An epistle to the church in Africa: On surrogacy, divorce, marriage and remarriage

Across Africa and in African diaspora communities, the church still speaks with confidence on many issues. It can speak firmly about modesty, discipline, loyalty, and morality. It can mobilize its people quickly around doctrine, identity, and spiritual order. But on some of the most painful realities tearing apart families and quietly crushing believers, many churches remain hesitant, unclear, inconsistent, or silent.

That silence is no longer sustainable.
The church must now confront, openly and proactively, a set of deeply consequential issues that are reshaping family life and moral decision-making in our time: surrogacy and assisted reproduction, divorce and remarriage, and the conditions under which marriage itself is recognized, prepared for, and sustained. These are not side issues. They are not elite Western debates. They are pressing African realities. And the longer the church delays, the more damage it causes.

In many African societies, childlessness remains one of the deepest forms of private pain and public stigma. It can expose couples, especially women, to humiliation, suspicion, family pressure, and profound emotional suffering. For many believers, the conviction that children are a gift from God is both true and precious. But what happens when modern reproductive technologies enter that sacred space? What should the church say about IVF, donor eggs, donor sperm, embryo transfer, or surrogacy? Is every medical intervention a violation of divine order? Or can some forms of treatment be understood as legitimate means through which healing and parenthood are pursued?

Too many churches have no clear answers. Some avoid the issue entirely. Some condemn what they have not studied. Some offer private permission and public silence. In the vacuum, believers move ahead in secrecy, shame, and confusion. Vulnerable women can be exploited. Couples can be left spiritually wounded. Children born through these arrangements may later be forced into silence about their origins. That is not moral leadership. That is institutional neglect disguised as caution.

The same confusion surrounds divorce, often with far more devastating consequences. Many churches still treat divorce mainly as a theological embarrassment rather than a human emergency. They preach the sanctity of marriage, which they should. But too often they do so without equal seriousness about abuse, coercive control, serial adultery, addiction, abandonment, financial destruction, emotional violence, or the safety of children.

As a result, many people remain trapped in dangerous or degrading marriages because they fear that leaving will cost them not only their home, but also their standing before God and the church. Some are told to keep praying while their lives collapse. Some are urged to preserve appearances while suffering in silence. Some are judged more harshly for leaving a destructive marriage than their spouses are judged for destroying it.

This is not pastoral care. It is a failure of courage.

A church that has no clear, just, and compassionate doctrine on separation, divorce, abuse, and remarriage does not preserve holiness. It multiplies suffering. It burdens the wounded and protects the harmful. In some tragic cases, the consequences are irreversible. Families are not only broken. Lives are shattered.

Then there is marriage itself. Churches speak often about defending marriage. But many do not ask enough hard questions before marriages begin. They officiate weddings with great joy, yet sometimes with too little moral seriousness about compatibility, abuse history, hidden debt, family coercion, immigration motives, financial irresponsibility, fertility expectations, or psychological instability. They celebrate covenant while neglecting preparation.

And when couples raise difficult but practical questions, such as whether prenuptial agreements should ever be allowed, the church often responds with sentiment rather than thought. A prenup may indeed be misused as a signal of distrust. But in some cases it may protect children from prior relationships, clarify financial obligations, reduce later conflict, or shield a vulnerable spouse from future exploitation. The question is not whether the church should blindly baptize every legal instrument. The question is whether it is willing to think carefully and theologically about the real pressures people bring into marriage today.

What is most troubling is not simply that the church lacks consensus on these issues. It is that many churches seem far more energized by minor, symbolic, or performative concerns than by the family crises quietly destroying their members. In too many places, the church is preoccupied with external codes, secondary controversies, reputation management, and superficial markers of holiness while infertility, abuse, marital collapse, and relational trauma unfold behind closed doors.

This imbalance should alarm every serious pastor, theologian, and policymaker.

The church has faced morally disruptive issues before. History is not flattering on this point. Christian institutions have often been slow to confront major wrongs when those wrongs were socially accepted, culturally convenient, or institutionally uncomfortable. Whether in relation to slavery or other historical injustices, the church has sometimes needed hindsight to recognize that silence was not neutrality. Silence was complicity. Delay was not prudence. Delay was harm.

That lesson matters now.
A proactive church does not wait until scandals pile up, lives are ruined, and public trust is lost. It studies, teaches, discerns, and leads before confusion hardens into suffering. It provides doctrine before rumor does. It offers policy before panic does. It trains pastors before crises overwhelm them.

This is especially urgent in African Christianity, where the church remains one of the most influential institutions in family life, public morality, and social belonging. Its words carry weight. Its silence also carries weight. When it refuses to clarify its position, people do not stop making decisions. They simply make them alone, in fear, or under pressure from relatives, culture, and circumstance.

What is needed now is not reckless liberalization, nor harsh moral posturing. What is needed is disciplined seriousness. Denominations, seminaries, bishops, councils, and theological associations should urgently develop clear guidance on assisted reproduction, surrogacy, separation, divorce, remarriage, marriage preparation, and related questions of family ethics. Clergy should be trained to handle these matters consistently, biblically, and compassionately. Churches should create confidential support pathways for those facing infertility, abuse, or marital collapse. And African theologians should stop treating these issues as imported controversies and start addressing them as pressing realities already shaping the lives of their members.

The choice before the church is clear. It can continue to react late, speak vaguely, and wound people through inconsistency. Or it can lead with truth, courage, mercy, and moral clarity.

If the church could eventually confront great moral failures of the past, it can also confront the family ethics crises of the present. But only if it is willing to stop hiding behind silence and start doing the hard work of doctrine, policy, and pastoral care.

The families in our pews cannot wait.
Dr. Enoch Ofosu [[email protected]]