By Eric Appah Marfo
Accra, Feb. 21, GNA — The Reverend Professor J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, President of the Trinity Theological Seminary, has urged citizens and the political community to let their actions reflect the profession of their faith for Ghana’s growth.
He said they must hold themselves accountable regarding the expression of their faith in the public sphere by letting it count towards public good.
Rev. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu made the comments on Day One of a three-day J.B Danquah Memorial Lectures (Series 56), in Accra.
The Lecture was on the broad theme: “African Politics and the Mystical Realm: Religion and Governance in PostColonial Ghana.”
Rev. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu spoke on the subtitle: “Healing Our Politics: Travailing and Prevailing in Prayer for Supernatural Interventions in the Ghanaian Public Sphere.”
He said the ultimate objective of politics and governance was to build institutions, empower the citizenry and galvanize collective efforts towards the pursuit of social justice and human wellbeing.
Rev. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu said unfortunately, politics had become a source of human brokenness and desperate attempts to gain socioeconomic control over the weak and vulnerable had caused people to seek power by whatever means possible.
He said corruption was a monumental problem and had become “demonic not simply in the mystical sense but also in the monstrous nature of it.”
Rev. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu said in Ghana, Christianity seemed to be malfunctioning in several respects because it was being exploited to serve as mystical rather than prophetic purposes.
“We love to travail in prayer so that we may prevail in life but we also honour God with our lips and with our hearts far from Him. In the African and public phase of religion, we see the prayer, we see the fasting, we see the search for divine favour in decrees and declarations, we see the cursing of evil but the repentance and turning from wrong remains absent.”
“Prayer is important, and at the heart of prophetic Christianity, it is the bold and fearless confrontation of leaders on their record of governance, social justice, the use of resources and their personal moral records in terms of private and public behaviour,” he said.
He said the nation’s predicament had been worsened by those who prophesied from their own imagination and peddled the word of God for material gain.
Rev. Prof. Asamoah-Gyadu said prayer and fasting unaccompanied by heartfelt repentance and the resolve to challenge oneself on “the moral record of social injustices, ethnocentrisms, religious bigotry and homophobia, rampant and shameless corruption and laziness would only amount to exercises in futility.”
He warned that if Ghana failed to mend its ways, other nations would progress, leaving it to lag behind.
GNA