A Social Anthropologist’s Analysis of Contemporary Healing, Part 1
Words of Knowledge
A statistical approach is also very useful in analyzing the revelations commonly referred to as “words of knowledge”16. Certainly some of these seem to be very “general” and could be expected to apply to at least one or two people in a congregation. More specific ones, however, are less easily dismissed, as I demonstrated in my report on Wimber’s Sheffield conference.17 A good example of a highly specific word of knowledge occurred at the Harrogate conference, when John Wimber announced the following revelation:
“There’s a woman named Janet who at eleven years of age had a minor accident that’s proven to be a problem throughout her adult life. It had something to do with an injury to her tailbone but now it’s caused other kinds of problems and so there’s radiating pain that comes down over her—er—lower back and down over her backside and down her legs. It has something to do with damage to a nerve but it also has to do with some sort of a functional problem with the—um—I think it’s called the sacroiliac.”
Though many had prayed for other Christians, with varying results, some of the most interesting cases came from the minority who had been willing to try praying in this way for non-Christians. Often they saw signs of God’s power in unexpected ways.
Moreover, those responding to such highly specific words of knowledge also tended to report higher degrees of associated healing than those responding to less specific revelations. This process is obscured in the overall percentages of people receiving healing because at the Harrogate conference many more people responded to a less specific word of knowledge for anyone with skeletal problems (including arthritis) to receive prayer: their degrees of healing ranged from “a great deal” or “total” healing through to “little” or none. It was only in the subsequent statistical analysis that I discovered the tendency for more specific words of knowledge to be associated with greater degrees of healing.19
A statistical approach is also very useful in analyzing the revelations commonly referred to as “words of knowledge.”