GHANA’S NATIONAL CATHEDRAL: Even the President might have no clue what he is doing! | Part 1 of 3
There are seismic spiritual shifts among the nations in nearly every generation which redefine socioeconomic and other key realities. We are in the midst of one right now but few notice it. As they say, “the fish in the water doesn’t see the water.”
The story is told of a delegation from a ‘backward’ African tribe that experienced the delight of their first plane ride en route to Britain. While their English tour guides thought they were making a great impression on these negroid visitors by the imposing size and stature of their financial buildings, civil service infrastructure and entertainment edifices like the Wembley stadium, these visitors’ eyes glossed over; seemingly disinterested. Unbeknownst to their hosts, they were by now really eager to see what they finally verbalized as “the God House.” When they eventually did, Westminster Abbey, I believe, they asked a question none of the Brits could ever have contemplated: “Why is the God House not the biggest building?” For them, the centrality and prominence of faith needed to be expressed in the sheer size of the space allocated to it. For others the measure of prominence and centrality might be portrayed in location and to some, the material and financial worth.
Whichever way, the African is arguably ‘incurably religious’ and that centrality of faith must be expressed as such. For the African, and Ghanaian for that matter, spirit takes the first place, for nature, the state, and man are all spiritual (Abraham 1970, 50-51) and the temporal and the non-temporal are fused (52). Some have even gone to the extent of claiming, “The African is a radically religious person, religious at the core of his or her being. Africans’ communal activities and their social institutions are inextricably bound up with the spirit world. […] Africans seem unable to explain life and its mysteries without some reference to the supernatural” (Pobee & Ositelu II 1998, 9).
HOW WE GOT HERE
It is not surprising then that like the Thessalonians in the first century when the Ghanaian people also “turned away from idols to serve the living and true God” we have sought to incorporate the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ in our body politic. In fact, the original text of Philip Gbeho’s peri-independence national anthem (we still use his tune but the lyrics were changed after the first coup d’etat in 1966) were unequivocally to the Lord God of the Christian faith (who other faiths cannot bring themselves to call “father”):
Lord God our Father we pray thee,
Be thou our guide in all our ways,
May we unite together, proclaim the dawn of our new day!
Children of Ghana arise and uphold your cause
And blaze the trail of freedom far and wide,
O God our Father harken to our call
and bring us peace here in our fatherland.
When the president of the Republic of Ghana announced at the dawn of Ghana’s 60th independence anniversary in 2017 that he had plans to put up a national cathedral, “the God House” of the Ghanaian people if you like, I wasn’t excited. Initially. The intellectual in me (if I can claim that) sat on the fence to give this a deep think. When I asked in my August 2018 article, amidst serious brouhaha among the citizenry, whether this was a virtuous or vulgar venture I wasn’t kidding.
I will not repeat my thought processes and content then (you may revisit it here) but since undertaking graduate studies in world Christianity and missional leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary in the USA and at our own Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology Mission and Culture in Akropong, Akuapem, I have concurrently taken the time to research the matter and spoken with the real people at the helm and have become convinced that the National Cathedral Ghana venture is Godly, timely and defining in a way that I dare say, tafracher, even the President of the Republic himself who mooted the idea has no clue.
VISION IS PROGRESSIVE
According to His Excellency, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his three compelling reasons for this cathedral are (I’m paraphrasing what I heard him say in my presence at the March 5, 2020 ground-breaking of the national cathedral): first, to thank, praise and honour Almighty God for sparing Ghana major calamity, including civil war and famine (unlike most of our West African neighbors who we’re no better than) but rather blessing us with peace and relative prosperity; secondly, to galvanize the 71% Christian majority towards united effort in national development and finally to redeem a personal pledge he made to Almighty God that if He helped him win the 2016 election after two unsuccessful attempts he would erect a national cathedral to His honour.
All of these are good, and in my opinion, in that order. But as a missiologist, one who sits at the intersection of gospel, culture, and the church, there is so much more going on in the world of faith and religion that makes the idea and timing of this cathedral so iconic, it cannot be a coincidence and certainly not ignorable. I seek to therefore elevate this conversation beyond partisan politics and above the utilitarian rhetoric, especially on social media, typically by an elite that are book-smart but may not necessarily be spiritually discerning and tend to be more secular humanist in outlook than they even realize. Of course, I write from a Biblical worldview with an unashamedly Christian bias. Everyone is biased; it’s only worse when one doesn’t know it or wouldn’t acknowledge so.
THIS IS OF GOD, THE MISSIONARY GOD
First of all, it is Almighty God who forms nations (Acts 17:26) and nation states, “people groups who recognize themselves as a coherent community with a political meaning, and are generally larger than tribe or clan” (Lyman Stone). The missionary God forms nations for His three-fold purpose to bring:
- Himself glory through the praise and worship of their lips and love and lives thereof,
- creation a blessing (especially human beings, who are made in His image and likeness) and
- evil to an end by vanquishing it and establishing His kingdom of righteousness, justice and equity.
