Beyond Doctrinal Assent: A Bowen-Informed Review and Contextual Pastoral Framework for Addressing Witchcraft Anxiety among Seventh-Day Adventists in Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe

Abstract

Witchcraft anxiety remains a pastoral and missiological challenge in many African Christian communities, yet it is frequently addressed either through denial or through practices that may intensify fear, stigma, and accusations. This article examines how Seventh-day Adventist ministry in Mashonaland East, Zimbabwe, can respond to witchcraft-related fear without dismissing Shona interpretations of misfortune, endorsing unverifiable accusations, or reducing medical and psychosocial suffering to spiritual causation. Using Bowen’s qualitative document-analysis method, the study reviews biblical texts, selected writings of Ellen G. White, African theological and missiological scholarship, Zimbabwean contextual studies, and Adventist ministry research. Documents were appraised for relevance, authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning; data were then coded and synthesized thematically. Five interacting findings emerge from the literature: witchcraft anxiety is sustained by relational accounts of causation; baptism does not automatically displace inherited plausibility structures; ecclesial silence creates a pastoral vacuum; power-centred responses can reproduce the fear they seek to cure; and durable care must integrate theological, communal, psychological, medical, and safeguarding resources. In response, the article proposes the Christ-Centred, Contextually Intelligent Pastoral Care framework, organized around listening, discernment, theological re-narration, multidisciplinary care, congregational formation, and accountable evaluation. The framework treats fear as pastorally real while suspending judgment about alleged occult agency. It rejects consultation with diviners as inconsistent with Adventist faith, but also rejects coercive deliverance, public naming of alleged witches, treatment interruption, and victim blaming. The article contributes an Adventist model of spiritual care that is biblically grounded, culturally attentive, ethically bounded, and empirically testable.