Faith, Health Decisions and Household Economic Vulnerability in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism

Abstract

Illness rarely remains a private medical matter in Zimbabwean households. It rearranges work, spending, caregiving, and the search for help across clinics, churches, and family networks. Drawing on a historical case study of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), this study traces how Pentecostal teaching shaped treatment timing and therapeutic choices and asks what those choices meant for household economic security. The analysis brings together AFM archival records, church constitutions, financial and welfare documents, colonial and postcolonial public-health reports, thirteen interviews conducted during doctoral fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and original empirical studies of health costs and religion in Zimbabwe. Prayer-first care could reduce immediate cash expenditure and sustain hope, yet prolonged or complicated illness could shift costs forward through emergency transport, repeated treatment, lost work, and unpaid caregiving. Church networks partly buffered these pressures through medical-aid funds, food, transport, fundraising, and welfare support. The study contributes by treating religious health decisions as household economic processes rather than matters of belief alone, and by showing that Pentecostalism could generate both vulnerability and protection. It argues for faith-sensitive referral practices and social protection that recognise the economic realities within which treatment decisions are made.