The Great Omission – Why We are Busy Producing “Twice the Sons of Hell”

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As a child growing up in multiple Pentecostal churches, nothing was more important to us than the “winning of souls” via evangelism. I can recall so many sermons where we were guilt-tripped with repeated questions of how many souls we had won for Christ that year. We were criticized for our lack of care for the souls of all those going to hell, and how we needed to do more to evangelize the world. What is today commonly referred to as the “Great Commission” aka Matthew 28:18-20, was read and repeated as the go-to command of Jesus, which requires us to be diligent in preaching salvation to all men who are destined for hell.

But Father Richard Rohr says, “You only see what you are told to see”, and the more I have studied this “Great Commission” passage, along with the help of other bible scholars, the more I see how we miss the point of it, confirming Richard Rohr’s statements. Apart from the fact that this passage is itself one of the most important summaries of what our “good news” should actually be about – which “good news” has very little to say about “souls” destined for a “hell” – it’s become obvious to me that many Christians read this text with their mind already made up and miss the very real meat of the matter. This has made me begin to think that for all the money, time, prayers and energy spent in fulfilling what we have called “the Great Commission”, perhaps we may rather be fulfilling “the Great Omission”, to the joy of the devil himself.

The Great Omission

“(18) Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (19) Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, (20) and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20, my emphasis)

As mentioned before, my emphasis is on verse 20, and especially on the words “and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”.

But first and foremost, we will notice that Jesus’s command is for us to make disciples. For many Christians, our first mistake arises from having a wrong mental image of what a disciple is. The mental image we have in our heads is that of students – people who sit in a school classroom/lecture hall, listen to the teacher/lecturer, take notes, acquire knowledge into their heads, and regurgitate that knowledge at an exam. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The word disciple here is akin to “apprentice” i.e., one who is learning a trade from a master. The mental image we should have should be that of a young man or woman learning carpentry/masonry/auto mechanic/dressmaking/hairdressing from their master. A good master shows their apprentice what to do practically, whiles explaining why it needs to be done that way. In the end, the goal is to produce an apprentice who is as skilled in the trade as their master, not through examinations, but through practice.

Applying this logic to Christianity, the goal of Christianity is Christlikeness. It’s not “Christ knowledge” – aka piling on sermon upon sermon, neither is it “saving souls” from hell to heaven, nor is it the typical African’s favourite form of religion – transactional religion aka getting God to do what I want for me. Rather, it is being empowered by the Spirit of God to become more like Jesus in his example of self-sacrificial love – even if it means the disgrace of the cross and ultimately, the suffering of death.

If you doubt that the goal of Christianity is Christlikeness, ask the foremost “soul winner”, Paul the Apostle.

“He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end, I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.” (Col 1:28-29)

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom 8:29)

And this is why Matt 28:20 is critical, and so easily misunderstood, even amongst many classical Protestant Christians who pride themselves in being more “biblical” in their Christianity than the Pentecostals, Charismatics, Roman Catholics et al.

Jesus doesn’t say “teach them about me”, as if he is a person of historical curiosity that we learn about in school, like Kwame Nkrumah or Christopher Columbus. Even more importantly, Jesus doesn’t ask his disciples to “teach them to obey the bible” or “teach them to obey scripture”. Jesus is homing in on the specific instructions he gave his disciples when he was alive and with them, which the Holy Spirit has graciously preserved for us in the sweat and labour of the Evangelists we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Why? Because Jesus is not interested in producing apprentices of Moses, David, Joshua, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah or any other biblical character. Jesus the Master is interested in producing apprentices of himself, therefore his teaching, that is, his own words hold supreme to anything that came before him or even after him (including the revered Paul the apostle).

Jesus knows that even if you focus on teaching “scripture” or “the bible”, you are still very capable of missing Jesus, whom scripture points to. That is exactly what he told the Pharisees who were serious students of the scriptures, in John 5:39-40

“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:39)

So, to misconstrue “teach them to obey everything I commanded you” to mean “teach them to obey the bible” is a very serious mistake, a mistake Jesus had warned the Pharisees about. And if we think this mistake is not that serious, check out what the impact of “teaching the Bible” leads to, from Jesus’s own mouth.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” (Matt 23:15).

And this is why I call the current model of evangelism and church planting that dominates the African landscape the “Great Omission”. Many of our churches are busy making students and not apprentices, and in the end, making them twice the sons of hell because they refuse to teach them to obey what Jesus commanded, but rather anywhere and everywhere in the Bible that suits their cultural fancy.

I see a billboard on my way home at Atomic Junction, advertising an “Evangelism Conference”, and I am saddened. I hear millions of dollars being raised to organize so-called “crusades”, and I cringe. I see people zealously engaging in street evangelism or holding signs with pithy messages about “accepting Jesus”, or street preachers with their megaphones raining the fear of hell on passersby as I walk to the Madina market, and I sigh. So much zeal for the Great Omission.

And because we have made “soul-winning” the benchmark of what Christianity is about, and not Christlikeness, we can’t see when our pastors have totally missed the mark and need to be corrected, because after all, who are we to correct them when they are “winning souls”, and the church is “growing” (numerically of course, but not in Christlikeness)? God must be pleased with such increased numbers of “souls won”, not so?  And if our local pastors are treated this way, then how much more are our church founders/overseers/presidents/moderators/bishops/chairmen? They are Jesus themselves, after all. They are God himself!!

The History of the Great Omission

But how did we come to think that “saving souls” and teaching “the Bible” was what Christianity was about?

Well as I always say, if you don’t want to learn your Christian history, you always think that what your church is doing is the best thing since sliced bread. So, let’s dig into history a bit.

According to a scholar of early Christianity – Alan Kreider – in his book “The Patient Ferment of the Early Church”, in the first 400 years of the church’s life before it became a national religion of the Roman empire when a person wanted to become a Christian, they went through a process called “catechism” – a period of 1-3 years where the interested person, called a “catechumen” was introduced to the faith by a teacher officially called “a catechist”. A watered-down version of this is still practised in Roman Catholicism and in orthodox churches in Ghana. An even more watered-down version is done today in some modern churches as “new converts” classes.

Hear what Alan Kreider says.

“Many catechists saw that instructing the catechumens in the teaching of Jesus was central to their catechesis”. (pp 157, Patient Ferment of the Early Church)

And where will the “teachings of Jesus” be found? Not in the book of Exodus, nor in 1st Kings? It will be found recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. Now it doesn’t mean that they didn’t teach any other books of the Bible, it just meant that they focused a lot more on what Jesus taught. The Old Testament was taught as background to show how Jesus’s teaching was different, while the rest of the New Testament was used to give examples of how Jesus’s commands in the Gospels were practicalized. The Gospels were the centre of their teaching because they knew the Bible was capable of being twisted to teach anything you desire if you don’t home in on Jesus. They knew very well the story of the Pharisees.

This practice produced Christians who mainly focused on being like Jesus. Of course, there will always be a minority who struggled, but that is normal for any human institution. Christlikeness was the goal, right from the word go, and the leaders of the early church tried their best to get that message across right at the door, or you were free to leave and continue life as a pagan. They were not in a hurry for numbers, yet the church grew rapidly because their lives (not just their beliefs) were so radically different and yet attractive.

But in the 4th century, the Roman emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian (no kidding, he refused to attend catechesis and decided to teach himself the bible – you see where this is going?), and at least the persecution of the church stopped. The leaders of the church were so happy that Christians were no longer the hated class of the Roman world and began to change the teaching of the church to accommodate the empire’s ways of doing things. What better place to find “laws” and “rules” that work for an empire that dominates the world through violence, than to do away with Jesus’s commands on the love of neighbour and enemy alike and to begin to focus more on Moses, David, Joshua and Solomon – great leaders and kings of Israel – with the excuse that “all of it was Scripture” after all.

In the 5th century, St Augustine, an African bishop, called on the empire to use violence to attack not another empire/state/country, but fellow Christians who were teaching heresy. Yes, the Donatists were teaching falsehood, but is that the way of Jesus? Did Jesus kill his enemies? Because the church now had state backing, it began settling disputes amongst itself not by talking with one another or maybe just shunning heretics but asking the state to capture and kill heretics. Of course, by this action the church had lost the ability to question emperors when they go to war and began to find biblical passages from anywhere but from Jesus, to support the empire’s wars and violence. The church had the power now, why jaw-jaw, when it could war-war? It was a numbers game, and the official church was winning.

All this ingrained the habit of not obeying Jesus’s commands but finding whatever passage suits one’s agenda in the bible to do whatever one desired, so far as one claimed to be “Christian”.

Over centuries, this led to so many excesses in the church, and Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin led a Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, which led to a break from the Roman Catholic church. And when some of those who were part of that resistance pointed out to these Reformation leaders that they were not obeying Jesus’ commands, what did they get? Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk followed in the examples of his mentor from 1000 years earlier, and like St Augustine, asked the German state to capture and kill those who questioned him, who are today called the Radical Reformation. Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin also perpetrated some of this same violence, forgetting again that it’s not about “knowledge of Scripture” as Jesus told the Pharisees, it’s about following Jesus’s example. But alas, it was a numbers game, and the Radical Reformers were small fry.

Today, we are children of the revivalists of 18th century America, who were so gripped with angst about Jesus’s immediate return and the fact so many people would be condemned to hell if Jesus returned. They prioritized raising money and exerting their lives and organizing mass “crusades” and “tent gatherings” to preach to thousands and “win souls” in preparation for Jesus’s second coming. But again, following Jesus’s commands was not really a priority. It was a numbers game.

In Ghana, our churches, whether Roman Catholic, traditionally Protestant or Penteco-Charismatic, might be doing their best, but too many of us don’t realize the water we are swimming in is already contaminated. The desire for numbers (and the power that comes from it) means that even when a local church pastor is interested in Christlikeness, the system they are operating in is interested in numbers. Even a pastor’s local congregation measures him by numbers. And since Jesus’ commands are not really amenable to building large numbers, the Great Omission will always be preferred to the Great Commission.

But building with the Great Omission instead of the Great Commission has its consequences, and I’ll leave us with the words of perhaps the most faithful builder of God’s church – Paul the apostle.

“If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.” (1 Cor 3:12-13).

top view of loyalty lettering made of wooden cubes on blue backg

Why Entrepreneurial Christianity Needs Loyalty Teaching To Grow

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It has been a long time coming, and finally, it has arrived in the general public. Reports of abuse of pastors and former bishops of Lighthouse Church have surfaced on TheFourthEstate, and Ghanaian Christendom has been divided on whether to castigate or to defend the church. Many Ghanaian Christians fail to do the hard work of detecting patterns and analyzing church structures to discern if their own churches are susceptible to the same abuses. Perhaps now is the time for me to write about a pattern I discerned a long-time ago about Charismatic Christianity in Ghana, a pattern that should tell many of us busily castigating or defending Lighthouse and Dag Heward-Mills, that maybe this was bound to happen anyways, and is sooner or later going to happen in our own Charismatic church (if it hasn’t already).

