“Thank God, He Didn’t Answer My Prayer!” (Failed) Healing as Boundary Maintenance

Abstract

Divine healing is an emotionally and theologically conflictive field where actors communicate positions and draw boundaries by engaging in certain practices and renouncing others. In this article, I analyse how a progressive evangelical megachurch, faced with the dominance of conservative evangelicalism, uses healing and the failure of healing for boundary maintenance and identity construction. Drawing on ethnographic field research, interviews, and the analysis of sermons, I argue that the church develops and communicates its position in the evangelical field by developing and presenting healing practices that directly address the supposed shortcomings of other evangelical churches. To achieve this, the church makes failed healing an integral part of religious practice and encourages its followers to speak openly about this failure while continuously managing their expectations.