Founder of the New African Concept, Dr. Joshua Oppong-Sarfo, has urged churches and Christian leaders to actively participate in matters of governance in order to bring about the needed societal changes.
Speaking at the opening day of the 2023 edition of the Church of Pentecost’s All Ministers Conference on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, Dr. Oppong-Sarfo said limiting missionary work to only evangelism would only succeed in winning souls for the church but not righting the numerous wrongs on the continent.
“It is time for the church to deploy political missionaries. We have for so long deployed evangelical missionaries, and they must be maintained, and we need more of that; but can we go beyond that?”
“Political missionaries are people we have groomed. People whose hearts and passions are in matters of politics They may not have the pulpits to preach, but their pulpits are Parliament, where they can enact laws that will bring the flavour of heaven onto the earth,” he said.
He charged the Christian Church to go beyond social services to social action based on the moral values it has imbibed over time. He reasoned that social services don’t solve the ills of society but only provide temporary relief. However, social action, according to him, serves to uproot the societal vices themselves.
Dr. Oppong-Sarfo called for “adjustments” to the concepts of “materialistic gospel” and “Christian dualism”, which attempt to separate the sacred and secular lives of Christians.
“The essence of Christianity is not the happiness of man but the glory of God. When we design a theological framework that emphasizes needs and uses God as a commodity to receive things in order to solve personal needs, then there is a problem.”
“Sacred and secular [differentiation] is a western philosophy. To the Christian, all things are sacred. Every aspect of the life of the believer must be considered sacred”, he furthered.
The All Ministers Conference (AMC) is an initiative of the Church of Pentecost under the chairmanship of Apostle Eric Nyamekye.
The three-day event, which is underway at the Pentecost Convention Center at Gomoa-Fetteh in the Central Region, has brought together ministers of the gospel from several denominations under the theme “Moral Vision and National Development: The Role of the Church”.