Charismatic Church Founders as Entrepreneurs

Their goal is to create a product that people are willing to pay money for. Once the product is launched and money is coming in, they have the starting blocks of a successful business.

Many Charismatic churches in Ghana are run on a lot of the principles of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur is someone who sets up a business, taking on financial risks in hopes of profit down the line. I’m an entrepreneur myself involved in technology and real estate, so I know how this works.

Entrepreneurship typically begins with having a business idea. The idea may be novel or one that is already known, but the founder feels they can add their own twist to satisfy a target market, and in the process make gains from it. To bring this idea to fruition, an entrepreneur invests their own money and/or raises money from investors and begins the task of trying to bring their idea to market.

Their goal is to create a product that people are willing to pay money for. Once the product is launched and money is coming in, they have the starting blocks of a successful business.

In the case of founders of Charismatic churches, their equivalent of a business idea is “a call from God into ministry”. This “call” cannot be questioned, as nobody was there when God “called” them. In an overly religious country like Ghana, saying you have been “called into the ministry” is all you need to get going. Now the product that they develop is a church. It’s a tried and tested formula, and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to offer that product. Ghanaians are already very religious, so it’s easy to get family and friends to join the startup church as initial customers of the product. The founder then goes about enticing already existing Christians from other churches or “winning souls” – the religious terminology for bringing in new unexposed customers to the product.

Typical of entrepreneurship, the seed funding comes from sacrifices of the founder: their money, their time and effort, are spent with the belief that all will be repaid in leaps and bounds as the church grows bigger. The initial product offering consists of finding a meeting place (called “the church”) which may be paid for via rent or via someone gifting a space, finding a good source of already familiar gospel music, giving a sermon that meets some existential (and especially financial) need of the customers (members), and the collection of revenue (tithes, general and special offerings). 

After the starting blocks have been built then comes the seed stage, and this tends to be the stage where there is much intimacy in the church. Do not be fooled though if you are in the church at this rosy stage. It is still the Charismatic founder’s church. And just like a business entrepreneur, a typical Charismatic church founder’s sacrifices are done with the assumption of profit down the line – profit that is typically labelled “God’s blessings” manifested in material wealth. So, the “intimacy” of the setting is not really the goal: it is simply a means to an end. Growth is where the money is, and to do that, certain approaches are required.

All this while, the founder lives with one insecurity – the fear that another “founder”, whether a long-established one or a new entrepreneur like him – will snatch away his members. Because at this stage there is only one church, this tends to be easy to manage. But this fear and insecurity never goes away

Now to ensure that the product has a sense of permanence, the final block that is needed to complete this seed stage is the acquisition of land and the building of a physical structure with all sorts of fancy names – tabernacle, temple, sanctuary or church. Apparently, the God who created heaven and earth needs a place to live, a place where he can be commanded to meet the customers’ needs. If this part of the product is not yet done, the product is still deficient and hasn’t truly arrived.  

All this while, the founder lives with one insecurity – the fear that another “founder”, whether a long-established one or a new entrepreneur like him – will snatch away his members. Because at this stage there is only one church, this tends to be easy to manage. But this fear and insecurity never goes away, as we will discover below. 

How Charismatic Church Founders Grow Their Churches

In almost all religious circles (not just Charismatics circles alone), success is measured by the ABCs (Attendance, Buildings & Cash). And so, for the founder to feel his business – religiously labelled “his ministry” – is growing, he needs to see an increase in these ABCs. The product is the church, so it needs to multiply into different areas. And they have a religious justification for this – more church members/customers for the product means more “souls” are being won for God. This MUST be pleasing to God. Who cares if the souls are hungry, are homeless or are the best bribe-takers in their offices? So far as the ABCs are on an upward trajectory, it is a sign that God is “blessing the ministry”. 

For a private business founder, it is very clear who the business belongs to – the shareholders. If the business founder believes he needs to grow the business, he simply raises funds (from revenue he has made, a bank loan, from a shareholder or an additional investor), hires additional people and tasks them with selling the product in the new markets he wants to move to. However, the Charismatic founder starts off their initial church creating the impression that this church is “our church”, aka it’s something that he and his “customers” own. This is where the difference begins to emerge between a normal entrepreneur and a church founder. In a private business, the founder (or majority shareholder) can take whatever decisions they feel will bring more money to the business without asking his customers. He is only accountable to shareholders. In the church, the founder cannot be seen to be taking unilateral decisions, since his customers perceive themselves to have a share in this business. So, religious language is deployed to justify a need to expand as part of a drive to “save more souls”. 

Unlike a private business, Charismatic founders cannot simply hire and fire a new pastor to handle the expansion. They need someone they can “trust”, someone who will not attempt to “steal” their church from them. They need someone loyal to the founder’s “ministry”. This fear of treachery exists obviously because this happens to many churches all the time – a pastor is appointed to lead a new branch, and in the eyes of the founder, he “led the people astray”. The reasons why this happens are myriad, and I have no intention of discussing them here. One of the cardinal tools by which many founders (and many other established churches) use to avoid this occurrence is the practice of transfers – a practice the church inherited from the world. Don’t be fooled by all the justifications that churches give for this practice. Transfers are a tool of control.

One of the cardinal tools by which many founders (and many other established churches) use to avoid this occurrence is the practice of transfers – a practice the church inherited from the world. Don’t be fooled by all the justifications that churches give for this practice. Transfers are a tool of control.

Enter the False Teaching of Loyalty

And so, to protect the “ministry” of this entrepreneurial founder from being “derailed by the devil” (in the form of junior pastors stealing churches away), there has always been in existence in many Charismatic churches, teachings in one form or another about loyalty to the “mother ministry” – something that is not needed if this were simply a normal business with a clear founder/CEO who can hire and fire. This stealing away of followers is just stealing away from the founder’s empire they call their “ministry”, but it’s typically couched as being “unfaithful” to God. 

However, nobody has done a better job of clearly making codified teachings out of this than Dag Heward-Mills, the founder of Lighthouse Chapel International, now renamed United Denominations Originating from the Lighthouse Group of Churches (UDOLGC). And he makes it explicit why he codified this teaching in his book “Loyalty and Disloyalty”. If you want a brilliant study in twisting scripture to support empire-building, there is no better book.

So, let’s take a few passages from the horses’ own mouth. Unfortunately, my copy doesn’t have page numbers properly showing, so bear with me for specifying only chapters.

Sadly, by the 2nd page of Chapter 1, the deception begins.

“An inexperienced person would think that a friendly brother would make a good pastor. He may also think that someone with good oratory skills would make the best preacher. Do not make that mistake. The Bible teaches us that the cardinal requirement for leadership is faithfulness and not anything else. “it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful (1 Cor 4:2)” (Chapter 1- Loyalty & Disloyalty)

The question to be asked here is who is Paul referring to when he talks about faithfulness? Is it about being found faithful to Jesus or Dag’s ministry? If you are doubting which one Dag is referring to, hold on to your horses.

“Because of this, anyone who wants to extend his ministry and bear much fruit has to learn to work with many other people. These people are the team that I’m talking

about. However, it would be better to work alone than with a team of disloyal, disgruntled, disunited and dis-affected people.” (Chapter 1- Loyalty & Disloyalty)

So, there’s the answer. It’s about Dag’s ministry (or any other entrepreneurial Charismatic founder’s ministry, for that matter).

As I mentioned before, an entrepreneurial Charismatic founder (and other misguided Christians) measures himself by the size of his church network. And that is no more obvious than when he says this.

“If we want to have a large church, we need to minister with love and with oneness. If we cannot be one, let’s stop pretending. You see, I encourage people to walk out of my church if their hearts are not with me. “He that is not with me is against me.” Matthew 12:30” (Chapter 1- Loyalty & Disloyalty)

Not only does he tell us clearly that the name of the game is “having a large church”, but that he also requires that his pastor’s hearts must be “with him” – not with Jesus. Worst of all, Dag Heward-Mills equates himself to Jesus by repeating the same words as Jesus did, words that apply only to Jesus, not to any human on earth. He is the Son of God, the one to whom all power and authority have been given. He is the only one to whom loyalty is owed, and every other human who demands it is in danger of idolatry.

Loyalty, Every Dictator’s Favorite Word

I cannot count the number of world dictators who have commanded loyalty. And I don’t begrudge them. Loyalty is the way dictators ensure the longevity of their empires, although every empire in the world collapses at some point.

But for Christian leaders to be demanding loyalty? That smacks of idolatry. No scratch that. That IS idolatry.

Loyalty, whether demanded by autocratic politicians and businessmen or Christian leaders always leads to the same thing – abuse. The abuse may not always be widespread, so don’t be surprised if others under such leaders claim they have never experienced it. Many under such leaders will have imbibed this loyalty teaching so deeply that it takes an extremely negative event happening to them before they wake up to the reality of such abuse. Many in the good books of such leaders either do nothing when they see abuse or actively participate in its perpetration, having already religiously justified their behaviour.

Perhaps, this “system” has forgotten that even Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray him, and yet he kept him in his company till the end. And yet mere mortals like Dag and his company of entrepreneurs need – no scratch that – crave loyalty to them, brazenly twisting scripture to pretend that this is about the kingdom of God.

So, I’m not surprised by these reports of abuse. I have personal friends who have shared with me their own experiences of abuse not just from Lighthouse, but from many other Ghanaian churches, whether they explicitly or implicitly teach loyalty. I’m also not surprised by the PR campaigns to save face as well. The system is always more important than the people it hurts, so defence is more important than introspection. Perhaps, this “system” has forgotten that even Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray him, and yet he kept him in his company till the end. And yet mere mortals like Dag and his company of entrepreneurs need – no scratch that – crave loyalty to them, brazenly twisting scripture to pretend that this is about the kingdom of God.

And So What?

Because of how religion and power can so easily blind, there is a reason why the historic, faithful Christian tradition has always emphasized humility and submission to one another, instead of loyalty. In fact, I struggle to find the word “loyalty” in my NIV translation – the word is always faithfulness, and it ALWAYS refers to faithfulness to Jesus and his mission, never to a Christian leader. Humility and submission to one another is the New Testament’s way because humans are broken people, and when elevated to a pedestal, they will hurt fellow humans. Wherever humility and submission to one another are lacking, people will tread over others in pursuit of a leader’s empire agenda. 

Wherever humility and submission to one another are lacking, people will tread over others in pursuit of a leader’s empire agenda. 

