Note to the Reader
As a Ghanaian studying religion, this piece is my attempt to understand how we got to this moment where mission churches in Ghana are actively working to assert their authority and identity in schools that were originally founded by missionaries but are now funded by the government. It’s a long read, but I hope you’ll stay with it, because the Church’s position in Shafic Osman v. Board of Governors matters and deserves our full attention.
Here’s a guide:
- To understand how we got here, see Parts II and III.
- To understand why the Methodist Church’s position has drawn support from the broader Christian community, jump to Part IV.
- For a practical path forward for the state, the Church, and the Muslim community, see Part V.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Part I: What Happened to the Church?
A question I often get from family and friends is, “How come we didn’t get liberation theology?” It usually comes up whenever the Ghanaian Church, by which I mean the whole ecumenical body (across denominations), does something oppressive or simply thoughtless. The assumption behind the question is this: if Ghanaian mainstream Christianity had been shaped by liberation theology, our clergy would be less fixated on homosexuality and more outraged by widening inequality, or corruption that robs “the least of these.” They’d be less anxious about Muslim students praying in mission schools and more worried about the destruction of waterbodies and forests through galamsey.
My answer to this question is usually twofold. First, even in Latin America, the birthplace of liberation theology, many churches have drifted toward oppressive ideologies and formed alliances with authoritarian governments. For example, the people who stormed Brazil’s congress after Jair Bolsonaro lost the last election were Christians. Second, Ghana once had a vibrant liberationist Christian movement. From the 1960s through the 1990s, the Ghanaian Church served as as a formidable moral force. Of course, not every church participated in their campaign for justice. While the mission churches challenged military regimes, mobilized against injustice, and rebuked government ineptitude, other churches were actively partnering with these regimes.
The Mission Churches as a Moral Force
Take the time General Kutu Acheampong declared a National Week of Repentance. He claimed Ghana’s economic stagnation, corruption, unemployment, and poverty were due to “national sinfulness.” The mission churches refused to participate, calling it what it was: a political distraction dressed up as spirituality. As Ghanaian theologian and Anglican priest, John Pobee reported, many Ghanaians saw the “event as a mockery of true religion. Some even joked that if anyone needed public repentance, it was the General himself. So, who presided over this grand service?“ It was Rev. Abraham de Love, the “international evangelist” behind the Philadelphia Mission of Africa.
When Acheampong later brought in Elizabeth Clare Prophet, an American spiritual leader of the Summit Lighthouse to help promote UniGov, the tension was palpable. Prophet reinterpreted the Union Government idea through the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in which Acheampong, and the Armed Forces were God the Father; the professional bodies and students were the Son; and the workers of Ghana were the Holy Spirit. (One day we must talk about the fabulous role of students in Ghana’s movements for social change, but not today.) The Christian Council rejected Mrs. Clare Prophet’s claims, insisting that her statements about Christian belief had no biblical or traditional grounding and condemning her assertion that soldiers and police possess a “divine right” to political power.
Even though they had prayed for Moses to deliver Ghana, the mission churches under the became one of the few groups to challenge Jerry John Rawlings and his Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) regime from the 1980s through the 1990s. The PNDC suppressed freedom of the press and speech, established “kangaroo courts” to dish out cruel and degrading punishments including making convicted and suspected offenders carry human excreta, stripping citizens of their citizenship, and banishing them from Ghana.
It was in this hostile climate that the mission churches took a more activist role in national life. Of the sixty public letters issued by the Christian Council of Ghana between 1941 and 1994, two-thirds – forty- were written in the 1980s and 1990s. These letters challenged economic mismanagement, human rights abuses, and corruption. Some members of the Christian Council and the Catholic Bishops Conference later explained that they saw opposing unjust rule as part of their pastoral and prophetic duty. As Archbishop Akwasi Sarpong put it, “Christ does not want his Church to be meaningless in society… but to be right at the center of things, where the action is.”
