Orthodox Churches and the Distortion of “Grace”

This is the first of a 2 part series of posts on the phenomenon of unbiblical understandings of “grace” that permeates Ghanaian Christianity.

Readers of my blog will notice that I have a problem with the way Ghanaian cultural Christianity uses the term “grace”. The hegemony that this term “grace” holds here (which I consider a distortion of what the bible actually means by the word “grace”) is encapsulated in the almost required response amongst cultural Christians to the simple greeting “How are you?”. If one answers with “by the grace of God I’m fine”, then one is considered a well brought-up Ghanaian Christian. If not, you might be required to bring your parents over for questioning on the kind of “upbringing” you were given.

But as I delve more into reading about the beliefs, culture and history of the Old Testament (a culture scholars refer to as the Ancient Near East i.e. ancient Israel and their Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Canaanite and Hittite neighbours), the greater the similarities I find between these beliefs and those of traditional and even modern Ghanaian culture. It has caused me to reflect a lot on things I have heard since I was old enough to process my culture around me, and increasingly I’m coming to a very important conclusion – long before the modern abuses of “grace” came along, our traditional orthodox churches failed to challenge the worldview of retributive justice that existed in our African cultures (and most other cultures worldwide), and that failure is coming back to bite us really hard in the ass in this modern, fast-paced, individualistic and pluralistic world. And for those reading this who may not be Ghanaian, in Ghana we use the term “orthodox churches” to refer not to either Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox churches, but rather to the churches founded by European missionary efforts i.e. the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, AME, Roman Catholic etc who dominated the landscape before the rise of Pentecostalism and its junior brother – Charismatism.

Now, let me explain myself.

Retributive Justice in the Old Testament

Scholars point out that in the Ancient Near Eastern world, many people believed the gods to be intricately involved in the affairs of men, especially in their fortunes or misfortunes. The right worship of the gods (aka righteousness) led to the receipt of blessings from them. Consequently, it was also assumed that misfortune was as a result of the anger of the god(s) due to a failure in worshiping the gods or doing their bidding, whether one knew what one’s failure was or not. Hence, scholars use the term “retributive justice” to mean the following beliefs .

The god(s) reward righteous behaviour with blessings of material prosperity.
The corollary was this – misfortune could only be explained as resulting from the anger of the god(s) at one’s personal or inherited “unrighteous” behaviour.

This belief was also dominant amongst the people of Israel as expressed towards Yahweh, and is reflected in the Old Testament. The Psalms are full of passages about the Lord blessing the righteous and punishing the wicked, and this whole post will be taken up with examples if I attempt to give them.

However, some authors within the Old Testament began to question Yahweh about why the wicked were rather being blessed instead of the righteous. Many Psalms (like Ps 94) question God for allowing the wicked to rather prosper, calling on him to punish them immediately. The author of Ps 73 consoles himself about Yahweh’s eventual punishment of the wicked in the long run, even if not immediately.

The book of Proverbs is especially guilty of preaching the “righteous will always be blessed” mantra, leading to the notion that one can only be blessed with material prosperity if God explicitly gives it to you. No actual effort of yours counts towards this.

“The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, without painful toil for it.” (Prov 10:22)

Thankfully, other wisdom books like the book of Job, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes were written to counter this simplistic thinking by the people of Israel. Sadly they seem to have made little impact in changing their minds about retributive justice, and even in the New Testament, Jesus’s disciples ask questions which reflect such thinking in John’s Gospel.

“His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’” (Jn 9:2)

