What’s a Faith-Healing Congregation to Do When Measles Hits?
The outbreak of measles at faith-healing megachurch Eagle Mountain International Church (EMIC), which is owned by the company of televangelist and Oral Roberts disciple Kenneth Copeland, has received widespread negative attention.
In response to the controversy, EMIC co-pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons denied that she ever opposed vaccination (which is pretty much true: she spread some unscientific rumors, but she never directly said, “vaccines are bad, don’t get them.”) She has now endorsed measles vaccinations, set up vaccination clinics at the church, and put a big green banner on EMIC’s website to point reporters in the direction of their half dozen press releases and sermons on the matter.
But last Sunday, Terri Copeland Pearsons’s co-pastor and husband George Pearsons’s sermon “Take Authority Over Your Body” attributed the end of the measles outbreak not to vaccines, but to a two-minute long communal prayer he led the previous Wednesday for “an outbreak of healing,”
At our Wednesday Service, we prayed together, we spoke to that spirit of measles, commanded it to leave, and Thursday morning, they said it stopped. No more cases, no more cases. I give God praise for that.
When George Pearsons says that they “commanded” the “spirit of measles” to leave, he’s not being figurative. Pearsons believes that you can be cured of almost any ailment by a ritual recitation of God’s word. He claimed in Sunday’s sermon that people could, “take authority over their bodies” by using “words of dominion,” saying that, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.”
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