The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has called on the African Christian Movement not to only focus on the spiritual growth of the people, but also their socio-economic development.
He said there was the need for the Christian community to work closely together with the state in tackling the problems that confronted the citizenry.
“Here in Ghana, our state, our government and the Christian community work closely together because we understand that, as you are saying, we’re basically trying to attack the same problem, perhaps from different angles,” he said.
President Akufo-Addo made the call when a delegation from the Global Christian Forum (GCF) paid a courtesy call on him at the Jubilee House in Accra on Friday.
The visit was to formally brief the President on the 25th anniversary celebration of the GCF and its 4th forum scheduled to take place from April 15 to 20 in Accra.
The forum, to be held for the first time in Africa and hosted by Ghana on the theme “That the world may know”, is expected to attract about 300 global Christian leaders of various churches across the world.
President Akufo-Addo noted that Ghana was very strong in its attachment to Christianity with nearly 72 per cent of self-professed Christians and so the choice of Ghana as the place to host the event was only appropriate.
“I appreciate it very much the work that you’re doing. Ghana is a Christian nation practically, constitutionally we are a secular nation but the majority, the overwhelming majority of our people… we are looking at something like 70 to 72 per cent are Christians, self-professed Christians of which I am one and we feel very strongly about our attachment and to have an organisation that has its focus of bringing together all the various families within the Christian polity is an exceptional praise-worthy endeavour,” he stated.
For his part, the President of GCF, Reverend Dr Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, said the GCF and the government had something in common in the area of reconciling political division in the country and the different Christian denominations.
He said there were about 47,000 different Christian denominations across the world claiming the same Lord, but had divisions and it was the task of the forum to find out how the space could be found to build a common trust.
Reverend Granberg-Michaelson said Christianity had moved dramatically to the global south with Africa estimated to hold about 40 per cent of the global Christian population by next year.
“We want to make space for those new voices in the Church to balance that with the old historic voices. There is no other place within global Christianity that we are able to gather the whole diversity from Catholic, orthodox evangelical Pentecostal, African instituted and the others to gather in the spirit of solidarity under oneness in Christ and this is our unique calling and we do this not to argue about dogma or argue about doctrine, but by establishing common relationship that we have in God’s spirit and in Christ,” he emphasised.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