Enter Traditional Ghanaian Determinism

Many Ghanaians, including many well educated pastors and church leaders, have a deterministic view of life, drenched in traditional African notions of destiny. Traditionally Ghanaians express a belief in their god(s) already determining their destiny (“hyebre” in the Twi language), with the notion that if one doesn’t stray from the path that has been laid out for you by the god(s) (by correctly and constantly worshipping the god(s) and obeying their commands), then one will reach this destiny – which most of the time is hoped to be a materially prosperous one. If one’s life is turning out to be difficult, the best one can do is to plead with their god(s) to “change their destiny” (“sesa me hyebre” in the Twi language), so that at some point in the near future, prosperity will be their portion. Because one is not in control of one’s destiny, it presupposes that one is at the mercy of one’s god(s). The choice to give you a “good” destiny is in the hands of the god(s), and therefore it is a gift to you if one receives a “good” destiny. The Twi term for being gifted something one doesn’t deserve (or isn’t in control of) is “adom”, and that is how the word “grace” in the bible is translated in Twi bibles – “adom”. Hence, if one is doing materially well, has bought a new car, has gotten married or is generally alive and not dead, one must acknowledge the god(s) for this by saying “eye Nyame Adom” i.e. “it is by God’s grace”. A well brought up Ghanaian, when commended for some good fortune, is expected to say “it is by grace oh, not my doing”. Hence, the Ghanaian cultural expectation of the response “I’m fine by God’s grace” to the simple question of “How are you?” .

Now, do you see where I’m going with this? Do you see the similarities between this way of traditional Ghanaian thinking and those of retributive justice as evident in some parts of the bible? And do you see how our European missionaries and their Ghanaian counterparts who took over from them have failed to see where they are reading the bible with Ghanaian cultural eyes and assuming that it lines up with their pre-existing beliefs, despite both Old and (especially) New Testament evidence to the contrary?

The Effects of this Syncretism

Because these Ancient Near Eastern beliefs reflected in especially the Old Testament are quite compatible with this traditional Ghanaian (and largely African) worldview, Christianity, despite all it’s positive achievements in Ghana, has also had a very dark side in the Ghanaian experience. Here are some of its effects.

It is very difficult to question the source of a church member’s riches in a Ghanaian church. Because the bible expresses God’s desire for righteous people to be materially prosperous, and because of passages like Prov 10:22 quoted above, it is assumed that God must have given the person these riches. Hence, God’s will has been confused with God’s causation.
Because God is assumed to have actively caused people to become materially rich, it is not surprising for people who have gained wealth through all sorts of nefarious and illegal means to be immediately elevated to positions of huge influence in our churches, and to be treated specially. This may not necessarily be due to an attempt to benefit from their riches, but an inherent assumption that this person must be a “righteous” person to be that “blessed” by God.
Given the above 2 effects, church leaders typically resign themselves to benefiting from such “blessed” people for the benefit that their wealth will bring to the church’s ABCs – attendance, buildings and cash. Afterall, God has already placed their “stamp” on such people, so who are they to ask questions but just to “tap into such blessings”.
Listening to Ghanaian gospel music, one can see how it has become saturated with “Eye Adom” (it’s by grace) and “Hyebre” (destiny) and “Nhyira” (material prosperity). These sound deceptively biblical, but are purely based on a traditional Ghanaian worldview than by the worldview defined by Jesus and especially the New Testament.
Traditionally, Western Christianity has been guilty of “spiritualizing” the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus says “Blessed are the poor” (Lk 6:20) instead of usual “blessed are the rich” of retributive justice, by a flawed interpretation of Matthew’s version “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt 5:3). By his declaration that “the kingdom of God is at hand”, Jesus turns the retributive justice principle on its head, urging the church communities to take active steps in elevating the poor from their status, which one sees in the book of Acts and the life of the New Testament and early church. However, “Blessed are the poor” taken literally, sounds totally against every fibre within the bone of our traditional Ghanaian “God must bless me” worldview.
These deterministic beliefs undermine the need for hardwork. Despite all our lip service about the importance of hard work, we preach and act as if hard work isn’t necessary to material prosperity. Using passages like Prov 10:22, we keep our people in church for so many hours, engaged in myriads of “church programmes” because that is the means by which we show our “righteousness”. Coupled with giving to the church, this is preached as the means by which God will “bless” us. Given that 70% of Ghanaians are Christians, is it surprising that we as a nation remain poor?
Ghanaian Christians live with a very huge cognitive dissonance. Despite all their “good worship” of God, our nation continues to wallow in poverty. We keep quoting the portions of scripture that tell us that being righteous will lead to us being materially prosperous, whiles the Japanese, Chinese, Indians etc who largely don’t even care about Christianity are living much better lives in terms of material prosperity than we do, and are giving us loans and grants. Confront church leaders with this, and they’ll give you some flimsy reasons, just like the people of the OT when it comes to why the wicked prosper.