It is clear from these precedents that while Ghana may not have produced a liberation theology in the mold of Latin America or the Social Gospel in the United States, we once had a church movement deeply rooted in liberation and committed to justice. At the center of that movement were the mission churches. And their resistance to authoritarianism was no accident, it grew out of a theology that saw faith as inseparable from public life and justice as a Christian mandate. But all of that changed with the emergence of what I call the Charismatic turn. This was the moment when Duncan-Williams and his mentees arrived with new theology, new preaching styles, and new visions of prosperous Christian living. Suddenly, the energy once devoted to challenging governments and demanding accountability was redirected toward trying to keep young people from leaving their pews. And this is where the question, “What happened to the Church?” truly lands.
Part II: The Charismatic Turn
The first big theological shift occurred with the emergence of African Independent Churches (AICs) in the early 20th century. Due to the refusal of Western missionaries to engage seriously with African religious worldviews, Africans, some former members of the established mission churches started forming churches which came to be collectively called the AICs in the 1900s. The AICs were led entirely by Africans and operated outside the control of the Western mission churches. The AICs integrated indigenous symbols and practices into Christian worship. In Ghana, the first set of AICs were known as Sumsum Sore or Spiritual Churches. These Spiritual Churches formed the bedrock of the classical Pentecostal tradition, which emphasized healing, prophecy, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the felt presence of God. While many supported Ghana’s independence movement and were occasionally co-opted by political leaders in the early postcolonial era, they did not maintain sustained interest in politics. For them, politics was “worldly,” and since God appointed rulers, the believer’s duty was simply to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” (I promise, this really does come together soon.)
This legacy, the spiritual focus of classical Pentecostals combined with their historical disinterest in engaging in politics provided the fertile ground for the Charismatic Turn to fully flourish. If you went to Sunday School in the 1990s, you may have felt the beginnings of the shift in the mid-2000s. It showed up in the focus on individual blessings, in the sermons that promised material wealth, and the suggestion that poverty is simply one’s sin made manifest. Gone was the talk about how hard it would be for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Gone was the emphasis on caring for the “least of these.” In its place, are wealthy preachers claiming the donkey Jesus rode to Jerusalem was “the Rolls Royce of his day.”
That change in focus was triggered by a new wave of Pentecostal renewal that birthed the Charismatic movement in the late 1970s and 1980s under the leadership of Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams.. After training under the Nigerian mega pastor Benson Idahosa, Duncan-Williams returned to start Action Chapel International in 1979 and mentored figures like Charles Agyin-Asare, Dag Heward-Mills, and others. The movement emphasized healing, prophecy, deliverance, spiritual warfare, speaking in tongues, and the works and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They also leaned heavily on Oral Roberts’ Seed-Faith doctrine: a theology that promised a good God who could be moved by prayer, affirmation, and giving to release wealth and other blessings into the life of a Christian. Duncan-Williams and his mentees drew deeply from American evangelical networks and televangelists including T. D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Mike Murdock, Myles Munroe, Morris Cerullo, Reinhard Bonnke and others for the sermons, crusades, and conferences.
Their timing was perfect. Beyond the coups of the mid-1960s through to the 1980s, there was the devastation brought by the drought, famine, and bushfires of 1982/83. Add to that the mass expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, hyperinflation, chronic shortages, corruption, and the violence of the PNDC, and you get a traumatized population. In this context, despite their activism for justice, the mission churches were seen as spiritually unresponsive. The classical Pentecostals, who led previous Pentecostal renewal movements, largely avoided material and political concerns. And so the Charismatic churches stepped into this vacuum with a simple but powerful promise: God can still bless you now, even amid economic and political collapse.
