I go for this meeting with a pastor friend. He needs my assistance on some church-related matters, and I am hoping he gives me an offering for the assistance I am about to freely render him. As soon as I sat on my chair, he talked of the great burden of the church: “Frank Gashumba is roasting us.” “Roasting who?” I thought. But immediately, I remembered that I must stand in solidarity, lest I am misunderstood and lose all right to receive an offering for the assistance I am was about to freely give. “Well, I wish they hadn’t answered him,” I said hesitantly. I mean, who doesn’t know Frank Gashumba? Why should he be worthy of such attention? But, to think of it, what was Gashumba’s crime? He unwittingly gathered all apples in the church “business,” bad and good into one basket, saying: “miracles are fake. No pastor can perform a miracle on the spot.” Both statements are not entirely true. First, there are fake miracles and genuine miracles. Therefore, to say all miracles are a sham is to attack the good and the bad all at once. If Frank had said, “Fake pastors cannot perform miracles in Uganda,” he would have been safe from genuine pastors – and perhaps from all pastors, because all purport to be genuine. Instead, his arrogance, according to the accusations of his critics, stirred anger because of his indiscrimination. Second, when he said that no pastor could perform a miracle on the spot, he was partly right. He was right because no man who heals or performs miracles does so at will and with absolute power. They all know it because the most gifted healer among us has never healed each and every person who came to them. And some have died. Their fate depends on God. Gashumba was wrong because miracles are performed on the spot when God allows it. There is no timetable given to men in the Bible for when miracles will happen. The instructions are: pray always. Believe all the time, “for the just shall live by faith.” Therefore, miracles do happen on the spot when prayers are rendered and God wills, just as they happen when crusades and healing conferences are planned and God allows. At the same time, it is fundamentally important for worshippers to exercise their faith for a miracle to happen. Sometimes Jesus healed out of his personal initiatives. Many times, he commended faith. More individual miracles in His ministry happened because of faith. And there is no moment when Jesus performed a miracle because He was put on the spot to prove Himself. Jesus responded to human need, but He did not allow beings – human or demonic – to dictate the terms on which God must change stone into bread. A hospital visit to pray for a sick person is not the same thing as a wager that God must heal someone in front of cameras to prove Himself. Yet, if He chooses to heal before a camera, He does. Had Jesus lived during a time of cameras, we would have His videos too. Just as He did not personally write the Gospels in which his miracles are recorded, even today, an inspired TikToker or content creator like Sheila Gashumba would have captured miracles for us. But why the rant by pastors? When Gashumba says they can’t perform miracles on the spot, he is challenging a fundamental “selling point” in the church. In charismatic advertising, where I belong, miracles are a distinctive mark of the group. Miracles are the rosary of the Pentecostal. Touch miracles and you have touched Holy Mary. But also, they are a net for drawing in seekers. Even Jesus was followed more for the miracles than for His word. Most of those who would genuinely convert had to come, whether for miracle food or healing, first. However, Pentecostals and Charismatics wrongly take it that when a person challenges their limited capacity to perform miracles, they are questioning the power of God. That way, their anger is stirred up, together with one of those for whom miracles are a kiosk, who see Gashumba’s challenge as “killing the business.” But I ask, why not openly acknowledge human limitations in the matter? I wouldn’t have a problem saying: “I can’t do miracles beyond what God has allowed. Yes, I am anointed. I will always pray and always exercise faith, but the final guy is God.” But that we can’t do. Why? Because we teach people that faith can change everything. And we don’t know how to correct that when things don’t always change, and we can’t prove or disprove whether people genuinely believed or not. But if faith can change everything, then Gashumba is right to challenge us. Why not raise a dead body on the spot, Pastor, if your faith is “solid”? If all it takes is faith? And if we can’t raise the dead by faith, because there are other factors at play, our own teaching of “faith answers everything” risks condemning us as fake. I ask, therefore: Do we need to revisit our teaching of faith in the charismatic discipline? How do we handle issues when those who believed never received? It may be safe to throw people under the bus: “You didn’t believe enough.” But, oh, Pastor, if you believe enough, and if faith is all that matters, then go to the ICU with Gashumba. The writer is a theologian prfranksemakula@gmail.comThe post Pastor, go to the ICU with Gashumba appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.