The Seeds Have Always Been There

The only reason why our “orthodox” Christian churches were a bit reserved in their endorsement of materialism (as compared to the modern Charismatic movement and it’s love affair with Word of Faith teachings) was because they had a much larger focus on saving souls from hell to heaven. Now that the seeds of syncretism that they planted regarding an incorrect view of divine determinism and “grace” are being taken advantage of by these prosperity preachers, leading to a loss of church membership, our “orthodox churches” are beginning to sound more and more like their Word of Faith counterparts.

In the next post, I will explain how the Ghanaian Charismatic church (which has largely imbibed Word of Faith teaching so much it’s difficult to find a non-WOF Charismatic church in Ghana) is hammering the word “grace” out of all proportion in the pursuit of material wealth.

Of Theologies, Songs and Mantras

Last Sunday at our meeting, we found ourselves questioning another song that we Ghanaian Christians sing and take for granted every day, and also reflects a general trend which we believe is worrying. The song is recorded below, with its English translation alongside it. Please forgive my translation if it’s not too exact, but I think we all get the drift of this song.

Ye beyi Yesu aye (We will Praise Jesus)

Wo odo a odi ado yen (For the love he has for us)

W’ama ade pa akye yen biom (For he has made us wake up in health again)

Ye beyi n’aye daa (We will praise him forever).

Our beef was with that third passage which talked about Jesus waking us up in good health (or something to that effect). I know most people have not given much thought to that sentence in the song, but I believe it reflects the general malaise that has eaten into the Christian message and witness in our times, especially in the Ghanaian context. So please stick with me a while and you’ll get the point I’m driving at.

Thinking Globally

There are 7 billion citizens of this world. The Indians hold 1 billion of that, and the Chinese close to 1.5 billion. Statistically then, these 2 countries alone constitute 28% of the world’s population. Yet the majority of these people are either Hindu or Buddhist in one form or the other. In fact according to Wikipedia, 82% of Indians are Hindu, so that makes that 820 million Hindus in India alone. And these are people who may have not even heard about Jesus Christ, or may have but don’t believe in him. And yet, China’s economy is the fastest growing economy in the world, and we in Africa are importing their products by droves. India is coming along just nicely after China economically. I have not even begun to talk about the Buddhists/Hindus outside of Asia, much more the abundance of Muslims all over the world.

All of these huge masses of people have something in common – the live and breathe and have their being as Paul put it, but it’s not because they believe in Jesus Christ. It’s simply because God has allowed it to be so.

Marriage

The Indians, with all their Hinduism, have the lowest divorce rates in the world. Contrast that to America with all its “Christianity”, where according to the pollster George Bana, 50% of specifically Christian marriages (not American marriages in general) have led to divorce. Again, this figure is not general American marriages, but Christian American marriages. And yet we kid ourselves with the notion that “If Jesus is in our marriages, they will be successful”. Of course, nobody actually stops to think that the standards that Jesus sets for our marriages are far higher than those of the general public. Jesus himself is not the guarantee of a successful marriage – learning to live a life of love, respect, humility and self-sacrifice for one another in marriage is the guarantee, and Jesus gave no other standards.

Wealth

The wealthiest people of this world are not Christians. And I don’t mean people who have Christian names or believe in the existence of God (we seem to confuse a belief in God with a belief in Jesus), neither do I mean Jews. I mean people who believe in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the savior of the world and who are part of a community of saints, spending their time and lives with them. It is universally self-evident that if a Christian wants to be the most prosperous man in the world, he probably is in the wrong religion. Just go make your money and spend it, and forget about being a Christian. Alternatively start up a church, and find ways to justify collecting money from the members in the name of “God blessing a cheerful giver” and “doing God’s work”. Obviously not all of us Christians can be “pastors”, so this wealth is even segregated. Hmm, remind me if we are still running a priesthood of all believers.

