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 1^st 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 1^st 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.