The Christian God forms nations for His glory to be displayed in and through them to the extent that even at the end of time, when the new and heavenly Jerusalem is revealed, the nations bring their leaders and glory (from languages to whatever cultural idiosyncrasies) into the city (Revelation 21). What will Ghana(ians) bring?
I am one of those who interpret the name G-H-A-N-A as an acronym for God Has A Nation Ahead. There is so much yet to be actualized in this great land. The National Cathedral Ghana can easily become a Tower of Babel experience if it does not fulfill God’s three-fold mission delineated above. Those people who settled on the plains of Shinar and became Babel (‘a people of confused noise’) sought glory for themselves and not the Most High God (they wanted make a name for ourselves) and did not want to be dispersed to spread God’s glory and be a blessing to the whole earth. The moment our sense of nationalism overtakes God’s global mission and our pride gets in the way of His purposes, you can be sure this project and its people will be scattered and the venture aborted. To the extent that a National Cathedral advances God’s three-fold purpose on earth as it is in Heaven, it is worthy of support. “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations?’ Jesus asks us like he did the first century Jews. Woe betides us if it becomes ‘a den of robbers.’ The National Cathedral Ghana is a significant missiological statement, in brick and mortar, that the Kingdom of God has more fully come in Africa and from here, Ghana as the geographical centre of the earth, will radiate to all the nations of the earth.
AFRICA LEADS TODAY
Throughout history, God has moved the centre of his missionary activity: Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, Rome… He has particularly done so when His people lose mission vision. While the East was at the helm in the first 1,000 years after Christ’s ascension, the West led the missio Dei for the next 1,000 years in sheer numbers as well as missionary activity. In this 21st century, everything has changed. Missiologists the world over agree: The centre of gravity of Christianity has shifted from the Global North to the Global South i.e. to Africa, Latin America and Asia. For the first time, the top two continents with the most Christians are Africa and Latin America, breaking a 1,000-year record Europe held. I am in the throes of completing a book on how Africa has transformed from a mission field into a mission force.
The year 2018 was the first year recorded with more Christians in Africa than on any other continent. That is phenomenal, that a continent called ‘dark’ that had barely 9 million Christ followers at the beginning of the 20th Century would now have over 650 million in 2020! The places that have had their historic cathedrals are today slowest in Christian growth but have significantly deep roots. Shall the place leading the world in the Christian faith not have a place to celebrate it, symbolize it, embody it and consolidate it and from there be a launch pad to the rest of the world? I feel privileged to be alive to see a day no one could’ve envisaged a century ago! Let this cathedral stand for the dawning of this new era of African leadership of the global mission of God and symbolize the celebration of this epoch!
TO BE CONTINUED.
Part II continued here.
References
Abraham, Willy E. 1970. The Mind of Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Pobee, John S., & Gabriel Ositelu II. 1998. African Initiatives in Christianity: The Growth, Gifts and Diversities of Indigenous African Churches; A Challenge to the Ecumenical Movement. Geneva: WCC Publications (Risk Book Series, no. 83).
Growing SMALLer
What Transpired in Court: a Blow to Blow Account
The day after my trial I sent a newsletter to all my family, friends and ministry partners around the world who had been praying for righteousness, truth and justice to prevail, giving them a ‘blow to blow’ account of happenings on that eventful day, November 28, 2018. You may read it here. Acquitted! Discharged!! Free!!!
Leadership is Likadis Likadat
The idea of ‘leadership ellipse’ is perhaps the most striking leadership concept I’ve come across most recently. How in the world is one supposed to ‘balance’ the inner spiritual life and the outer demands of leadership and tame tensions like being in the world but not of it, faithfulness and fruitfulness, impact and profit, being and doing… and remain sane?!
LIKAWHAT?
So after paying lots of money to take a course in Mentoring these were among the final words of admonishing (from Dietrich Bonheoffer): “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community” and “Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.” Huh? Now, which is which? Give me back my money! LOL!
Welcome to the business of life and leadership–paradox and ambiguity. To live in one extreme or the other is the easy option (any ‘fool’ can, excuse me to say); but to be able to hold two extremes in balance in your head, heart and in life is the real deal and few are able to handle this well. Yet that is an essential ingredient for success. In fact, sometimes these apparently contrasting dimensions of life are not even to be balanced per se but to be continually held in tension. To be comfortable with the uncomfortable tension and do well therein, that is the issue!
Pursuance of a life and leadership of integrity is living as activists and contemplatives, following and leading, managing our outward leadership responsibility and inward spiritual reality as well as having external organizational success principles and internal spiritual disciplines jiving. Robert Fryling, in his insightful work, The Leadership Ellipse, brings these to the fore and challenges leaders to integrate our lives in the sense of one’s outer and inner worlds being one, synchronous. Fryling’s metaphor to describe a life holding these foci and tensions together is the ellipse.