Long Life

The oldest living human beings in the Guinness book of records are not in Christian dominated countries, but in Asia, specifically Japan. Yet most Japanese are either Buddhist or Shintoist. Again, both the Bible and science have shown us the keys to long life. When we are busy NOT living a healthy life, but rather damaging ourselves and expecting God to miraculously give us good health, we have none to blame but ourselves. And even when through no fault of ours we are struck down by disease and are not healed by God, we do not see how our sickness may be a means to an end, and either point fingers claiming “you don’t have faith”, “there is sin in your life” or some other judgmental mantra.

In Short

Afterall God gives everybody life, and takes as he pleases. The bible says God supplies rain to both the good and the wicked as well. Waking up to a good day has got nothing to do with believing in Jesus Christ. The 820 million Indian Hindus woke up this morning, and some of them have 1 million dollar weddings to attend this weekend, if my Indian friend Himanshu’s statements are anything to go by. Being wealthy has got nothing to do with believing in Jesus. In spite of our plenty Christianity, we are borrowing a paltry 3 billion from the Chinese with plenty political hoopla and I don’t need to remind you what they believe in.

Surprised By Hope, Ignited by His Kingdom

And so I wonder why we do not sing and shout about what makes us unique in this world. I wonder why we sing “God has been good”; when it should be “God is good”. Was there ever a time when God was not good, or are we only talking about when times were good for us? Has our theology become so warped that we uncritically accept any song labeled “Christian/gospel”? I wonder why our “Double Doubles” and confused gospels are all about how me and my family have woken up to good health, how God is going to “change my destiny” (wonder where that is in the bible?), how what God has said about my life he will fulfill (when He has said all He will say about his church already, and we are only part of that communal vision), how God is going to “butter my bread” and “sugar my koko”, giving me double houses and double cars? What about the days when we wake up with malaria and can’t go to church on Sunday? Or when because of persecution, our brother is killed for their faith in Jesus (as is happening in Asia & Middle East)? Can we still sing “W’ama ade pa akye yen biom” sincerely? Can we still sing “Your house na double double” when by no fault of ours the house we’ve sweated to build is burnt down in a fire? Or is it because we’ve believed Jesus Christ because of what we think we will get from him in this material world, and not his mission for us on this earth?

Because if that weren’t the case, our songs will be more about Jesus and his call to us as a people to be the expression of his nature – a nature of love. Our songs will express eternal truths about his coming to die to bring us cleansing and salvation. Our songs will galvanize us to build his kingdom on this earth, through love and devotion to one another, and through a dedication to see the destitute, hopeless and lost feel and see that the coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ “go be keke”. Our songs will reflect that joy is found in Christ and his community, even when the world is pressing us on every side. Our mantras will be about how through our faith in Christ we are able to galvanize our resources towards meeting our own needs, as well as those less fortunate around us; that we are the bearers of good news, bringing hope to both the rich and the poor, the lonely and the famous; that there is something unique about us as a people of Jesus, something that neither sword, nor persecution nor riches nor poverty can take away from us.

Let us leave the songs about daily bread to them that have not the hope of Jesus, and let our songs tell what kind of people we are that the rest of the world isn’t. If not, let’s stop kidding ourselves, become Japanese so we may live long, marry an Indian so we have blissful marriages and become American Wall Street brokers, so we can become wealthy.

In the end, we changed the words from “W’ama adepa akye yen” to “W’aba be wu agye yenkwa” (He has died to bring us salvation). So don’t be surprised if you hear me sing it differently then.

We have a kingdom to build, and we cannot waste time.

Vicit Angus Noster Eum Sequamur – Our Lamb has Conquered, Him Let us Follow

Of Double Doubles, and Confused Gospels

As I grow in life and grow in Christ, it seems that I keep rediscovering the Jesus I believe in. And I’m more excited each day discovering his wondrous worth as the risen Messiah, the one spoken of by Israel’s prophets of old. However, when I turn round to what I see and hear of we who follow him, my heart sometimes fills with such sorrow. And one of those instances is when I heard the words of the “gospel” song “Double Double”, because nothing can be farther from the truth when it comes to the reality of what the New Testament determines to be God’s blessings.

