When your church sees medicine as weak faith: Kenyan Christians wrestle with cancer and God

Maasai Seventh Day Adventist women praying in the Adventist Inchorroi Church, a center of hope to a pastoral community of the Massai, some 75 kilometers west of Nairobi. Creative Commons photo.

NAIROBI — When Mary Macharia, 29, was told that her non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma had spread to the bladder and the chest, two years after chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she opted not to seek further treatment.

“I knew only prayers would heal me,” she said.

One day, Macharia pulled out two chairs. She sat in one and asked God to sit in the other.

“I counted the number of problems that I had encountered in my life since I was a child,” she recalled. Macharia experienced poverty, abandonment from her father and a cancer diagnosis in her 20s, among other difficult circumstances. “That is when I realized that I had to put my religion aside and focus on spirituality; to have a deeper understanding of who God is and his promises. I told God, ‘I want us to talk.’”

So for two hours with those two chairs, Macharia prayed and told God she wanted him to heal her.

A year after, the pain reduced, and she slept better.

“I have seen faith work. From that day, I found peace that I never experienced before. I no longer fear cancer,” Macharia said. She has lived with cancer for nine years now.

With stories like Macharia’s and stories of miraculous healing in the Bible, from Jesus healing lepers, the blind, the demon-possessed and a woman with excessive bleeding, many African Christians, especially charismatic sects, believe in supernatural healing.

That doesn’t necessarily exclude modern medicine. Many churches teach that medicine is a gift from God for the benefit of his people, and that in most cases, God works through the hands and the minds of the doctors. Many of the sick seek medical treatment knowing that God will use it to accomplish his healing.

But in Africa, there are deep-seated traditional beliefs that life-threatening illnesses originate from a generational curse, witchcraft or as a punishment from God, and that seeps into some church teachings too.

For instance, Millicent Kagonga, 32, a cervical cancer survivor, spent five years in a church praying away her symptoms.

“I found myself in the wrong church that did not believe in hospitals,” she said. “The pastor told us we were like Levites, and that we were not supposed to interact with outsiders. At one point, the pastor blamed my cancer on my stepmother saying that she had bewitched me. At another time, a conflict with my mother. She told me the symptoms would go away through prayers, not medicine.”

Poor, divorced, and with two children under her care, Kagonga would pray from 6 p.m. til 2 a.m. and fast for 21 days despite already being frail from her illness.

“I prayed, but the symptoms worsened,” she said. “It is only after I was excommunicated from the church and seeing other sick church members dying that my eyes opened to the reality that God heals through medicine. I decided to go to the hospital.”

Eunice Mwende, 27, with Stage 4 breast cancer, says a family member told her that she needs to repent to receive full healing.

“An aunt told me that I got cancer because I wasn’t going to church,” she said.

Beverly Mlale, a psychologist and a reverend at Purpose Centre Church in Nairobi, Kenya, believes supernatural healing exists.

“The Bible is very clear,” Mlale said. “It speaks of God the healer and the ultimate physician. We have read of the healing miracles he did.”

However, she says whether a patient favors prayers instead of medicine rather than alongside medicine depends on the individual’s understanding of religion.

“In spirituality, there are those whose faith is still in infancy. Others see their faith as so strong that it surpasses our understanding. Such patients may go the spiritual way in seeking healing,” she said.

Mlale believes it’s up to the sick to decide for themselves.

“Even family members should accept if a person has made this choice [to not use medicine],” she said. “A terminally-ill patient may have weighed the risks and benefits of medicine and decided not to accept it, knowing that total healing comes in form of death.”

Richard Bauer, a Roman Catholic priest who has been involved in care and support for people affected by HIV and AIDS since 1982 and worked in Tanzania, Namibia, and Kenya said approaches to health, healing, illness and dying entwine in a complex way.

Patients often ask Bauer, “Why is this happening to me? Why am I suffering? Why is God doing this to me?” he said.

In Kenya, where people often discuss cancer and healing miracles on social media, there will always be common views that, “God loves me, I cannot get cancer,” Bauer said, and, “Cancer is not a disease, it is a demon masquerading as a virus.”

But does it mean that God does not love those who get the disease?

To help patients process their beliefs about religion during an illness, perhaps every doctor, social worker and chaplain, should be able to screen for both psychosocial pain and spiritual distress, Bauer said.

 “Ask the patient, ‘Are you at peace? Do you have spiritual pain? Is there a pain deep in your heart or your soul? Can you tell me about it?’ You don’t have to pretend you know the answers, you just need to help patients express their questions and be compassionately present,” Bauer said.

Diana Mwango is a journalist based in Nairobi. She is currently working as an Editor at Business Daily.