Political Privilege and Media Influence
Their success is not only due to their North American–infused Prosperity Gospel or their media strategies, but also in their relationship with Jerry Rawlings and the PNDC. In a bid to counter the opposition and criticism from the mission churches, Rawlings turned to the classical Pentecostal and rising Charismatic groups, whose theology and ethos differed sharply from the mission churches. They were granted access to preside over national events and were positioned as a counterweight to the “troublesome” mission churches. For example, in January 1993, when Rawlings decided to hold a national thanksgiving service to mark his 1992 election victory, an election the opposition maintained was rigged, it was Duncan-Williams of Action Faith Chapel and the Pentecostals who presided over it. The mission churches refused to participate. The rewards for their loyalty were immense and transformative. Duncan-Williams became one of the first pastors to secure a regular slot on national television once the airwaves were liberalized. The media platform allowed him to model a new style of televangelism and theology for scores of emerging preachers. This access to traditional media and national platform eventually helped them alter the religious landscape. This period also marked the beginning of Pentecostal leaders stepping into high-profile public roles, with chairpersons of the Church of Pentecost serving on the Council of State.
In the beginning, the mission churches viewed both the classical Pentecostals and the Charismatics as fringe groups with unorthodox theology. Their prominent role in Rawlings’ thanksgiving service only heightened that tension. The Christian Council of Ghana’s response to the event captured the strain between the mission churches, the regime, and the Pentecostal–Charismatic group. The Council’s statement stated that because these churches were not members of the Christian Council, they had not been invited to take part in efforts to promote political dialogue for national peace. And that while it was unclear how they might have responded if they had been included, their strong focus on spiritual matters and their tendency to separate the sacred from the secular suggested to the Council that they were unlikely to be interested in political and other temporal concerns.
And yet by the mid-2000s, the dynamics had shifted dramatically. The mission churches found themselves redesigning both their liturgy and theology to stem the tide of young people leaving for the Charismatic churches. They, along with the classical Pentecostals, were compelled to adopt some of the pneumatic elements that had drawn the youth toward Charismatic and Pentecostal congregations in the first place. While they did not abandon their traditional systematic forms of liturgy and theology, they created space for fasting, prayer, praise and worship, all-night services, and the use of anointing oil for healing and deliverance. Many introduced English-language services or bilingual formats using interpreters, a significant change from the practice of conducting services strictly in local languages. The Church of Pentecost (CoP), now the largest Pentecostal denomination in the country, launched the Pentecost International Worship Centre to retain its young and professional members, and in 2012, it even relaxed its once-rigid dress codes.
The “Pentecostalization” of Society
But the thing about transforming the religious landscape is that Charismatics–Pentecostals did far more than change church life, they reshaped the country itself and, by extension, public imagination. For instance, through their active use of media, they helped turn homosexuality into a major moral concern and worked to orient public attitudes with Pentecostal sensibilities. When Archbishop Duncan-Williams said that unmarried women “will rot with their intelligence and beauty,” he was reinforcing established Pentecostal gender norms. There is hardly an aspect of life that Ghanaian Pentecostals have not touched — how we work, how we play, how we pray, how we sleep or do not sleep. Everything. In his study of Pentecostalism in Ghana, the President of the Methodist Conference, Rev. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, describes this dominance of Pentecostal values in public life as the “Pentecostalization of society.”
This influence was reinforced by their deep ties to North American televangelists. Scholars acknowledge this influence, though some argue the Charismatic movement is an African response to African problems. Asamoah-Gyadu himself argues that American televangelists served mainly as inspiration because, “in Ghanaian eyes, North America, with its technological superiority and material abundance, epitomized modernity. But anyone tracing the connections can see that Ghana’s Pentecostal-Charismatic movement drew not just inspiration but content, style, strategy, and alliances from U.S. evangelicalism. To date American preachers and musicians continue to headline major conferences in Ghana. Duncan-Williams’ invitation to participate in the National Prayer Breakfast on the morning of Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration. This demonstrates how deep he is embedded in the global evangelical network.