The Background to the NT & Jesus’ Times

I strongly believe that one of the problems of Christian teaching and teachers down the centuries is a very severe ignorance of the background and times that Jesus and his apostles lived in, and this ignorance allows us to continuously misappropriate scripture to our own purposes, ignoring totally the theme that drives the use of certain words in the NT. We don’t realize that Jesus’ work is part of a narrative of historical events in which Jesus participated as a very important figure, and in which we are participating after he has left. We therefore just pick out as we please, and the resulting Christianity we get tends not be pretty, to say the least. Let us examine some of these backgrounds, and then we’ll look at what we mean when we talk about God’s blessing vis-à-vis the Christian in the NT. For those interested in details, delving into “New Testament History” by FF Bruce, “New Testament History” by Ben Witherington III and other NT historians will be helpful.

About 400 years before Jesus birth, Israel had just returned from exile. Whiles in exile, they’d been encouraged by the words of prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel to continue to be faithful to God and that they will see God’s faithfulness to his covenant to Abraham when they are delivered. This deliverance finally came through the Persian king Cyrus who allowed the likes of Ezra and Nehemiah to return and rebuild the Jewish nation. It is believed that it is within this period of exile that institutions like the synagogues sprang up because they did not have a temple like in Jerusalem to concentrate their worship around anymore. When they returned, they were led by their leader Zerubabbel to build a new temple in Jerusalem (recorded in Ezra 3-6), and this second temple named after Zerubabbel is the temple that existed at the time of Jesus Christ. The Judaism that was practiced after this second temple was built is what scholars refer to as Second Temple Judaism. One of the important things to note at that time was that because of the problems created by having to live in exile for so long, a whole new batch of religious laws had crept into the Jewish society aside of the Old Testament (Torah) that we Christians know, and these laws were called the Talmud, sometimes referred to as “the tradition of the elders”. In fact, in some places, they overrode the Torah given by Moses which was directly from God. These Talmudic laws are what Jesus condemns when he says to the Pharisees that they break the command of God for the sake of their traditions (Matt 15:1-3).

In addition to these, the institution of Pharisees and Pharisaism arose during and after the exile. These were men learned in the Torah and Talmud, and who guided the religious lives of the ordinary people. Though the Jews looked to the council of priests (The Sanhedrin) for ultimate leadership of the whole country during this period, the Pharisees were more respected because they seemed to follow the laws more devoutly and spent more time directly amongst the ordinary people than the priests, who were busy politicking and doing their rituals in the temple. Of the two popular Pharisaic factions, Paul the apostle was originally of the Hillel faction, having studied under Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel (Ac 22:3).

The Hope of the Jews

Despite their return, all was not well with the Jews. They knew that they had a special covenant with God as the children of Abraham, and that their prophets had prophesied to them that God will bring his promised kingdom to pass through the “Son of David” – the “Son of Man”, the Messiah – after their exile. Despite all the prophecies about God restoring them from exile and bringing everlasting peace to them, here they were under occupation – first by Ptolemy (one of the generals of Alexander the Great) and his descendants, and then by Caesar and his Roman empire thereafter. To the 2^nd temple Jew therefore, salvation was not centered on a personal redemption from sin and its effects, but God entering into the present and changing the world order by virtue of His anointed one (Christ means “anointed one”), that they the Jews may be vindicated as the true nation of God.

One of the expectations of the coming of that kingdom is the gift of the Spirit of God to his people, enabling them to be able to obey God’s commands without a written law. This was because they believed their own efforts at being obedient to the law were insufficient in pleasing God, but then he would give them the means to please him himself if his spirit dwelt in them. As Ezekiel 36:25-27 records God’s intent:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezekiel 36:25-27)

Jesus & the New Testament

400 years after the exile and whiles the 2^nd temple Jew is seriously contemplating why God hasn’t brought his kingdom into fulfillment, Jesus enters the scene and begins to talk about this same kingdom whose coming he says is very near. In some places he actually says that the kingdom has arrived in the present. The “kingdom of God”/”kingdom of Heaven” is mentioned in the gospels about 84 times, many times more than the word “salvation” in the entire NT. And yet it is very odd that the current Christian discourse has very little mention of the kingdom. Jesus’ mission of creating a people in every location who are expressing his nature and his kingdom in the now has been totally subsumed by our own self-defined missions of “winning souls” to sit in pews and wait for heaven to come, doing nothing but clinging onto “faith alone”. In fact waiting in pews has become tiring, and therefore we’ve moved on to claiming material property in the name of “God’s blessings”. Two millennia of Christianity has managed to emasculate the Gospel from its Judaic background, and has lead and is still leading us down a path where every theology can be easily supported by stringing together any number of proof-texts from the bible in the name of “God’s word”. The least said about the “motivational speakers” the better, for that genre of preaching does not even need a Christian to do.