And it is in this spirit that one who wants to centre their faith on Jesus – the one who is God incarnate and who shows us what God’s own character is – needs to pay attention, not to books about loyalty but Jesus’s own words. 

“Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—  just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:25-28)

No matter how “gifted”, no matter how “qualified”, no matter how “called”, no matter how “blessed” a supposed founder or pastor is – it is actually quite easy to see whether his “ministry” is really about Jesus or themselves. 

First, how do they treat those whom they claim are in ministry with them – no matter the levels of maturity or years of service. Do they treat them (not just in words) as co-workers, even the youngest of them, or are they their underlings: to be lorded over, just like “the Gentiles lord it over them” in the name of fulfilling the founder/pastor’s “ministry”? One easy way to discern this is to listen to their “junior pastors” or ordinary church members speak about their founder/pastor. Do they speak of him/her as a co-labourer or as one who “exercises authority” over them?

Secondly, how do they treat their perceived “enemies”, or people who hurt their supposed ministry? Do they curse them, – paradoxically in the name of the one who says to bless our enemies? Or do they forgive them and look forward to a time when they might even work together for the good of the kingdom of God?

Beware therefore that Ghanaian Christianity is made up of many demigods building their entrepreneurial empires, and (despite what it says on the label), many of these church empires have little to do with Jesus and everything to do with religious entrepreneurship. 

Why Some African Christians Love their Scandalized Preachers

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It baffles many people, both Christians, and skeptics alike. A “pastor” is in the news for having acted in a way that would normally have brought disgrace to them or their church. And most of the time, this pastor is male. 

It might be accusations of sexual escapades with many women in the church, they may have been accused of swindling some people of their monies, or of being verbally or physically abusive towards someone. They may even be accused of dabbling in occult/voodoo. But none of these accusations is ever really able to dissuade their church members from abandoning them. In fact, in most cases their church members will rally around these leaders, castigating anyone who dares to repeat the alleged offense of their leader. And 99% of the time, these leaders don’t even bother to apologize or take steps to rectify the wrong they’ve done. They simply go on leading their congregations and empires they have built, brushing off the allegations as if they never existed, even in cases where it has been proven that they actually did commit whatever they are accused of. I could give countless examples of each of these, from the beloved “men of God” that middle-to-upper-class Ghanaian Christians love, to the multitudes who target the “ordinary” lower-class in the populace. But that will digress from the goal of this article because I’m trying to diagnose the problem, not point at the culprits.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve met people who are skeptical of Christianity wondering if Christianity is just a religion for fools, as these skeptics wonder why these faithful cannot see that they are being hoodwinked. But alas what critics and baffled Christians do not understand is that these “pastors” fill a very important role in the worldview of what a critic might call a “fool”, and until one understands that worldview, there will be no end to the critic’s amazement. And don’t be deceived – it doesn’t matter whether this African worshipper has a Ph.D. or has no formal education. So far as they grew up in Africa, this is the worldview that is bequeathed to them. They may be living in UK, US, Germany, or Accra. In the diaspora, it usually takes the 2nd and 3rd generations before this worldview changes. In Ghana, one who questions this worldview is deemed an ignoramus, a spiritual baby, or worse – the devil himself. 

So, with the pleasantries out of the way, let’s delve into 4 of the underlying pillars of the typical African worldview that make false preachers thrive even when exposed.

A Strong Belief in The Gods

Yes, I meant gods, not God. And it doesn’t matter whether one grew up in a Christian/Muslim/traditional African or non-religious home. Because even when many Africans are talking about the God of the Bible, they actually have a god in their mind that is closer to the traditional African conceptions of God than they realize, something I explain here. Our language is saturated with mentions of god. We believe so much that the gods have our destiny in their hands and are capable of directing it as they please. Hence our “success” i.e. material wealth and health – is determined by how we are able to steer the attention of the gods in a direction favorable to us. How to attain this attention is the ever-enduring plight of the African religious person.

A Complex Relationship with The Extended Family

Even though there is a gradual reduction of the hold of the extended family on the average African, they still retain a very strong influence. Just take a look at the role they play in the typical rites of passage of most Africans, and you’ll see why. Extended families demand their pound of flesh when it comes to weddings, baby naming ceremonies, and funerals, and extricating oneself from its claws in such events is anathema. On an ideal day, this shouldn’t be a problem. However, there is the constant frustration (which continues to increase with each generation) that our extended families fail in supporting us in attaining “success”, but demand to be respected and cajoled when we need them, or easily demand resources from us as they wish. I used to think this was a modern complaint, but listening to the lyrics of the likes of Pat Thomas (Me Wo Akoma), Wulomei (Mebusuafuor) and a host of other popular highlife musicians of long ago expressing this frustration tells me that this is a very deep-seated frustration. While many upper-middle-class Christians in Ghana might be able to overcome this overreach by the extended family in their lives, it has a suffocating effect for the less well-endowed.

There Is an Enemy Under Every Stone.

It is hard enough trying to figure out the will of the gods so one can succeed while navigating the overreach of extended family. It is made worse by the belief that not everyone you meet in your day to day life means you well. Many Africans have a morbid fear of the “enemy”, which is typically someone who is supposedly close to you. Hence the famous Akan proverb “Aboa bi be kawoa, na efri wontoma mu” – to wit the animal that bites must already be in your cloth/dress.  

African movies have contributed in no small way to magnifying this fear, with all sorts of dubious special effects applied to show how close “friends” plot wickedness via the use of “black magic” against a person’s success, mostly out of envy.

Now, these enemies may not be found just amongst friends and colleagues at work, in the marketplace, in one’s neighborhood, or even in the church. The extended family is a veritable source of enmity, as the constant attendances to weddings, naming ceremonies, and funerals mean that some family members get exposed to the growing “success” of other family members, and hence go about plotting a PhD – a “pull him down” operation. This means that many Ghanaians either find ways to avoid some family events or are extremely cautious to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Again, Dr Paa Bobo’s Ofie Mponi comes to the rescue.

This fear of the enemy has a very strong place not just in modern popular music from the likes of Shatta Wale to Stonebwoy, but it resonates strongly in that of supposedly Ghanaian “gospel” music. Exhibit A is Joyce Blessing. 

One Needs the Right Intermediary to Overcome

It is this unholy alliance of unreachable gods with their mysterious “destinies” for us, demanding external families and “the enemy from within” that forms the fertile ground for the fervent need for the religious intermediary. This intermediary is the one who can move the gods in the favor of the seeker so they can overcome and become “successful”. Knowing this deep-seated need that exists amongst Africans, many modern-day pastors now fill in the void, advertising themselves as the one with the right “technique” to get one’s needs met. Coupled with the fact that the general perception brought on by European colonialist Christianity was that to be “enlightened” (in Twi it’s called “eni bue”) was to no longer appeal to the “gods” of traditional religions but to look to the white man’s God, all one needs to do is to constantly find Bible verses to support one’s shenanigans, and voila, the “Christian pastor” is born.

And this, therefore, is the primary reason why many Ghanaian Christians follow their pastors. They have very little interest in studying the Bible deeply. They mostly neglect the formal study of theology, calling it “the wisdom of men”. In churches that support formal study, the theology studied is of very little actual use in discipling the church. It’s mostly a means to promotion in the church hierarchy. Some of the more elitist ones call themselves “Dr” or append “PhD” to their names to increase their appeal to their more educated membership but their PhDs are either honorary or do not come from any properly accredited institutions.

The more the ability of such intermediaries to perform “miracles” the better. A large percentage of time in church is devoted to testimonies, to create more trust in the preacher man’s spiritual credentials. It is not abnormal to hear language about the “pastor’s god”, suggesting that he is the one who is more in touch with the Biblical God, while other preachers may rather be invoking false gods. 

In addition, there is an inordinate amount of attention paid to prayer sessions which may or may not be led by them but are sanctioned by them, as this is taught as the primary means by which the religious African may get god to “alter their destiny” in a way that pleases the seeker. This explains the abundance of churches with “Prayer Ministries” in their names, with some calling themselves “Prayer Armies”. It is also why many churches have all sorts of special all-day prayer sessions open to anybody (whether church members or not) to come and pray for their own “breakthrough”. The names evoke their purpose – “Jericho Hour”, “Solution Center”, “Breakthrough Hour” etc. Basically, the religious intermediary’s goal is to create the “enabling environment” for you to petition God for your own needs. 

Scandal is of Little Consequence

As a result of the 4 pillars above, a scandal involving such men of God is really just a fly to be swatted away. The so-called “man of God” is needed because he is the means to overcome these three-pronged problems of unknown destiny, extended family overreach, and enemies within. The continuous “success” of such men of God keeps hope alive amongst congregants that they will have success someday. As a result, they cannot fathom why such a “man of God” being caught stealing money or abusing people has anything to do with their personal success. They are not following this “man of God” because he models Jesus for them to follow. They are members of his church because he claims to have the keys to unlock their hidden potential and to overcome the enemies of their progress. To such people, charisma is more important than character. The end justifies the means. They want personal results, and they’ll get it, so far as they are not the ones directly affected by the misbehavior of these “men of God”. It is only “haters” who refuse to see the genius of their “man of God”. 

The baffled critic needs to understand this about the typical African religionist – religion is a means to their personal ends. The personal moral choices of their chosen religious intermediary have precious little to do with those personal ends, unless they themselves are the victim. Once the religious intermediary can still show themselves to be in touch with the gods, the show must go on.

While many of us may feel frustrated with such preachers and their shenanigans, perhaps we should pay more attention to what kind of people our worldview produces, and how that fits perfectly with the kind of leaders we have, religious or not. After all, they say that oftentimes we deserve the kind of leaders we get.

Conclusion

One of the enduring legacies of Christianity on the African continent is that it simply moved the allegiance of many Africans from their traditional African gods to a god that looked more modern – the god of the white man. That god may be dressed in Roman Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal or Charismatic clothes, but nothing much changed about our expectations of that God. In this respect, popular African Christianity’s enduring failure is to disciple church members to realize that the god represented in Jesus Christ is a God who uses the right behavior – God’s own example shown us in Jesus the Messiah – to achieve his goals.

In this failure, perhaps we have forgotten the words of Jesus Christ himself.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and, in your name, perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Mt 7:21-23).

Indecision

False Teaching and Conspiracy Theories – The Perfect Bedfellows

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Many have died, and until a solution is found on a global scale to deal with this pandemic, many more deaths are bound to be recorded. There is uncertainty. Jobs have been lost; incomes devastated; money is harder to come by. Families are going hungry, and a passenger sitting next to you in trotro who dares to cough receives a very suspicious glare. These are the days of Covid-19. The question on almost everybody’s mind is “why Covid-19”? Why now? Why this generation? Maybe even “why me?”, as you ponder it’s impact on you personally and/or your family. It is only human to seek answers, to seek for explanations and most importantly, to feel in control of your own destiny in times of uncertainty.

