknowledgment of the imprint of the image of God in all people.
It is critical for church leaders and missionaries in Africa to preach the true gospel and exemplify true biblical theology. Prosperity theology in Africa has grown with too little protest for too long. The global missions community has played a part by not firmly (yet lovingly) confronting it out of fear of being accused of unfairly judging African forms of worship. However, theology has great ripple effects in societies, especially on poor and hidden like people with disabilities. Missionaries and church leaders must stand firmly together for truth in love and point believers away from detrimental false beliefs.
Lastly, many global missionaries and churches are content with running a disability program of sorts in their churches or even establishing an organization to serve those with disabilities. However, most do not consider people with disabilities to be co-laborers in the kingdom of Christ.
They often do not integrate people with disabilities into worship with others or provide opportunities for them to serve in (and even lead) different aspects of their churches or ministries. Even those not affected by prosperity theology and who have done well accepting all people into their fellowship need to improve in this area. Growing in our incorporation of people with disabilities into the church, acknowledges that we are incomplete without every part of the body working together to glorify God and advance his kingdom.
Jackie Kimani (jackiekimani@ahint.org) is the training and curriculum coordinator for Accessible Hope International (accessiblehope.org). After living nearly 10 years in the US, God sent her back home to Zimbabwe to serve as a missionary. She believes God is calling Global South disciples to participate in global missions and knows that people with disabilities are co-laborers in that effort. Jackie lives in Harare, Zimbabwe with her husband, Brian, and son, Spurgeon.
[i] Gailyn Van Rheenen, Communicating Christ in Animistic Contexts (Pasadena, CA: William Carrey Publishing, 1991), 20.
[ii] Charlotte Baker and Elvis Imafidon, “Traditional Beliefs Inform Attitudes to Disability in Africa: Why it Matters,” The Conversation, June 15, 2020,
[iii] Baker and Imafidon, “Attitudes to Disability.”
[iv] Ben Rhodes, “Signs and Wonders: Disability in the Fourth Gospel,” The Journal of the Christian Institute on Disability 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 63.
[v] Rhode, “Signs and Wonders,” 71.
[vi] Ryan Wolfe, “Jesus, Disability Ministry, and the Bible from Cover to Cover,” Ability Ministry, December 16, 2021, https://abilityministry.com/jesus-disability-ministry-and-the-bible-from-cover-to-cover/.
[vii] Jeff McNair and Ben Rhodes, “Towards a Christian Model of Disability: The Bible Is for All People,” The Journal of the Christian Institute on Disability 8, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019): 25.
[viii] Brian Brock and John Swinton, Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), introduction, Kindle.
[ix] Devan Stahl and John F Kilner, “The Image of God, Bioethics, and Persons with Profound Intellectual Disabilities,” The Journal of the Christian Institute on Disability 6, no. 1–2 (Summer 2017): 35.
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 4. Copyright © 2024 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
