The Embodied Performance of Deliverance Prayer in Christian Healing Ministry

Christian Healing Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida is a charismatic organization that promotes and practices Christian healing. Although known for healing prayers, its worldview is more holistic and includes different kinds of prayers that address emotional, psychological, spiritual and bodily health. Deliverance prayer is of particular interest because it imagines a world of “spirit attachments” that are introduced to the body through multiple origins including trauma, inappropriate lifestyle, genealogical history, and intentional or incidental occult involvement. However, deliverance ministry is particularly difficult to give explanation to since its imagined world of spirits is dissimilar to naturalistic explanations of disease. The contention of this paper is that deliverance prayer is performative in which the participants symbolically interact with each other in ritual situations consenting to an imagined reality. Findings are based on participant observations and interviews and are placed in the context of symbolic interaction and performance.