Before the introduction of the anti-LGBTQ+ bill into national discourse, the World Congress of Families (WCF) held conferences in Ghana with allies like Moses Foh-Amoaning, the chief architect of the bill. This is the same WCF linked to the criminalization of homosexuality in Uganda and Nigeria. While there may be no formal institutional connections, the bond between Ghanaian Charismatics and U.S. evangelicals is undeniable. As American evangelical culture wars escalate, their themes and anxieties now reverberate in Ghana. That is why homosexuality became a moral concern in Ghana only after it became one in the United States. And so while it might not yet be apparent to Ghanaian Methodists and their allies, their position on the Wesley Girls issue reflects these same Pentecostal sensibilities along with the Islamophobic ideas that have traveled into Ghana through American evangelical networks.
Part III: A Very Short History of How Christianity Took Root Here
Like all religions, Christianity is a living, breathing tradition that continues to undergo transformations since the first gatherings of the Jesus movement in the Greco-Roman world. Ghana is no exception. The faith here has evolved many times since Portuguese traders first introduced Christianity to the region in the 15th century. (“Traders” here sounds innocuous, so let me be clear: these were traders dealing in human lives that set off the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.)
That first phase of missionization in the area, which was supported at different points by Dutch, Danish, and Swedish missionaries and traders, remained largely confined to coastal enclaves. There were attempts by the traders and missionaries to establish educational spaces. The first of its kind was established at Cape Coast Castle by Thomas Thompson, a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, who arrived from New Jersey in 1751. Although Thompson’s time in the Gold Coast was cut short by ill health, one of the three boys he sent to England in 1754, Philip Quaque, returned in 1765 as an ordained minister. Quaque went on to serve as a missionary, schoolmaster, and catechist in Cape Coast Castle. Remember the church in Cape Coast Castle that sits right above the dungeon? Yes, that was also the school. As Ghanaian theologian John Pobee and others have noted, this early phase did not result in widespread conversion of people.
However, things shifted under British colonization. The British decision to stay in the region was partly due to an appeal Rev. Elias Schrenk of the Basel Mission made to the British Parliament urging that country to see evangelization as a form of reparations for centuries of European abuse in Africa. For the British, “reparations,” meant “civilizing” the natives. And education became their primary tool for their civilizing mission. For the colonial government, education was meant to produce a workforce for the civil service and European businesses. For the missionaries, it was a medium for spreading Christianity. Schools therefore became a site for transmitting Christian and European values to the general population. It is no surprise, then, that the colonial government and missionary bodies worked closely to establish schools across the country. By 1949, the Methodist Church for example had already established 708 primary and middle schools, rising to over 1,000 later that year, and 131 more by 1966, all funded by grants from the colonial administration.
Now, this essay is not about the ownership of mission schools, per se, but to make sense of why we’re even having this conversation, we must understand how these schools came into being. One advantage of colonial officials documenting nearly every aspect of their administrative lives is that we have a clear record of both the destruction they caused and the infrastructures they helped establish. In other words, we can trace exactly how the Gold Coast ended up with government-funded public and mission schools.
The archives show that the Basel Mission understood its work as undertaking a “frontal assault” on traditional society, hence its approach of separating students from their communities through boarding schools. The same logic informed the creation of the “Salems,” the special enclaves set apart for new converts. So the next time you pass through Osu Salem, Abokobi, or any other Presbyterian enclave, remember they didn’t happen by accident. We can also tell that the establishment of schools in the Gold Coast was never an exclusive missionary effort. In 1821, the British government decided to establish government schools in the Gold Coast with public funds. Historians call this policy radical, since Britain itself did not create public bodies to run schools until 1870. In fact, these government schools in the Gold Coast predated many missionary schools by at least a decade.
To be sure, once missionaries found ways to survive malaria and other diseases, they began to establish their own schools between 1835 and 1844. Even then the evidence shows that mission schools were supported by the government even before the 1882 Ordinance which created a central Board of Education, local boards to manage grants for fully state-funded government schools and assisted schools (run by missions or private individuals but supported with public money). And you know what else that Ordinance did? It laid out rules for who should be in these schools, how they should be treated, and what they should study. Among other things, it stipulated that schools were to be open to all children, regardless of race or religion. It also placed no restrictions on the opening of new schools, anyone could start one, provided they complied with the education rules. In other words, even the colonial administration, which was steeped in Christian worldview, saw religious inclusion as essential to a public-funded education system.