Therefore, it is only human to seek to tap into these fears to portray oneself as the one with answers, the one who knows the secrets of the times. And no such people are experts at this than religious folks. Which is why our so-called “prophets”, “men of God”, “bishops” and “archbishops” are falling over each other to promote one theory or the other about the Covid-19 pandemic and what is driving it. Not only does this posturing betray their ignorance of history of the world in general and that of the faith they claim to be representatives of, but it exposes them for who they are – men deluded by their desire for power and control than by anything else. And so, we will look at some of the typical tactics adopted by power-hungry religious leaders as compared to leaders seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.

But before we talk about these tactics, let’s discern the 1 motivation behind these tactics.

Preachers of Comfort, Not Suffering

Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the hallmarks of false teaching has been the tendency to preach messages that make Christians seem invincible to suffering, especially if they exhibit the right levels of something religious – be it “faith” or “confession”, repentance, church attendance, giving, prayer etc. Their focus is on the individual’s own self-preservation and advancement, instead of what Jesus clearly laid down for us with his own life – suffering for one another’s advancement.

 

Instead of what Peter said – “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21), their preaching can be summed up as “Christ suffered for you, so that if you exercise the right level of religiosity, you will not suffer”.

 

However if Jesus left us example that we should “follow in his steps”, then caring for one another – enduring some suffering for the sake of not just a fellow Christian but all of humanity – just as God cared for and therefore died for us is at the center of what it means to be a Christian.

 

This denial of suffering (not just any kind of suffering but self-sacrifice for one another) is at the heart of almost every form of heresy that the church has known for its 2000-year history. This motivation is what then informs the following tactics deployed by such confused leaders.

Make Their Members Believe this is Unprecedented

The first thing such confused leaders engage in is to make Christians believe that such epidemics and pandemics have never happened before. They do this by pretending that Christianity only began when they (or their favorite past Christian leader) began practicing Christianity. This is easy for them to do, because 99% of the time even before this pandemic, they never preached about church history and the fact that Christianity is 2000 years old, blissfully ignoring the fact their church today is just a blip on the map of the Christian spectrum.

 

But if they were not so ignorant of history, they would know that the early Church faced its fair share of pandemics, most popular of which was named after a leader of the church in the 3rd century – Cyprian of Carthage. No, Cyprian didn’t cause the pandemic, neither did he curse the Roman empire with it. The Plague of Cyprian is named after him because he lived through it and documented it. But more significantly, his leadership during this period when the Roman empire was crumbling makes naming it after him even more appropriate. To that leadership, we will return later.

 

Many more epidemics and pandemics have followed the church beyond Cyprian’s plague, such as the Bubonic Plague of the 16th century, right in the middle of the Protestant Reformation, and yet the church continues to this day.

 

But if that pandemic was too far in history for today’s “men of God” to be aware of, I would have at least expected them to be aware and learn from the most recent one in world history – the Spanish Flu of 1918. But alas, if Christianity began with the founding of the churches of these “bishops” and “men of God”, perhaps their ignorance can be excused.

Divert Attention from their Failed Teaching

Having preached comfort for so long, any self-aware follower of such preachers would immediately ask questions about what these preachers have been preaching. Why has the “devourer” devoured my job, when I expected God to protect my job because I have been paying my tithes religiously? Why has my father (or another beloved family member) died from Covid-19 or it’s complications, when I exercised faith and prayed profusely for healing? Doesn’t God “know his own” anymore? Why has God allowed this Covid-19 to bring my business to its knees, such that I can’t even feed my family 3 square meals a day?

 

In difficult times like these, preachers of comfort need a means to divert the attention of their followers from these questions, and so are quick to fall for the next most comforting thing – conspiracy theories and “end of days” prophecies. Cue the likes of Chris Oyakhilome and his love affair with 5G conspiracy theories or American evangelicals and their beloved “rapture” teachings fused with biblical misinterpretations around “666 and the mark of the beast” as exemplified by people like John Hagee.

 

Such preachers make you think that Christians have always been waiting for some beast to dish out some form of “666” mark, ignoring to tell their followers that this teaching misreading of the book of Revelation only began with the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, especially during World War I. Please note, for 1800 years of Christianity, most Christians didn’t give a hoot about an “Antichrist” or “the beast” or 666 and a coming end of age. Most Christians awaited Jesus’ second coming, and that was the end of the matter.

 

But when comfort Christianity fails, diversions are needed to keep church members from devouring their leadership, and so a new (or old) enemy will always be found. And most of the gullible flock are ever desirous to believe, instead of asking deep questions. After all, asking questions is equal to not having faith in these circles of Christianity.

 

Preserve the System, at the Cost of the People

And so, we come to one of the most glaring aspects of false teaching – a need to “keep the system going”, instead of pausing for reflection about the effects the pandemic is having on people. Such preachers care more about the opening of church for “normal service” than they care about the lives of people. They will present themselves as the people with “faith” who are not allowing a pandemic to tell them how to “worship their God”, and will label the wisdom of scientists as evil, in so far as it prevents their “system” from going on as usual.

 

And it is here that we look to the leadership of Cyprian of Carthage. When the Plague of Cyprian hit the Roman empires, the rich were abandoning the cities in their droves to their comfortable country homes, leaving the poor to suffer. And yet Cyprian the bishop encouraged Christians to stand their ground and rather care for the sick and dying. Whiles some of the Christians inevitably succumbed to the disease and died in the process, some also survived and became important in the care for the poor and sick in this pandemic. By this single act of leadership alone, Christianity grew massively after the pandemic subsided simply because the church, led by Cyprian and other such leaders, focused on meeting the actual needs of those affected by the pandemic, not blame games and diversionary tactics.

 

It is this kind of leadership that is required of our teachers in these times. Yes, today we have science, showing us how to avoid the coronavirus as well as ways to stop it’s spread, and we should heed that advice. But beyond that, livelihoods have been destroyed, businesses have collapsed, children are going hungry, and poverty is on the rise as a result of Covid-19. And this is happening to both churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike. We know better not to be in close contact with people without the proper precautions, but there’s so much more that can be done to help whiles the medical people do their bit.

What we Don’t Need

What we don’t need are sermons castigating people for lower church attendance and giving.

What we don’t need are 5G lies and deceit, or nonsense about “mark of the beast via vaccines”.

What we don’t need are pontifications about a coming “New World Order” or a coming “rapture”.

What we need are leaders who will remind us of that is important – what historic, faithful, and true Christianity has always focused on – the simple commands of Jesus Christ, especially his command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:37-20). We need leaders who will rally us around working to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on the lives of actual church members, and then beyond that, our neighbors in the public square.

In Ghana, the Covid-19 Private Sector Fund has been able to put together money to build an infectious diseases center. That is worth commending, but those are the kinds of initiatives that I can expect of private sector businessmen. Given the amounts of money that sit in the bank accounts of some of our church denominations, Ghanaian churches could easily have done this and more, especially if they put their heads together.

But I’m less worried about what we do at the national scale than I am what we do at the local church communities.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’” (Matt 25:35-36).

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels refuse to feed people because they didn’t “go to the synagogue or temple to worship on a Sabbath”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you are poor because you refused to pay tithes”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you lost your job because you didn’t have faith”?

Can our church leaders spend less time guilting us on coming to church and spend more time being obedient to Jesus – caring for actual real needs? Can we create structures that enable us to easily detect when people are “suffering in silence” in this pandemic?

Let us remember that we are not going to be judged by how well we knew 666, or how we quickly deciphered a New World Order via so called 5G or when “rapture” and “tribulation”. We will be judged by our deeds of love for fellow human beings, and that is the end of the matter.

The Ghanaian God vs Jesus as God

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In SimplyChrist we say that we are a Jesus-centered movement. Let us be upfront by saying that we are not the only Jesus-centered movement, church or organization in Ghana. But saying that we are “Jesus-centered” can seem redundant, as many Ghanaian Christians assume that they are centred on Jesus. In addition, when we say “the Ghanaian God” we don’t mean that this is how every Ghanaian – not to talk of every Christian Ghanaian – thinks of God. We are simply saying this is the dominant way that MOST Ghanaians who are Christians think about God. So, let us help people understand what we mean by Jesus-centered, and why the difference is important.

What Did Jesus Come to Do?
It starts with answering this question well. Now the default answer you will get from many Christians in Ghana is that “Jesus came to die to save us from our sins”. Whiles we at SimplyChrist do not dispute that forgiveness of sins is one of the benefits of Jesus’s coming, we don’t think that says all there is to say about why Jesus took on flesh and dwelt amongst men – what the historic orthodox Christianity calls “the incarnation”. So, in pitting what we believe to be the “Ghanaian conception of God” with Jesus, who is God in the flesh, I’ll like this comparison to be made around 1 provocative statement by an important thinker of our time. “Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God” – Father Richard Rohr. We do this comparison by asking 4 questions. There are more, but there’s only so much we can cover here.

What is the Nature of God?
What Jesus shows us – God is love. Not God is loving, or God is love and … (put in anything you want here). Jesus shows that at the core of what God is, God is eternal love. Which is why even though the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible, the only way that the leaders of the church could make sense of what the early disciples taught and wrote about God AFTER JESUS CAME (not before, but after) was to speak of God as subsisting in 3 persons, forever giving and sharing love with each other and yet existing as one. Almost everything about this comparison we are making here is hinged on understanding the depth of how different this way of thinking about God is. No religion before or after has centred its understanding of God in this way. Not even Judaism, the precursor to Christianity. Note, I didn’t start by saying “God is Trinity”. I said, “God is love”. It is the latter that explains the former.

What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God is a single, all-powerful being. Here the starting point is about how powerful and unique this god is over everything in the world.
Because the starting point is “power”, the God that results becomes increasingly unlike Jesus the more you pay attention, something that you will realize as we go along. Note that this is also the same view that most Hebrews of the Old Testament had about Yahweh, which is why the Old Testament is written the way it is. And while many of the nations that surrounded the Hebrew people believed in more than one god, they also tended to speak of their gods in the same “power” language. They just had more gods, whiles the Hebrew people largely believed in only one god. But the differences between their conceptions are very few. Now whiles Jesus does reveal God to be all-powerful, he dwells more on the love of God than on his power. It will become evident why he dwells less on God’s power as we go along.