Blessing

One of such proof-texting comes from the typical use of the word “blessing” with regards to Gal 3.

A lot of Christians have thought of the “blessings of Abraham” to connote being blessed with material wealth like Abraham was blessed by God. And yet it is very obvious from the context of Gal 3 that Paul is talking about how the Galatians received the Holy Spirit – which is exactly what God promised in Ezek 36 above. Oh, by the way, a promise is not a wish – it is expected that a promise will be fulfilled, given that all conditions for its fulfillment is met. This is important as we’ll see later.

“Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? … The scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you’. So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith” (Gal 3:2;8-9).

Which blessing is Paul talking about here, except in direct reference to the blessing of receiving the Spirit of God? The argument is sufficiently ended when we look at v14.

“He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Gal 3:14)

Riches

Another of such usage is with regards to “riches”. The typical proof-text is 2 Cor 8 and 9

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).

As usual, in the haste to claim things for ourselves whether legitimate or not, we have totally ignored the context of this passage. We notice first that Corinthians is an epistle not to a person, but to a congregation. Even v 1 says “And now brothers”, meaning he’s not referring to one person becoming rich, but the congregation’s collective increase, whether through one person or through many. In addition, the English language does not help us here because the language uses “you” to refer to both singular and plural numbers. However the “you” and “your” used here are different forms of “humei” in Greek which denotes a plural, not singular. This fact is even supported by “for your sakes” as properly translated by the NIV.

Given the foregoing, how can we come to the conclusion that 2 Cor 8:9 says that every Christian must be rich, or there’s something wrong with their Christianity? And yet we’ve lost sight of the really important thing that Paul was saying – that even in extreme poverty, the Macedonian churches gave to help their Jerusalem brethren. I know many Christians who claim they are willing to help their less fortunate brethren, but they are waiting to be rich before they can do so. I wonder if they’ve read 2 Cor 8 properly.

Prosper

Oh, and the favourite proof-text:

“I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well” (3 Jn 2).

There is no doubt that John the apostle is wishing his brother Gaius well, and as any Christian will wish his brother a happy birthday – there is no guarantee that his brother will indeed have a happy birthday. This is not a promise of God, recorded in the Law, Prophets or Gospels that we must at all times prosper and have good health. So I ask a simple question: if I pray that my friend’s marriage is successful as we always do when we go to our friend’s weddings, does that automatically mean that their marriage will be successful? Is logic not allowed to prevail anymore when reading the scriptures?

Again, the real problem that John the apostle sought to address (which is what is happening everyday in our churches today – authoritarian self-imposed leadership in the name of “serving” the church) is nicely glossed over? Do we not have an abundance of Diotrepheses in our churches? In fact, haven’t we institutionalized “Diotrephesism”? In fact, New Covenant theologian Dr Jon Zens is challenging us to rethink the institution of the clergy today in his book “The Pastor Has No Clothes” in an attempt to deal with such problems, and we probably need to pay more attention to men like him.

When Jesus was praying for his disciples in Jn 17, I believe his focus was that God give them the strength to fulfill the commandment he’d given them and to be united as a people in doing so, not in making sure they “prospered and had good health”.

Conclusion

I know that songs like “Double Double” are very nice to dance to and get all worked up on. But if there’s any theological strength to such songs, I’m obviously not getting the message. In fact, it actually is getting depressing listening to “gospel” music of today, whether it comes from the polished American singers of the day or the not-so-polished Ghanaian ones. The value is the same, and we need to get back to talking about Jesus, his kingdom and how we can make him and his kingdom real in the community of the brethren.

Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur

Our Lamb Has Conquered, Let us Follow Him

Category: Music