Africans Supporting Their Own Schools
Moreover, as nationalist sentiment grew, chiefs, wealthy businesspeople, and entire communities donated land and money to establish schools across the country. For example, when the Methodists founded Mfantsipim, and struggled to keep it open,John Mensah Sarbah, J. P. Brown, A. W. de Graft-Johnson, J. E. Casely-Hayford, and others worked to keep the school from collapsing between 1889 and 1901. This group created the Fanti National Education Scheme to support Mfantsipim and to build additional schools. Their fundraising campaign was not a success, but that did not stop them from pushing for more educational opportunities. As Philip Foster notes:
“By the end of the century there were four schools, three in Cape Coast and one in Accra, that gave all the education which purported to be more than elementary. Though they may have been secondary schools in name only, it is significant that they were totally staffed by Africans and supported by them. Two of these institutions were later to receive more adequate support from the Wesleyan and Anglican missions in the early twentieth century and emerged as Adisadel and Mfantsipim schools, but their origin was largely due to African enterprise.”
So when the Christian Council of Ghana and the Catholic Bishops Conference assert their “historical proprietorship” of these schools like they did last week, what exactly do they mean? What do we make of the land and resources of the Africans that went into the establishment of these schools? What about the land, labor, and resources of Africans that built them? What about the money from the colonial government? And why does the church want to deviate from their inclusive heritage? So yes, the mission churches were involved in building some of these schools, but they did not do it alone.
Part VI: Why It All Matters Now
If you’ve been under a rock in the past few days, here is the back story: Last week, the Office of the Attorney-General filed a statement in support of Wesley Girls’ High School in the lawsuit Shafic Osman v. Board of Governors of Wesley Girls’ High School. Osman is challenging the school’s bans on Muslim students fasting during Ramadan, wearing the hijab, and observing Islamic rites, arguing these restrictions violate constitutional protections for religious freedom. The question at the heart of the case is simple: Should a publicly funded school be allowed to violate the constitutional rights of its students? The answer according to the statement filed by the Attorney-General, Wesley Girls is a resounding yes. The school, the Attorney General says, is a Methodist institution, so it has the right to enforce rules consistent with its Christian identity, even when those rules restrict other religious expressions. And in response to public criticism of the AG’s statement, the Christian Council and the Catholic Bishops Conference issued a statement to say that preventing Muslim rites in mission schools is not intolerance but a defense of Christian institutional identity. The Methodist Church of Ghana followed with its own statement, saying it “considers discrimination to be fundamentally inconsistent with Christian teaching,” but in the same breath insisting that allowing Muslim students to fast or observe rites would create “parallel systems” and undermine cohesion.
Never mind that Osman’s lawsuit does not ask the school to change its identity, redesign uniforms, or build prayer rooms. Never mind that many mission and government schools across Ghana already practice some form of religious accommodation. Never mind that older Wesley Girls alumnae recall such accommodations on their own campus. I have to say that the pattern here is striking and familiar. It mirrors the Church’s argument around the anti-gay bill. When activists point out that the bill violates basic human rights and that the Church cannot compel the state to criminalize what they view as sin, the Church reframes the debate as a defense of “Ghanaian family values” and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Never mind that Ghanaian cultures have historically offered gender and sexual minorities more room to exist than Christianity and Islam ever have. Never mind that neither human rights activists nor LGBTQI Ghanaians are demanding the legalization of same-sex marriage.
But back to the question at the heart of this paper: why are the mission churches and their allies so invested in asserting control over these schools right now? And why is it that despite their theological and historical differences, the mission churches and their Pentecostal-Charismatic counterparts are united on this front? The short answer is power — the power to dominate public life and shape the national imagination through Christian ideas. The Church of Pentecost’s Possessing the Nation campaign captures the essence of what many Ghanaian churches are working toward.