Who are We Humans?
What Jesus shows us – The reason why the incarnation is so critical to understanding Jesus becomes evident at this point. God entered this world as a fully human being not just because he needed to die (which is the default answer I get when I talk to many Christians), but because the only way God can show us who we really are meant to be is to become one of us. All humans (no exceptions by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, social class, spirituality etc) are created as image-bearers – that is, we are God’s representatives on this earth, caring for it in the same loving way that Father, Son and Holy Spirit care for each other. We are not powerless robots whom God remotely controls, but neither are we free to come up with our own purpose of existence. And so, God becomes human to show us what he is like – a God defined by love, and what we are to be like – a people defined by love.

When we are acting in love towards one another and creation, we are allowing the Holy Spirit (the 3 rd person of the Trinity) to lead us according to the Model Human (Jesus the 2 nd person of the Trinity) to the pleasure of the Father (the 1 st person of the Trinity). Without this understanding of our human identity, we become slaves to sin and death. What the Ghanaian God shows us – The Ghanaian God reveals to us that humans are simply spiritual beings with a human body. We are here to seek the best opportunities for the advancement of our individual selves, and God is there to help us to achieve those self- made goals. These goals may be couched religiously – we need to build God a new house (despite the obvious fact that he doesn’t live in houses); or they may be social in nature – without God, my marriage will be a failure. To the Ghanaian God, humans define their purpose, and then find a God that will support that agenda (or a “powerful” preacher who says he knows how to get God to support that agenda). Our spiritual goal then is to seek a level of “spiritual holiness/faith/righteousness/you name it” that will enable us to get God to easily do what we want. What are the Limits of God’s Care?

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Jesus is Lord- Covid-19 Reflections

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The first 2 cases were reported on a Thursday, with the Ghanaian Health Minister delivering the news via a Facebook live address to Ghanaians. Three days later, the President of Ghana declared the borders closed and invoked constitutional powers that gave him the right to restrict people’s freedoms. A week later, he called for schools to be closed. In the coming weeks, a partial lockdown was announced, limiting movement out of the capital Accra and the second-largest city – Kumasi. In a matter of weeks – once parliament ratified the emergency powers requested by the President – Ghana transitioned from a democracy where everyone had rights to decide what to do and how to live, to a semi-authoritarian state where the President had the power to dictate where any of us could go, who we could visit, whether our children could go to school or not, even how many people could share a trotro, our favorite means of public transport.

One of the consequences of this transition was the deployment of security forces not just to enforce the lockdown, but to even arrest and submit to the legal system, people who flouted the regulations on lockdown. Quite a substantial amount of money has been accrued to the state via the fines that were realized from non-compliant citizens during this period. The President had made rules restricting our movements with regards to controlling and mapping out the spread of Covid-19, all for our own good. What was required from the citizenry was simple – obedience to the restrictions.

One of the frustrations I’ve had when I talk to people, especially Christians about the significance of the term “Jesus is Lord” has been the inability of a lot of people to connect with the reality of what that term means. But I believe the recent reality of Covid-19 and its management by the government of the day has given me another illustration by which I can communicate why the Lordship of Jesus was a living reality for many early Christians and should be for us as well.

Jesus is Lord – The Spiritualized Version

There are many ways in which people spiritualize this term. A few examples will suffice.

It is very common to hear, especially in response to someone expressing some difficult situation that they are facing, the phrase “It is well”, almost immediately followed by “Jesus is Lord”. To most folk Christians, “Jesus is Lord” is a synonym for another favorite term – “God is in control”. To such people, “Jesus is Lord” simply means that if the person experiencing this difficulty continuously expresses faith in Jesus, he will sail through this difficulty. The term “Jesus is Lord” then is just a balm that many folk Christians use to soothe life’s challenges.

Then there are those who are confused by the term “Lord” in this confession. Because translations of the Bible use the phrase “The Lord” in place of the divine name Yahweh – especially in the Old Testament – when some readers see “Jesus is Lord” in the New Testament, they automatically interpret it to mean “Jesus is God” aka that Jesus is divine. Whiles historic orthodox Christianity has always maintained that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity and therefore divine, this is not what Paul and other writers of the NT (New Testament)  mean when they say, “Jesus is Lord”.

These two very common go-to interpretations of this phrase have a devastating impact – the Jesus described above has very little impact on how many folk Christians live their day to day lives. But these interpretations couldn’t be further from the truth.

So, What Does it Mean Then?

One of the prooftexts that are often quoted during Christian evangelism sermons (more like tirades, if you ask me) is Romans 10:9

“If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Rom 10:9)

But have you ever stopped to ask yourself why Paul juxtaposes confessing “Jesus is Lord” with believing that God did raise him from the dead before on can be “saved”? Well, the key to understanding it lies in the same letter to the Roman church, for the very first verses of the letter set the tone for the rest of this wonderful letter. 

“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—  the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, (a)who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was (b) appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.  Through him, we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake.” (Rom 1:1-5, my emphasis)

There are 3 key points to pay attention to from Paul’s statements above. (a) By emphasizing on Jesus being a “descendant of David”, Paul was focusing on his humanity, and specifically as one coming from the royal house of David. (b) Paul goes on to say that by God resurrecting Jesus from the dead, God had confirmed that Jesus was indeed “Son of God” (again, a royal title meaning the chosen king by the “gods”. Note that Augustus Caesar, the Roman emperor, was also called son of god, but for different reasons). 

This is why believing that God did indeed raise Jesus from the dead is central to our ability to confess him as “Lord”. But what is the point of that confession anyway? Is it just as we Ghanaians say in pidgin, a  “mouth mouth” thing that we just say so we get “saved”? Well, that brings me to the third point and the key reason for this article.

The one thing that the announcement of any new king leads to is for every sub-king and subject of the kingdom to do 1 thing – swear loyalty and obedience to him.

The importance of this perspective cannot be overstated. And the recent Covid-19 decisions and enforcement by our President Nana Akuffo-Addo should help cement the ’s understanding of what the phrase “Jesus is Lord” should mean to us as Christian Ghanaians. 

Just as the Ghanaian President is able to tell us to stay home and not travel, and we obey even though we have the personal independence to not do so, by calling ourselves followers of “Jesus the Lord”, we are obligating ourselves to first and foremost obedience. And not just obedience to anything written in the Bible, but obedience especially to Jesus’ own words and example, mostly captured by the Gospels.

And for Jesus, the most important command he gave to his disciples was as follows.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).

As people who claim to be Christians, how well are we doing against our first and foremost command? Because unlike the world’s kings and politicians who do one thing but tell us to do something else, Jesus is a king who puts his money where his mouth is. He loves his enemies even to death. So, when he says we should love our enemies, are we a people who are good at making excuses, or are we a people who do what the number one duty of a subject is – to obey their king?

Or because unlike our President Nana Akuffo Addo, Jesus doesn’t have a police force to run around and arrest us when we don’t love one another as even Christians (not to talk of loving our enemies), we perhaps think we are getting free lunch. Well, if that is the case, let me leave us with one more implication of the resurrection of “Jesus the Lord”

“For he [God] has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” (Act 17:31)

By the same resurrection from the dead that declares that “Jesus is Lord”, this king has been appointed by God to judge with justice (aka how we treat each other). Let us ensure that our justice to one another will be seen on that day.

How We (Simply Christ) Choose our Theological Mentors

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We at SimplyChrist get asked very often this question in one form or the other.

“How do you know that this teacher/theologian’s teaching is to be trusted? Why should I listen to these people you recommend over (or in addition to) my pastor?”

And so, this post sets out to answer that question. But before we go ahead, some clarifications are important.

Humans are Mimetic

We are human beings, and human beings are inherently mimetic. That is, we are designed to learn from each other. You are reading this because at some point in your life, someone taught you the alphabet of the English language, and others built on it until you developed the ability to read and understand things written in the English language. Because learning from others is inevitable, it is better to be intentional about how or from whom one learns, than to pretend that every form of knowledge is equal, or that you yourself (or your pastor) is the originator of one’s own thoughts or opinions. The real question Christians need to ask themselves is this.

“What are the criteria by which I choose to learn from one supposed Christian leader over the other”?

And so in this post, we will set about describing our criteria for learning from certain Christian teachers and scholars, and hopefully help you establish a good criteria for yourself when evaluating teachers, especially the myriad of pastors you will come across in your life as a Christian in Ghana.

1.    Their love for Jesus is obvious and central to their work.

It may sound obvious that everyone who “teaches the bible” has Jesus at the center of their teaching, but that can be far from the truth. And this doesn’t apply only to what many self-respecting Ghanaians might call “quack” preachers like the Obinims and the Obofours, but to more “regular” pastors that one might even respect.

You see, Jesus’s life and teaching is very demanding and uncomfortable if one takes him seriously. So, the further the church grew from its origins, the more Christians leaders explained away the difficulties of what Jesus teaches by appealing to other parts of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, to smoothen over the things he says. This then enables many Christians to live their own comfortable lives pursuing their own agenda, using Jesus as an enabler of their own ambition. Instead of teaching people to take up their crosses and follow Jesus, a lot of “Christian” teachers teach people that Jesus has taken up the cross, so they don’t have to.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are people who don’t attempt to dumb down the difficulty of being a follower of Jesus. And so in their teachings and books, one can see a relentless focus on Jesus and on the Gospels (Mathew, Mark, Luke & John), a deep understanding of the real-life difficulties that Jesus presented to his disciples then, and what he presents to us now. With this deep understanding of Jesus’s mission, they then expound on the rest of the New Testament, especially the letters of Paul. It is also with this same deep understanding of Jesus’s mission that they then do what the early Church did – read the Old Testament with a focus on discovering Jesus hidden in there, not a focus on “applying life principles” from there.

2.    They understand and communicate the complexity of the Bible.

The general tendency within Ghanaian Christianity is to teach the same level of faith to both Sunday School children as they do to an Adult’s service (save for the nice children’s pictures used to teach Sunday School Children).

There is a reason why a child is taught in Sunday school that God created the world in 6 literal days, and then as an adult they are then exposed to the difficulties that Genesis 1 poses when one reads it literalistically, especially when in that creation story, day and night were created before the Sun (how does one have day and night if we use light to mark off day and night?).

The Bible is not a rule book, nor a manufacturer’s manual, nor the “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”. It is not 1 single book, but a collection of books of different genre – poetry, wisdom, history, teaching (the word sometimes translated as “laws” or “traditions”), letters and visions/dreams. Each book therefore needs to be handled appropriately. The choice of which books appeared in this collection called the Bible involved humans, and each book has human input. All of this needs to be acknowledged, not ignored.

The teachers we recommend are people who are aware of these difficulties and teach an adult way to read the Bible to derive the maximum intention of it – as a guide that teaches us the way of righteousness.

