Page 313 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

dreams and trance as means of acquiring access to the invisible world. The task
of local priests was to communicate what they saw spiritually to those who were
in need of support and could not see by themselves. It was this quest for visions
which allow one to peek into what remains hidden to the naked eye (into the
“spiritual world”) and thereby make sense of the “physical world” that led to
numerous con®icts between missionaries and African converts, and was the ba-
sis for the founding of African independent churches (see Meyer 1999a, 113ff.).
In Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, both vision and the Bible are central.
Pastors claim to have visions, or even the Spirit of Discernment through the
Holy Spirit—indeed this is often the basis of their power and even the reason
why they broke away from another (more Orthodox) church to found their
own—and refer to biblical passages so as to interpret what they saw in such a
way that it becomes a revelation. In these churches pastors and believers in-
voke through their visions and dreams a huge imaginary space, the otherwise
invisible realm of the powers of God and the Devil. The Bible is cited and called
upon all the time, in a highly eclectic manner, in order to turn these visions
(which are never con¤ned to mere seeing but also imply hearing) into divine
revelations and thus vest them with authority. In contrast to the more sober
didactic representation of the act of looking as shown in the lithograph, which
teaches that the visible can only be understood by referring to the Bible, here
everything is geared to the production of vision itself, and the Bible is called
upon to legitimate these visions.
For instance, in September 2002 I attended a Crusade organized by the World
Miracle Church on the campus of the University of Ghana on three consecutive
evenings. This church advertises itself as able to produce instant miracles on
the basis of the leaders’ capacity to see, and to hear messages from the Holy
Spirit. As expected, night after night the Crusade drew a huge number of visi-
tors, all eagerly awaiting the church leader, Bishop Agyen Asare, to perform a
spectacular deliverance onstage—for example, prayers meant to free a person
from indwelling spirits (cf. Meyer 1998). With full con¤dence he would an-
nounce that the “Holy Spirit just told me that there are twenty people in need
of healing, come forward and I will pray for you,” and indeed he would not rest
until all twenty persons had stood up so that his vision had been proven right
(even if he had to threaten with a story about a person who had once been called
by the Lord but did not stand up, and right after the service died in an accident).
People would race forward, howl, and throw themselves on the ground, thus
participating in a complex spectacle of publicly casting out evil spirits (see
chapter 2 in this volume). While other Pentecostal-Charismatic leaders may be
a bit more moderate, they all have in common a strong emphasis on prophecy
and vision, and frame the church service as a spectacular performance where
the presence of the Holy Spirit can be witnessed.
Interestingly many video ¤lms also tie into this particular way of having
and communicating visions as the central practice of Pentecostal mediation.
Such movies are usually framed as confessions or testimonies, and make ample
reference to biblical texts, either in the beginning or at the end, or state some-

302 Birgit Meyer