The longer answer is this, the deep and longstanding influence of North American evangelicalism on Ghanaian Pentecostal-Charismatics means that shifts in the U.S. evangelical landscape have often echoed here. This is how, despite the absence of LGBTQ+ Ghanaians demanding same-sex marriage, homosexuality has become a moral obsession. It is why despite centuries of peaceful coexistence and even collaboration between Muslims and Christians, the Church has now grown increasingly intolerant of Islam. The backlash against Muslim students simply asking to observe their own religious rituals in a public-funded mission school is, in part, the local expression of American Islamophobia. This is not to excuse Ghanaian churches or suggest that they lack agency. But my goal is to show how North American evangelical influence has reshaped Ghanaian Pentecostalism and how Pentecostal priorities such as prosperity, rigid gender roles, hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, and suspicion of religious “others” have seeped into the broader Christian imagination. This is why the mission churches that once championed interreligious dialogue and stood courageously against state abuses of power are now advocating for the right to discriminate in their schools.
So when the Methodist Church argues that schools funded by the state must bend constitutional rights to its Christian identity, or when churches champion a bill that criminalizes queer life, they’re not promoting “Ghanaian culture” or the Bible. We are witnessing the cumulative effect of decades of local religious transformation intertwined with global evangelical current.
Part V: Where Do We Go From Here?
So, what next? The Attorney General’s position does more than back a school policy, it chips away at the very foundation of our national motto: Freedom and Justice. What we know is that nations, like ethnicities, are not fixed objects. They are ideas and we witness them being reimagined, negotiated, and constantly reconstructed. Asante is an ethnicity, yes, but it is also an evolving project shaped by new values, practices, and shared beliefs. Countries work the same way. Even the United States (for all its contradictions and chaos )shows that a society can reinvent itself and so society once built on slavery now at least imagines freedom for Black people as part of its constitutional DNA. If the Ghana we have is not the Ghana we want, (and I maintain it is not), then we must imagine and build a better one. Which means the choice before the state is simple. Public schools must serve the public. That means all Ghanaians, regardless their religion, ethnicity, class or background must have access to these schools. It also means that rights guaranteed in the Constitution should not disappear the moment a child walks onto a school compound.
What Reasonable Accommodation Looks Like
So what does that look like? First, reasonable accommodation. The idea that students cannot pray because of their religion is wrong. And the history of schools refusing sick students permission to go home, even resulting in deaths, shows how rigid policies can become cruel. We can do better. Accommodation does not mean chaos. Which brings me to the tired question that keeps coming up“So should we allow animal sacrifice too?” The answer is that accommodation depends on context. Some practices require conditions that may not be safe or practical in a school environment. But if a student’s religious observance can be done quietly and without harm, then why not? The standard should be fairness, not fear.Cost matters too. If a request would break the school budget or disrupt core responsibilities, that is a reasonable limit. But overall, the principle is already clear in our laws: public institutions cannot privilege one religion over another. That should guide every decision
A Question for the Church
And for the Methodist Church and the wider Ghanaian Church, we must return to a question Christians love to print on mugs: What would Jesus do? Would Jesus stop a Muslim child from praying? Would he expect constitutional rights to bow before denominational pride? Scripture contains many warnings about idolatry, yet there is no place where the people are asked to marginalize minorities or punish children for worshipping differently. If Ghanaian Christians truly see this country as under God, then its public life, including its schools, must reflect the God who welcomed, healed, and included. If Christianity is a faith centered on love, then the power of the Church should create space for others rather than close doors in their faces. The churches can help shape a Ghana where equality is not just an idea but something that is lived.
Selected Sources & Notes
Mission Churches here to refers to denominations established in Ghana by Western missionary societies. These include the Roman Catholic Church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, the Methodist Church and the Anglican Church.
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