3.    They love the church but are honest about its historical failures.

The church is the people whom Jesus has called to serve him by virtue of his empowerment of it through the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2. It is the means by which Jesus chooses to work out his kingdom goals in this world, despite all its grievous flaws. In Ghanaian Christianity however, Christian leaders generally are either ignorant of the history of the church, or do not even bother to teach church members any history beyond the formation of their own denominations. They pretend as if every other church before theirs or their contemporaries are some dead forms of faith, whiles they are the true church.

As a result, many Ghanaian Christians are ignorant of the deception, greed, violence, enslavement and outright mass murders that the church in its 2000 years of history has either condoned, or actively participated in. Whenever such Christians meet skeptics who bring up some of these atrocities that the church has historically participated, they get surprised and defensive.

The teachers and scholars we recommend don’t pretend these events of Christian history didn’t happen. They are not afraid to speak of these failures of the church, and how we may learn lessons from them. They understand that God has worked with broken institutions before with the people of Israel and is capable of doing so with our broken history. However, they will not settle for these failures, and continue to goad us on to the perfect way – the way of Jesus himself.

4.    They work towards Christian unity, and are not afraid of self-criticism

Because of our ignorance of history, many Christian leaders in Ghana do not take Jesus’s prayer for Christian unity in John 17 seriously at all. Whatever allows their denomination/church to look better in the eyes of their members is amplified, to the detriment of seeing one another as people laboring in the same field for the same master. In this pursuit then, even pointing out mistakes that one’s own church/denomination or church leaders may be making is deemed “disloyalty”, since it will affect the “brand” of such churches/denominations.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are however not so ignorant of history, especially the history of Christian division and its futility. Hence, they are not afraid to cross carpet to learn from other traditions different from their own church traditions. They may mostly be Protestant, but they are not afraid to integrate the best of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy or Pentecostalism into their teaching to foster unity between Christians of different traditions. In fact, these teachers are well respected across many denominations divides worldwide, not just in their own home countries or their own denominations. And when they feel their own church denominations have adopted flawed theology, they are not afraid to raise it, sometimes to the discomfort of some of their own denominational leaders. Their goal is not to become popular nor rich, nor to grow their own churches at the expense of others.

5.    They take Judaism seriously as the seedbed for Christianity

The ignorance of world history coupled with the lack of attention to the background and culture of the people of ancient Israel as well as 1st century Israel (Israel at the time of Jesus) means that many Ghanaian preachers seriously misinterpret the Bible. However, this ignorance is so deep-rooted that many do not even realize their flawed interpretations, even when they are genuine preachers who are only doing their best at teaching Christians from the Bible. Their teaching is full of repeated clichés, ripping Bible verses out of context to teach what they want to teach, not what the text actually meant to the original audience nor what it should mean to us in light of Jesus.

The teachers and scholars we recommend are aware of this flaw that has existed within Christianity for centuries since Christianity moved from a Jewish setting to a Gentile world that didn’t understand Jewish customs. They are careful to bring the best research that historians have done to their interpretations of the Bible, so that Christians understand, appreciate and respect Judaism better. In this way, they help us avoid the previous errors of either insulting and denigrating Judaism, or the dogged worship that some Christians give Jews due to our misunderstanding of Jesus’s mission

6.    They teach that the Spirit is at work in the world to shape disciples, not just heaven goers.

The general goal of Ghanaian evangelism is to “save souls” from going to hell, so they could go to heaven. This means that Ghanaian preachers generally do not pay attention to how Jesus has taught us to follow in his life and example, but how to avoid hell and go to heaven. And in response to the “prosperity gospel”, after saving souls, the next focus area for many Ghanaian churches (even those traditionally non-penteco-charismatic ones) has been on how to God to meet one’s needs by faith, or in modern parlance – “by fire by force”.

 

The teachers and scholars we recommend show the flaws of this thinking, reminding us that Jesus’s instruction was to “go make disciples” (a disciple being one who follows in the footsteps of their master) and not mere believers. Their teachings and writings center the Christian life on membership into a body of disciples (called local churches) who are learning to support each other in the difficult work of following in Jesus’s footsteps and bearing bodily witness to his kingdom. They remind Christians that the goal of Christianity is not for us to make it to heaven, but for heaven to be made manifest on the earth.

7.    They emphasize the human vocation to serve the world in the love that Jesus displayed.

Because of the previous limitations expressed above of much Ghanaian Christian teaching, Jesu’s statement that to “love our neighbor as ourselves” is the most important command of God’s commands is almost totally ignored. Typically, Ghanaian preachers have a very limited understanding of why God had to dwell amongst men as the divine and human Jesus, and what that means for us made in the image of such a God.

The teachers and scholars we recommend emphasize the human vocation bequeathed to us in Genesis 1 which is manifested in the incarnation of God through Jesus – that humans were created in the image of a loving, self-sacrificial God. As Jesus left his glory, took on human nature and endured the most shameful death that a 1st century Jew could experience – death by crucifixion – we see these teachers and preachers consistently emphasizing Paul the apostle’s admonition to “have the same mind” of self-sacrifice as Jesus as we go about the work of caring for creation and for one another.

 

8.    They articulate the importance of ethnic, racial and gender reconciliation in Jesus

Ghanaian Christianity has largely absorbed the patriarchal behavior that exists within Ghanaian culture into its modus operandi. Hence, not only is gender abuse rife within Ghanaian churches, but the Bible is freely employed as a means to “keep a woman in her place”. Added to this is continued domination and exclusion of each other on ethnic basis, with preachers openly perpetuating the ethnic biases that different Ghanaian ethnic groups have against each other.

The teachers and scholars that we recommend, being people who are aware of the history of harm that the church has done not just to people of African descent, but also to women, are careful to highlight ways in which Christianity has become slaves to the biases in our culture. They help us see the ways in which Jesus meant to and actually liberated the oppressed class from the clutches of those in power. They openly acknowledge ways in which the church failed to follow Jesus example, and are people well known for advocating for gender, ethnic and racial integration.

9.    They don’t pretend to be the source of previously unknown revelation.

It is the modus operandi of many Ghanaian preachers, especially those of the Penteco-Charismatic lineage, to style themselves as people who have received what they themselves call a “mandate” that is hidden to everyone else but revealed only to them. This allows them to propound their own interpretations of scripture and call for “loyalty” to their “mandate” or face ostracization if one attempts to question them. They therefore tend to appeal to “what they have done” and how large their followership is to shut down criticism.

The teachers and scholars we recommend to you are people who make no such claim. Their goal is to equip us to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” i.e. the church of old who died to preserve the faith for us to access today. Their goal is to point us to Jesus, and to remove the barriers of bad reading habits, ignorance of history, ignorance of context that prevent us from seeing the beauty of Jesus and living Christ-like lives.

10.   They have no time for conspiracy theories and are not afraid to name false teaching.

Because of the many deficiencies mentioned above within much of Ghanaian Christianity, it has proven very difficult for genuine Ghanaian preachers to be able to refute false teaching. They tend to take a “wait and see” attitude, being afraid to point out false teaching because they feel “unqualified” to do so. This then further leads them to be impotent in the face of misinformation, so-called “prophecies” and outright conspiracy theories.

The teachers and scholars we recommend to you, because of their depth of understanding of the kingdom of God and Jesus’s mission on the earth through years of study in world respected seminaries alongside leading faithful church communities, are able to quickly discern falsehood. This is due to the fact that a lot of the false teaching that we experience today is not new. 90% of the falsehoods that exist in the church today can be discerned simply by a knowledge of heresies that the church has fought in historical times before this day. The remaining 10% requires a combination of reflection on Jesus and his kingdom via scripture, coupled with the input of brothers and sisters in your church community who are faithfully following Jesus as led by the Holy Spirit.

So here are our best reasons. There are more, but they will likely be related to one or 2 of the above. We will encourage you to make sure you know the reasons you listen to your “teachers. You are welcome to use our guidelines for yourself, as it could save you a lifetime of confusion and hurt in this Ghanaian Christian landscape.

What is so sacred about sex? – Part 2

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This continues from part 1…..

In part one of this article, we discussed the sexual mood of our present culture and whether or not as human beings, we are the owners of our own bodies and minds. We ended on the note that if it is the case that we have been made or created by someone else for his own purposes, then surely we would have a lot more obligations than we would have if we only belonged to ourselves. But we also noted that, this is a big “IF” because some people do not believe (or at least they live as if they don’t believe) that there is any Being higher than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible. Is it reasonable to believe that an actual Being exists who is responsible for our existence and to whom we might be accountable to, regarding our sexual lives? If there is the possibility for such a Being to exist, why would he be interested in what we do with our bodies sexually?

For starters, let us be brutally honest with ourselves: everything in this world – from ourselves to the flowers to the stars to sea to animals etc – points to the fact that some sort of careful designing has gone into the creation of our world and of ourselves, doesn’t it? We often take it for granted that this physical world of ours is structured the way it is. But mathematically speaking, the probability of this world happening by a mindless random or unordered process is incredibly small. According to Astrophysicist Hugh Ross’ conservative calculation, the chance of a planet like ours existing in the universe is about 1 in a trillion billion billion (i.e. 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in 10 raised to the power 30).

 Scientists are discovering that had even a single feature of our universe been just a little bit different, the stars, galaxies and human life would not exist. Let us briefly look at a few amazing scientific discoveries before we go on. The distance from the earth to the sun is just right. Why? Even a small change of around 2% and all life would cease. If the earth was too near the sun, water would evaporate. If it was too far from the sun, its coldness level would not support life. In fact, even the rotation speed of the earth is just right; if it was too slow, the temperature differences between day and night would be too extreme, and if it was too fast the wind speeds would be catastrophic. Furthermore, if the ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces had differed by about one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion (i.e. 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000), then stars such as the Sun, which are capable of supporting life, could not exist. Do you see any picture emerging?

The delicate balance of the elements in our universe, to use the illustration of the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, is like the accuracy level that a marksman needs in order to hit a coin twenty billion light years away on the other side of the observable universe. [A light year is the speed travelled by light in one year. And light, by the way, has the fastest travelling speed in our universe]. In fact it has been noted by some researchers that the earth is placed precisely in a part of the universe that is congenial to scientific studies in cosmology, galactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics and geophysics. That is, if our earth had been positioned in a part of the universe with too much starlight, we could not have been able to see into deep space. There are more than 3000 galaxies in the observable universe, each containing millions to trillions of stars – many being bigger than the earth.

