by
Stuart C. Bate
Publisher
Edwin Mellen New York.
Available
from Amazon.com
Price: $99.95
Dr.
Bate’s book, brings a welcome and much needed breakthrough in current
approaches to the healing ministry. This
level-headed, rigorously analytical, objectively critical and solidly
theological study treats the healing ministry with the depth, respect and
seriousness which the subject deserves....
Bate’s
study is commendable not only for its content, its comprehensive documentation
and analysis of the phenomenon of “Coping-healing” in the African Initiated
Churches, but also for its methodology. Healing
necessarily centers on the individual; to heal is to make a person whole (hygies; cf. John 5:6), physically, psychologically, emotionally, morally,
economically and spiritually. In
short, to heal is to enable the person to have life in all its fullness (John
10:10), in all aspects of one’s personal life and in one’s relation to other
human beings, the environment (the total context in which one lives), and God.