By Richard DABLAH
(richard.dablah@gmail.com 25/08/2025}
“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” — St Augustine of Hippo
I keep returning to Augustine’s sentence as if to a small lamp in a dark room. It is a lantern that both comforts and cautions: it widens our imagination about what the world might contain, and it warns us against the arrogance of claiming we already understand everything. Modern physics, the strange choreography of particles that ignore our commonsense categories, gives Augustine a strange companion. The world is thicker than our instruments; more is happening than our models can hold. That thought should enlarge faith, not flatten it into spectacle.
Last Sunday I walked past a packed altar service. People waited for the miraculous like commuters queue for buses. A friend told me about a child taken from a hospital ward to a midnight deliverance. Hands were laid; oil anointed. The child died before dawn. The grief in that family was a thing with weight. I asked myself: had faith supplanted prudence? Did prayer become an alternative to a scalpel? It is easy to condemn from a distance; harder to enter the shame and fear that lead a parent to believe a prophet’s assurance over a surgeon’s prognosis.
The hunger for signs has deep roots. The earliest Christian communities expected God to break into history; healings, exorcisms, tongues, resurrections were part of their vocabulary for the inbreaking reign of God. Pentecost in Acts was not about theatrical power only; it announced a new way of life, a community formed by the Spirit’s presence. In that frame, signs served discipleship and mercy. They were not retail commodities to be traded for status.
Modern Pentecostalism, however, carries two currents that sometimes run at odds. One current is the gift: immediacy with God, spiritual agency for the poor, fierce hope where secular systems have failed. The other current moves toward commodification: the performance of power, the marketplace of miracle-claims, the celebrity prophet whose blessing becomes a ticket. When a pastor’s anointing is packaged and sold, the church’s vocation to care is distorted into an economy of hope at someone else’s expense.
When Pentecostal forms arrived in African soil they did not wipe the slate clean. African traditional religious sensibilities, an ontology in which the spiritual and material are braided, found new expression under Christian vocabulary. Prophetic diagnosis and ritual repair came to look familiar: healing ritual in a church might echo a village shrine. That continuity has pastoral value: embodied prayer, communal lament, sacramental attention to bodies. But it also poses dangers. Authority can be privatized in persons rather than made accountable in institutions. A prophet who offers private cures but ignores public injustice performs spiritual therapy while social rot spreads.
There is also the risk Augustine named indirectly: that religion becomes consolation for structural sins. Marx’s critique, that religion can anesthetize the poor, still matters. Too often, the prosperity message makes poverty a moral deficit rather than a social failure. “Sow a seed” and wait for multiplication becomes a spiritual reframing of systems that should be politically contested. Theology that blesses accumulation without critique forgets the prophetic edge of the gospel.
I have seen the moral and bodily consequences. I have sat beside mothers who whispered they could not afford the prescribed drugs; I have watched congregants sell their savings to “seed” a promise and later eat the regret of that choice. I have also seen churches become sites of public health success when pastors partner with clinics to run vaccination drives or when elders promote medical literacy. The same movement that can mislead can also mobilize the best of communal care.
So what do we do? My reflections settle around practical, moral, and ecclesial moves. Pastors must teach a doctrine of signs that refuses spectacle and insists on justice. Clergy should partner with health professionals, not posture against them. Seminars that train ministers should include basics in public health, ethics, and media literacy so leaders can shepherd wisely. Communities should demand transparency: ministries that collect funds must be accountable; claims that cost human life must be answerable to public oversight.
The state has a role too. Laws ought to protect citizens from fraud and dangerous instruction without trampling religious freedom. Public health campaigns should invite faith leaders as partners, not adversaries. And finally, we as ordinary people must develop sober faith: prayer that walks beside hospitals, fasting that compels policy change, testimony that seeks both miracle and medicine.
Augustine did not banish wonder; he reoriented it. He received the surprising alongside the ordinary, insisting the mind remain teachable. If miracles are indeed corners of nature we do not yet see, then each claimed wonder must be judged by charity: does it heal? does it bring the poor into dignity? does it strengthen truth? If not, wonder is hollow.
I end with a small prayer for our churches: that they become places where awe and prudence meet, where hands lay in compassion and hands hold syringes in the same ministry of care. The Spirit can surprise us, but surprise must not become the cover for neglect.
_Vigilare et sapere_ — be watchful and wise. *R.D*