Further, Oxford mathematician John Lennox in his book, ‘God’s undertaker: has Science buried God?’, notes that the distinguished mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, admitted that his atheism was shaken profoundly when he discovered the degree of fine-tuning needed between the nuclear ground state energy levels in order for carbon to be formed either by a combination of three helium nuclei, or by a combination of nuclei of helium and beryllium. (And for the record, life cannot exist on earth without an abundant supply of carbon). Sir Hoyle’s discovery, according to Lennox, led him to remark that, “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology,” and that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.” Interesting isn’t it? And let us not forget the issue of the human DNA – the molecule containing coded instructions for the cells in the body. A group of scientists have recently estimated that the adult body contains about 37.2 trillion cells, each containing DNA. Each person’s complete DNA is unique; the exception being identical twins. The instructions are in what is called Genetic language and they are detailed, complex and specific. These instructions include for example, which cells should grow and when, which cells should die and when, which cells should make hair and what colour it should be.  If all this sounds too technical, then let me make it simple: the scientific discoveries are pointing in the direction where it is highly unlikely that an intelligent Being did not plan and execute the creation of this whole skilfully crafted universe, including human beings like us.

What is my point with all this information? It is this: if conditions in this universe, and the nature of our human bodies, are the way they are – so delicately precision-tuned – and if human beings like us posses the kind of intelligence we posses, even to study them, then it is very reasonable to (and unreasonable not to) suppose that a more intelligent Being, (1) is out there, (2) is the cause of our beings and (3) is interested in our lives. Now if we relate this thought to Mr. Lewis’ thoughts about moral duties (discussed in part one of this article), we can say with a fair degree of confidence that the whole of mankind must have a Landlord. Our bodies, strictly speaking, are not ours. Our Landlord is this Intelligent Being who created this world and everything in it. Religious folks simply call him, God. Since this God is the cause of our intricately designed bodies and existence, it is not mind-boggling that any “Dos and Don’ts” on how we use our bodies should come from him.

 

A Curious Worldview

 In his speech to the members of the city council of Athens, Paul the apostle of Christ tried to give them a new view of God, saying, “God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands.” (Acts 17:24 GNB) In a city so used to building alters and shrines for every imaginable god, this news was however unimaginable. But to the people in the city of Corinth (a city well-known for its immorality), who became believers in Jesus Christ, Paul wrote them a letter in which he explained to them the sacredness of their bodies: “…the body is not to be used for sexual immorality, but to serve the Lord, and the Lord provides for the body. God raised the Lord [i.e. Jesus] from death and will also raise us by his power. … Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory.” (1 Cor. 6: 13,14, 19,20 GNB). Dr Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher, appropriately explains that, “the Christian walks with God, not to God. We no longer go to the temple to worship. Rather we go with our temples to worship.” The body of a believer in Christ, rather than a church building, is the holy dwelling place of God and must be treated as “holy grounds.” Thus what this person wears, or touches, or says, or looks at or reads or listens to must uphold God’s holiness.

So much for the Christian “bodies”! What bearing does this worldview have on those who do not subscribe to it? The non-Christian is a prospective temple of God. God wants to live in this person. The Christian explanation for human existence in general is that God made us and not only that, but also that he made us all for himself (Col. 1:16) and he made us in such a way that only in union with him can our greatest good be had (John 10:10). Sin does not allow this to happen. But God became man in Jesus Christ, lived uprightly among us, identified with our human weaknesses, paid for our sins in his death and rose up and wants to live in us to empower us to live as we ought to. Like C. S. Lewis once observed, God invented us in a certain sense like how a man invents an engine. And when a car is made to run of gasoline, it would not run properly on anything else. In this same sense God made the “human machine,” as Lewis puts it, to run on himself.

The fuel we need in order to function the way he designed us is God himself and the food we need to keep our souls spiritually alive is God himself. We cannot expect to function properly on our own terms. Sexual fulfillment (a major hunger of our generation) with its proper joy, peace and security does not come through the pulling down of God’s boundaries. Without God at the centre of a sexual relationship, our much desired real and secure intimacy which we often believe can be found in sexual intercourse will prove elusive. Any person, Christian or not, who tries to outsmart God on this front will soon find that the last laugh is always God’s, not ours; restlessness, emptiness, meaninglessness, broken trust, guilt and shame will ultimately come resting at our door steps. There is definitely pleasure in sin but it is fleeting. Kenyan Christian Apologist, John Njoroge, insightfully says that, “Trying to meet our real needs without God is like trying to satisfy our thirst with salty water: the more we drink, the thirstier we become.  This is a sure path to various sorts of addictions.”

Even in our limited wisdom, we realize that playing our cherished game of football without any rules does not make it really enjoyable. So we have created rules, in all their imperfections. Even with the rules in place, some people hurt others and get hurt themselves; they offend and get offended during the course of the game. Can you imagine the unbridled chaos that would exist if there were no clear rules? In the same way, we are living in an increasing sexually chaotic culture today because we are desperately throwing off God’s moral restraints: husbands and wives are sleeping with people other than their spouses, young unmarried boys and girls are “training” themselves in the act of sex yet ironically the idea of marriage is appearing uncomfortable to them because of its widely acknowledged moral limitations. God has provided a framework within which sex can be properly enjoyed physically, emotionally and spiritually, and it is not outside marriage.

 In God’s scheme of things, according to Christian teachings, you do not need to be experienced in sex before marriage. This is because you have the whole of your married life to get to know your spouse’s body (God’s gift to you) as your bodies lock and your spirits mesh in sexual intercourse before God. With each encounter you get to know the body of your spouse even better to the glory of God. And here is the rich wisdom of the Christian faith (which may seem foolish on the face of it): Any person who genuinely relies on Jesus Christ before his marriage and also during his marriage will be given the grace and spiritual strength to stay the course of marriage should he find out that he has ended up with a sexually defective spouse. Tough to take in, I know, but I cannot make this truth any more appealing than it sounds right now in a time like ours. Marriage is not a selfish enterprise, where if you are not having a sexually exciting life everything else must come crushing down for everyone in it. Rather it is essentially a self-giving worship of God as you commit yourself exclusively to that one person, to love, to cherish and to seek the good of this person always.

 The Christian scriptures teach that all who trust in God will not be disappointed, ultimately. But break God’s precepts on sex (or on any other issue of life) and you can be sure that you will not only separate yourself from God and into a dark loneliness of the soul but you will also hurt yourself and others. Let us be clear: the idea that God is an unloving and unfeeling Judge up there who is simply watching down to see who has gone even slightly wrong so that he may swiftly punish him, is wrong. God wants to reconcile us back to himself. This is the Christian message to the world. God’s precepts in the Bible are intended to facilitate our happiness and not to stifle it. A parent sternly warns her child to steer clear of fire not because she wants to make the child miserable but because she wants to prevent the child from getting hurt or even dying. How can a child enjoy life when he is hurt or dead? If we separate ourselves spiritually from God (a spiritual death), through sin, how can we expect to receive God’s best? God knows the limits within which our best can be had. Stolen waters are not as sweet as we want to believe. Many people may look happy on the outside but on the inside they may be empty, restless, bitter and troubled because they have violated God in this area of sex.

Conclusion

We were made for God and if we spend ourselves in illegitimate pleasures, we will only come away broken and impoverished in our souls (and perhaps with physical scars too). No one enriches his soul by being sexually immoral. Rather we bankrupt ourselves spiritually; we feel the emptiness, restlessness of the soul, the guilt and shame of sin because we have divorced ourselves from God, who is our ultimate good. A more serious side to sexual immorality is that in the end, we must give account of our lives to the God. Some people realize this quicker than others but the important thing is that we are willing to take the necessary steps back to God through the path he has provided – faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. And to be clear, faith in Jesus Christ is not mere intellectual belief in Jesus as Lord but includes a willful commitment to live the whole of one’s life in reverence of him and his teachings. Christ offers forgiveness and rebirth even to the one who has wrecked himself or herself sexually yet is willing to repent. Are you a mess, sexually? Jesus gives hope and strength to those seeking to please God in their sexual lives.

The will of God. Credit: http://holyspiritrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-Will-Of-God.jpg

Finding the will of God

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If there is one thing that a lot Christians seem to be confused about, it is the question “what is the will of God?”. As a reflection of the times in which we live, this has been further honed into the individualized form “what is the will of God for me”, leading to variations such as “God will fulfill his purpose for my life” and so on and so forth. All of these then presuppose that there is a will of God for each person, and that if one lives one’s life according to God’s plan, then they will somehow discover this “will”. In fact the word “destiny” has now taken on a life of its own in some circles of Christianity to denote this concept, and pastors spend enormous amounts of preaching time trying to distill how to achieve this in their sermons.

However, we may need to pause and reflect deeper on what the New Testament actually says about the will of God before we run ahead of ourselves. This must be done in keeping with the important rule that Jesus must be the key to understanding God’s revelation of himself in scripture, it is important to first look at what Jesus himself had to say on the subject of “the will of God”.

Jesus

When Jesus came to the world, there was one thing he kept announcing – the Kingdom of God. Within the Gospels alone, there are 50 occurrences of the kingdom of God/Heaven metaphor, with Jesus continuously stressing that this kingdom that the 1st century Jews had been waiting for had somehow come through him. And so he set out what many scholars have called his “manifesto” in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matt 5:1-8:1, and in Luke 6. It is important to note that Matthew’s record links everything that Jesus said from Matt 5:1 all the way to 8:1 as part of that one sermon, and any serious student of the Bible needs to pay attention to this particularity. Although our modern bibles have nice chapter and verse divisions and sometimes headings for different “sections” of this sermon, Matthew says all this was said by Jesus at one sitting.

That being the case, it is important to note the following points

  1. Jesus seemed to be behaving like Moses, receiving a new Torah on the mountain and delivering it to his people.
  2. Jesus actually changed some of the provisions in the Torah, laying out a new way for those who will follow him. Compare what Jesus said in Mt 5:38-42 with what Moses wrote in Deut 19:21.
  3. Jesus was touching on 2 very important things in 1st century Judaism – election (who are the people of God, or the “blessed”) and Torah (what should be the way of life of these people). You will find all over the psalms who the people of ancient Israel called “blessed”(e.g. Ps 1, 16,32,112,119,128). Essentially this was anyone who was a descendant of Abraham or non-descendant who worships Yahweh, and who in addition followed Yahweh’s Torah given to Moses. Jesus turned this election around and said the poor, the peacemakers, the humble, those persecuted for his sake etc. who actually follow him are the “blessed” people, and gave his own Torah as to how they must live if they want to be part of his elect people.

In concluding his speech, Jesus ends with warnings related to all the things he had said. He warned about false prophets turning them away from what he has laid out, then warned that those who “do the will of God”, which he has laid down in this discourse, are those fit for the kingdom. He finally ended by saying those who take his words seriously are those who build on the rock, while those who don’t are those who build on the sand. Not only did he undermine the sacred Torah, he elevated his own words above it by using the formula “you have heard/Moses said” and “I say”.

