“Their journeys were not without demonic confrontation”: Healing and migration in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana

How have discourses and practices of healing, considered a hallmark of African Christianity today, changed over time and space within the oldest church in Ghana? Drawing on ethnographic and archival research in Philadelphia; New York; Accra, Ghana; and Akropong, Ghana, this study examines Christian therapeutic practices within the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG) both historically and ethnographically. Historically, I examined therapeutic shifts within the PCG that corresponded to the large-scale migration—from established towns to new cocoa farming villages—during the first half of the 20th century. Ethnographically, I studied continuities and disjunctures in the process of replicating healing practices, instituted in the PCG, within the Ghanaian Presbyterian community in the US, which constitutes a second great migration in the later half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Missionary discourse and practices within the PCG shifted by the end of the 19th century from incorporating local Akan therapeutics to solely relying on biomedical means of healing. Young Ghanaian Presbyterians, who migrated in droves to cocoa farming towns in the first half of the 20 th century, joined healing-centered churches such as Faith Tabernacle and its Pentecostal branches, which offered healing and protection from malevolent spiritual agents. The PCG at this time denied the existence of malevolent spiritual forces and offered no means of protection from them. Beginning in the 1960s and into the 21st century, the PCG began incorporating healing practices into the church as many of its members simultaneously began migrating to North America. By the 1990s, a network of Ghanaian Presbyterian immigrant churches emerged in the US. Within Ghanaian Presbyterian churches in the US, the same diagnostic procedures and healing practices have been replicated in order to combat the same afflicting agents, particularly witches. But within this new cultural context, areas of divergence exist too. Most notably, there is a high rate of male spirit possession, while many women enjoy leadership positions within the churches and the deliverance ministry in particular. The inversion of gender roles within the religious sphere is a byproduct of an increase in social power of Ghanaian Presbyterian women resulting from their economic advancement in the health care industry