CALL IT WHAT YOU MAY—BUT IT’S THERE!
Why does Fryling use the ellipse (an elongated circle) metaphor and how useful is that in all the cross-cultural contexts in which I serve? I ask because there are too many times when one is caught off guard trying to use a metaphor (like ‘snowball effect’) that does not cross cultures well. I don’t want a situation of trying to relate a concept that I appreciate so well from a Western context but struggle to transmit.
Fryling’s love for, and deep understanding of, geometry led him to employ this amazing metaphor because an ellipse “is defined by two distinctly different focal points that are of equal importance. One point is not inferior to the other, and both are needed if there is to be an ellipse.”
For Fryling, “one focal point is our inner spiritual life, our longings, our affections and our allegiance to God. The other focal point is our outer world and organizational life, what we do and how we do it. Together these focal points define an ellipse that circumscribes our true spiritual leadership. It represents the dynamic tension between our soul and our actions, and gives us a mental image for personal, spiritual and professional integrity in who we are and how we lead.”
While almost every schooled person, irrespective of culture, may ‘get it,’ I’m glad he uses other metaphors which everyone can appreciate, like form and freedom, the fixed bone structure and flexible muscles of the human body plus basic theology of the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus Christ.
PREDICTOR OF LEADERSHIP SUCCESS
This sense of dissonance between a leader’s outer world and inner world is normal. “We live with paradoxes all of the time,” says Fryling; even Jesus the ultimate leader wasn’t spared. His prayer for his followers was “to live in the world without at the same time being of the world.” In many ministries, like mine, there is a constant struggle between being faithful and being fruitful.
Those are leadership ellipses right there when “waiting on God to move or to shift something inside me while at the same time still needing to lead in the public arena” (Ruth Haley Barton). In fact, Barton goes on to mention how “we might notice tension between what the spiritual life requires and what it takes to be (or at least appear!) successful in the current cultural milieu. On our good days, we might experience these tensions as a place of paradox where creative solutions might be found, but on other days they feel like polarities that are impossible to manage.”
In rapid fire, she continues: “…there is real tension between what the human soul needs in order to be truly well and what life in leadership encourages and even requires. There is the tension between being and doing, community and cause, truth-telling and putting the right spin on things. There is the tension between the time it takes to love people and the need for expediency. There is the tension between the need for measurable goals and the difficulty of measuring that which is ultimately immeasurable by anyone but God himself.
“There is the tension between the need for organizational hierarchy with all the power dynamics this creates and the mutuality and interdependence of life in community to which we as Christians are called. There is the tension between knowing how to “work the system” and entering into trustworthy relationships characterized by trust and a commitment to one another’s well-being. There is the tension between the need for an easy discipleship process through which we can efficiently herd lots of people and the patient, plodding and ultimately mysterious nature of the spiritual transformation process. And there is the challenge of knowing how to speak of these things in fruitful ways in the very inside places of power without becoming polarized in our relationships with one another.” Phew!
INTEGRITY AGAIN!
Living in the tension of this and that, yin and yang, and learning to be comfortable in the space and place, while taming the tension has a lot to do with living a life of integrity. Remember, integritas is about being one whole (integers); not fractionated. And it’s hard.
My seminary president put it this way in his book, Called: “Authentic discipleship delivers us from a compartmentalized life. Rather than having a life with segments and partitions—divisions between sacred and secular, personal and public, image and reality—we’re called to one whole and integrated life. It has to be said, of course, that we usually don’t want such a life and prefer the separate compartments. Such divisions provide room for our conflicting and contradictory instincts and desires. This is how we try to manage our several selves. It’s the hedge-your-bets approach to life, highly appealing but ultimately disappointing. It’s like approaching life as a series of snacks rather than committing ourselves to a full meal” (Mark Labberton).
GAME ON
Fryling, Barton, Labberton, Scazzero and others have assured me that the paradoxes and tensions that I sense as a leader are not only real but normal…and can be successfully grappled with. I’m more willing to embrace elliptical leadership. How about you?
After studying several leaders I have come to the conclusion that the degree to which one is able to be comfortable with and live, love and lead well in the tension of this and that, yin and yang, determines their ultimate leadership success or otherwise. From my little experience and research, the best leaders in the world are those who are not only able to get comfortable with being uncomfortable living in such tensions but mastered the art of dexterously handling both well.
As long as we are alive we will live with ambiguity and grapple with paradox. Part of our discipleship—learning to live and lead like Jesus—is to master how he lived his elliptical leadership life as the God-Man, knowing it can be done; and it must be done.
Works Cited
Barton, Ruth Haley. 2008. Strengthening the Soul of your Leadership. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Fryling, Robert. 2010. The Leadership Ellipse: Shaping How We Lead by Who We Are. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Labberton, Mark. 2014. Called: the Crises and Promise of Following Jesus Today. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.