It is no wonder then that when he finished this sermon of his, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching (Mt 7:28)”. Unlike the Pharisees and Scribes of their time, or pastors and teachers of our time, Jesus didn’t expound the Torah. Jesus actually created new laws and invalidated old ones, behaving more like Moses or like Yahweh himself.

All of this put together should lead us to realize that those who were listening to Jesus at the time would have gotten the following picture, which many rejected because it was contrary to what they knew about Yahweh:

  1. Jesus was not just behaving like a prophet, he was also behaving like God.
  2. Jesus was changing the rules as to who was in and who was out. Being a Jew by birth (or proselyte) and following the Torah was no longer enough.
  3. The will of God was to follow this messiah called Jesus, and not to just call him “Lord, Lord”.
  4. Following this will of God was going to lead to even more suffering than they were already under, and yet that was the way that this messiah required.
  5. This will of God required them to love their enemies even to the cost of our own lives, to care for the poor, sick and disadvantaged, to seek justice for the weak and be filled with mercy, to be faithful to their spouses till death or be celibate, to speak truth without abundance of swearing, to let their prayers be not long and flowery but to the point, to do their deeds of love without public display, to put away anger against their brethren and so on. To sum all this up, this will of God simply required them to follow this messiah’s words and ways, and to make him alone receive all the glory of everything they did in their lives.

The Epistles

This will is what Paul expounds in Col 1:15-23 in such terms of cosmic glory. God’s will was that “he [Jesus] is before all things, and in him all things hold together … so that in everything he will have the supremacy … For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (v 17-19 NIV). And so Paul says that Jesus will present his followers holy and blameless in his sight, if they “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard”(v 23 NRSV. The NIV says “continue in YOUR faith”, which falls too close to the trap of individualism for me. Conversely, as pointed out by Ben Witherington, the NRSV also gets Heb 12:2 wrong with “perfector of our faith”, whiles the 2011 NIV gets it right with “perfector of faith”. Sigh …). Here Paul sounds the same warning as Jesus – don’t call him “Lord, Lord” and yet not follow him, but continue to be faithful to him.

We see Paul again reminding the Ephesians that they were saved, so they can serve.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—  not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph 2:8-10)

Every other place where the Epistles refer to the will of God is to be understood and framed in what Jesus himself has laid down as “the will of God” – following Jesus, and serving others even at the peril of our own lives.

Conclusion

The will of God is that his followers reject the ways of this world and the world’s unwillingness to submit to Jesus in obedience. The will of God is that his kingdom of justice, peace, mercy and compassion, love and care for one another will be made known to the world through the church, Jesus’ community of followers (Eph 3:10-11). The will of God is that men may see that there is a different way that society can exist, and that to find that way is to find the Anointed One who showed that way by giving himself up for us, and to join the people who are living life that way.

There is no separate “will of God” specially created for you different from what God has already defined “before the foundation of the earth” (Eph 1:4;2 Tim 1:9;1 Pe 1:20). God has no special “purpose for your life” other than that you follow Jesus. There is no “divine destiny” for you other than following the messiah, and working for his kingdom and with his manifesto.

If Christians thought this way, they would not be so easily swayed by all the winds of deception and confusion blowing about. They would not need the multitude of conferences and “divine encounters” that are being sold to them everyday. They won’t be worried about consulting “prophets” about whether to marry Kofi or Kwame, or the other important decisions we make in life. We won’t be worried about whether a decision about our lives is “in the will of God”, simply because it will all be reduced to a simple matter of whether it will enable one to continue to be faithful in following Jesus with one’s brethren or not.

If Christians thought this way, they will be less worried about themselves, and more worried about their neighbour. Because the kingdom of God is about what you are doing for others as Jesus did, not how you are grabbing for yourself. And what was it that Jesus said about neighbours?

What is so sacred about sex? – Part 1  

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In the Saturday, May 6, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ columnist Dr. Clayton Clay wrote an attention-grabbing article titled, “Pornography and a young mind.” In the article he recounted a problem a single mother told him she was facing concerning her five-year old son.  The young boy got an erection whenever his mother touched him to either give him a bath or dress him up. Initially doctors had told the woman that it was normal for boys his age to wake up in the morning with an erection. But apparently this boy’s case was more than that. Anytime he saw what he thought was sexually exciting, he got aroused like nobody’s business, and this included his mother’s touch.

 

The woman said that on one occasion she saw her son pick up a pillow and simulate sex in reaction to a love scene on, Promise, a soap opera on TV. She said she gave him a good beating for this behaviour which she considered immoral. Sometime later the woman received a report from the boy’s Day Care centre that he was caught inserting his fingers into the genitals of a girl in his class. The mystery of this boy’s puzzling behaviour was unravelled for the mother when she took the boy to his father’s house, where he often spent his holidays. The mother discovered a pile of pornographic videos and magazines in the bedroom of her estranged husband. Apparently, these materials were what  had so decimated the innocence of this young mind that he now could not help but associate the female body, even his mother’s, with the delights of sex.

 

In a subsequent article in the May 13, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ Dr. Clay reprinted a letter from a 51 year old man who confessed that, “I am always thinking about sex.” The man stated that he had two wives and also two sex mates. “I call them two sex mates because that really is what they are. I am more than able to satisfy all four women. As if that is not enough, I visit prostitutes as well.” he wrote. The details were simply stunning, for he seemed to be pushing the meaning of the word “Addiction” to new heights. He confessed, “I admire women with broad hips and big buttocks and I carry with me memories of such women anytime I see them into the secrecy of the toilet, bathroom or bedroom, work myself into imagination and enjoy myself.” He had been in the habit for 36 years. “… I cannot imagine masturbating at the age of 80. But in all probability that is what is going to happen,” he said helplessly. He also confessed that he had tried to stop this habit through repeated New Year’s resolutions but all had failed.

 

Further, somewhere in 2011, I listened to a woman being interviewed on one of our local radio stations about her sexual life. She was a well-to-do widow who was in a primarily sexual relationship with a far younger man who provided her with what she needed sexually. She in turn took very good care of this young man’s financial needs. Asked whether she feared if the young man would one day leave her when he found a younger woman around his age, the woman said she was aware of that prospect but in the mean time the young man was providing her with what she wanted.  She sounded very casual about the whole story.

 A panoramic view

The above stories may seem strange to some, but the signals from some research studies seem to suggest that we are either on the verge of or already in a sexual revolution. A study published in the International Family Planning Perspectives Journal, in 2003 on ‘Reproductive Health Risk and Protective Factors Among Unmarried Youth in Ghana,’ which used a nationally representative sample of 3,739 unmarried 12–24-year-olds, found  41% of female and 36% of male youth reporting that they had sexual experience. Four percent of these females and 11% of the males had had more than one sexual partner in the three months before the survey. In another study published in the same journal that year on ‘Sexual Health Experiences of Adolescents’ in Takoradi, Sunyani and Tamale involving 704 never-married youth aged 12-24, it was found that 52% of the respondents had had sexual intercourse.  Further, the 2008 Ghana Demographic Health Survey (which interviewed 11,778 households) reported that 8% of young women and 4% of young men had their first sexual intercourse before the age of 15, while 44% of young women and 28% of young men had first sexual intercourse by age 18. Thirty-four percent of all never-married women aged 15-24 and 30% of never-married men aged 15- 24 had sexual intercourse in the 12 months preceding the survey.

 

In addition, just recently it was reported in the news that 15 school girls in the Akuapem South District of the Eastern Region, aged between 14 and 16 years underwent Jadelle method of family planning to protect them from unwanted pregnancies because they had made it clear that they could not abstain from pre-marital sex.

 

Our generation is one in which sex and sensuality are not big deals. Why wait till marriage when the movies, soap operas and the reality shows say it is alright to start now? We cannot imagine a pre-marital love relationship without sex. “Eeish, is such a thing even possible?” we wonder. Married folks seem to find it necessary to get someone to satisfy them sexually when their spouses are not within reach. Even the average joke today must have some allusions to sex. Sex is like a free drug to be dispensed to anyone ready for it, (and sometimes even to people who are not ready for it – the cases of abused women and children). Our culture’s sexual temperature is heading towards fever level. In his satirical poem on the modern western mindset, Steve Turner, wrote, “We believe in sex, before, during and after marriage.” This is much like the emerging popular culture in Ghana. We do not believe there should be any set limits on sex except those we impose on ourselves as individuals; we want to have sex, we want to watch others having sex, and we want to dress in sexually attractive ways in public. In public discourses we may affirm that such things as adultery, fornication and pornography are wrong but in private life we deny them.

 

Here is the simple truth: When our minds are not convinced about certain beliefs or values that we advocate, our lives would eventually reject them, and this is precisely what is happening in Ghana today. We are outgrowing the “taboo days”; we need reasonable and convincing reasons why we ought not to have sex with anyone, anywhere and at any time we want.

 

Many of us today live quietly with the belief that everything is alright so long as you do not hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt.  This belief is rapidly working itself out in our lives – for both non-religious and religious folks.  Today we have an expression like “two consenting adults” as if to suggest that so long as there is agreement about the sexual act among two adults, there can be nothing morally wrong with it. We have no moral right to describe a particular sexual act as immoral since the definition now rests with the “two consenting adults.” We play with words now. The weight of words like “adultery” and “fornication,” for instance, have been reduced to mere “cheating.” Thus in an “open relationship” it cannot be said that you have cheated when you have slept with another person. The moral rightness or wrongness of the sexual act is no longer defined in the act itself but rather by the agreement or absence of agreement between any two people – married or not. Everyone else must mind their own business.

 Putting things into perspective

 While a case against such subjective attitude to sexual morality can be made from a social point of view, I think it ultimately cannot hold without a stronger foundation for our sexual moral obligations.  Consider the following thought which I borrow from the former Cambridge University professor and also Atheist-turned-Christian, C. S. Lewis: Let us picture a man on a ship among a convoy of ships on the sea. Now, if this man thinks or says about something he wants to do with his ship, “it is not wrong because it doesn’t hurt anyone else”, he understands well enough that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, yet he honestly believes that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a world of difference whether this man’s ship is actually his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether we are indeed the owners or the landlords of our minds and bodies or simply tenants who are responsible to the real landlord? This question is intended to force us to make absolutely sure that our bodies have not been “given” to us by someone else, before we start living to please ourselves. If it is the case that someone else made us for his own purposes, then it is quite certain that we would have a number of duties, which we should otherwise not have if we only belonged to ourselves. But of course, for some, this is a big “IF” because they do not believe (or at least they live as if they do not believe) that there is any higher Being than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible.

….Part 2