A Critical Reflection on the Place of Disabled People in Pentecostal Churches in Zimbabwe

Abstract

A number of scholars have defined Pentecostalism and delineated its history in so much detail that there is nothing new about these two aspects of the phenomenon that we can add in this study. Notable scholars in this regard include Allan Anderson (1992, 1993 and especially, 2004); Paul Gifford (1991 and 2004), and recently in Zimbabwe, Lovemore Togarasei (2005, 2006 and 2008); Francis Machingura (2010, 2011a, 2011b and 2012) and Kudzai Biri (2011, 2012 and 2013). A number of Eastern and Western scholars also have written extensively on Pentecostalism but the scholarship we have isolated above deals with a particular type of Pentecostalism found in Zimbabwe called African Pentecostalism, which is the focus in this paper for the obvious reason that we need to look at phenomena that directly affects us.