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11.03.2019 Feature Article

The Church Of Pentecost And Missions Work: A Peep Into Missions In The 21st Century

The Church Of Pentecost And Missions Work: A Peep Into Missions In The 21st Century
11.03.2019 LISTEN

Yesterday (March 10, 2019) marked the end of a weeklong missions’ week celebration of the Church of Pentecost (hereafter CoP). The Church, which was pioneered by Pastor James McKeown and his wife, Sophia McKeown, has become the largest Pentecostal denomination in Ghana. In West Africa, it places second to the Redeemed Christian Church, in demographic terms. As a mission-oriented Church, the CoP has transgressed national boundaries to establish missions in a hundred countries, encompassing Asia, Latin America, North America, and Europe. In Ghana, members of the church cumulatively constitute eight percent of Ghana’s population. Obviously, the CoP has made a mark in the field of mission. The growth of the CoP sustains the observation by Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Joel Carpenter, Kwame Bediako, and Ogbu Kalu the center of gravity of Christianity has made a progressive shift from the west to the so-called Third World countries.

The heartbeat of God is missions. God’s mission is to save the lost. He was the first missionary. When Adam and Eve succumbed to sin, it was God who first reached out to them. The first advent of Jesus Christ was missiological in motive, which He adequately fulfilled. In His farewell message to His disciples, He commanded them to go and evangelize to the world, while He reserved the verdict of conversion.

In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese blazed the trail for other European missionaries by coming to sub-Saharan Africa. In 1471, the Portuguese came to Elmina. Even so, it was in 1482 that they built their castle, which is now the biggest in Africa. When one of their leaders, Diogo de Azambuja, encountered Kwamina Ansah (whom they wrongly referred to Caramansa), the chief of Elmina, their plea was for him to convert to Christianity. While Kwamina Ansah read suspicion into the motive of the Portuguese, he grudgingly gave them a parcel of land to build their castle.

Mission work was, however, not successful until the nineteenth century when the missionaries reopened mission work in Gold Coast. By the nineteenth century, the missionaries had gone through the enlightenment in Europe. In view of that, their perspective was largely rationalistic, in terms of how they engaged in mission work. They dismissed the spiritual map of the people of the Gold Coast. Since there was no rigid distinction between the secular and sacred in the worldview of the people of the Gold Coast, as was the case in enlightened Western Europe, the missionaries condemned every facet of the culture of the people of the Gold Coast. This must be argued that the missionaries themselves overstepped their boundaries in terms of the clear instructions they had been given. In fact, we read from history that the missionaries had been told not to unduly interfere with the cultural practices of the people of the Gold Coast if those practices did not contravene the Christian faith. But the basic problem was that most of the missionaries (as the 1910 Conference in Edinburgh admitted) who were posted to Africa were not properly trained.

In the end, it was the involvement of the people of the Gold Coast and other Africans, who gave a boost to mission work. The itinerary preaching of William Wade Hade, Sampson Oppong, and John Swatson contributed to consolidating Christianity among the Akan in the Gold Coast. Later in 1917, Peter Anim, who formerly belonged to the Presbyterian Church, decided to engage with the new wave of Pentecostalism. His efforts were boosted by the presence of James McKeown who came to the Gold Coast in 1937. James McKeown and his wife, Sophia McKeown, worked tirelessly to establish the Church of Pentecost. In spite of the internal and external challenges, the CoP became officially independent from the general Apostolic Church on August 1, 1962.

Since 1962, CoP has become the largest Pentecostal movement in Ghana. One of the reasons for the exponential growth of the church is its ability to fuse aspects of the Ghanaian culture and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The capacity of McKeown to adapt and express malleability towards Akan culture was a mission strategic that helped the church to be foregrounded in Ghana. In response to why he was accommodative to Akan culture, he said as follows:

Despite all my years in West Africa and Northern Ireland, I have kept my Scottish speech and ways, as is the right of every man. I did not come to change the Africans from being African: I told them they should be proud of being African. … I taught them the Bible, got them to know Jesus and told them if God is giving children, He hasn’t to send to England for a noose to put on an African!

As we celebrate missions’ week, my concern is to peep into the future of mission work. The basic missiological question is: what do we do with Jesus Christ in the twenty-first century world? Jesus Christ remains the fulcrum of the church. It is who He is (deity and humanity) and what He did (redemptive work) that gives a solid foundation to the Christian faith. Even so, since the secularization of knowledge in the seventeenth century, revelation as an undisputed source of theological knowledge has been jettisoned. Following the lead of Immanuel Kant and David Hume, humanism has become the canon against which knowledge (episteme) is measured. Reflecting the axiom of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”, reason has gradually dethroning revelation as a means of doing theology. Impliedly, the person and work of Jesus have been questioned.

From the rationalistic point of view, the world was bracketed out of the control of God. Bible narratives are considered as convenient myths, while miracles are summarily dismissed as archaic and obsolete in the modern world. The biggest blow to Christian mission was in the secularization of morality in the twentieth century (beginning in the 1960s). Morality and ethics became matters of subjective opinion. Absolutism as a framework of morality was ruled out. Morality is conceptualized as a matter of subjectivism. Individual subjectivism became the prism through which morality was measured. The Ghanaian variety of this type of relativism is, "one man's meat is another man's poison." In the effect, moral permissivism, which was championed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, has become the defining mark of the postmodern world.

Consequently, the twenty-first century world is struggling with nagging moral issues like homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, and human cloning. The challenge the CoP would have to deal with is how to navigate around these issues globally. The issue is quite glaring because the CoP is now in countries where some of these moral issues have been legalized. In some cases, they are framed as human rights issues, where pastors risk losing their licenses if they decide to openly critique these practices.

The other issue the CoP has to deal with is the strategy of missions. In the nineteenth century, the European missionaries did not do so well in winning more converts because their missiological strategy was deeply rationalistic, which condemned the spiritual mark of the people of the Gold Coast to the backwaters. In other words, they could not speak to the worldview of the people of the Gold Coast to make the Gospel culturally relevant.

What appears obvious is that the CoP appears to be struggling with a missiological strategy. The question that needs to be answered is: how will the church make the Gospel relevant to the non-Africans who have inclinations towards rationalism? The so-called reverse mission is not making much impact among non-Africans because most of the African churches in Western Europe and America are unable to appeal to the cultural sensitivities of the non-Africans. This is exemplified in the fact that most of the African churches in Europe and North America are filled by Africans. You hardly find Europeans in African churches in the West. This is not necessarily because the West has lost its Christian bearing, as it is about the failure of the African church to make the Gospel relevant to them.

As the Church of Pentecost celebrates missions’ week, I want to outline the following strategies for consideration:

  • First, the CoP should train its ministers to think logically, even as they think spiritually. It is not enough mustering spiritual matters. The church must be able to speak the language of the modern world, encased in logical and rationalistic thinking, without losing the fervor of the Gospel.

  • Second, the CoP must train missionaries how to respond convincingly to contentious moral issues like abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and human cloning.

  • Finally, the cell meetings and Bible teaching missions of the Church should be strengthened to get the youth rooted in the Gospel.

Since the Gospel of Jesus Christ is counterintuitive and counterculture, it is necessary for CoP to device ways of making the Gospel relevant to the rationalistic-bent non-African and traditional-atavism of Africans.

I pray that we all will be part of the wave to make the Gospel meaningful to the world, as we anticipate the second advent of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

May God graciously continue to build His church.
Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra

[1] Christine Leonard (1989). A Giant in Ghana. Chichester: New Wine Press, pp. 64-65

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