'"Christ is the Answer": What is the Question?' A Ghana Airways Prayer Vigil and its Implications for Religion, Evil and Public Space

Abstract

Religion and life, both private and public, remain strongly linked in Africa. This was recently expressed in a prayer vigil organized by Ghana Airways when the staff and management invited a London-based Ghanaian evangelist, Lawrence Tetteh, to lead a 'healing and deliverance' service aimed at exorcizing evil spirits from the affairs of the airline and releasing it from its predicaments. The organization of a healing and deliverance session by a public corporation, it is argued, is symptomatic of the quick African resort to the sphere of religion in the search for solutions to life's difficulties. Religious functionaries including Pentecostal/ Charismatic pastors are important in Africa as purveyors of powerful prayers, potent medicines, and amulets for protection against evil. The Pentecostal 'healing and deliverance' ministry has become popular in African contexts like that of Ghana because it takes African worldviews of mystical causality seriously. This Christianity promises Christian alternatives to the search for security that drives people into the courts of other religious functionaries.

The experiences of caregivers of children living with HIV and AIDS in Uganda: a qualitative study

“…Such material utility of prayer sharply diverges from another study, for instance, in the USA among HIV caregivers where prayer was generally deployed to gain psychological composure in caregiving including managing positive emotions such as gratitude, trust, faith, gain focus, calmness, guidance and moral direction [ 66 ]. In Africa, religion and life (both private and public) are so deeply fused and the material utility of religion in search for solutions to life’s crises are everyday experience, especially with the upsurge in Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches [ 67 , 68 ]. As rightly observed by Asamoah-Gyadu, “…the quick African resort to the sphere of religion in the search for solutions to life's difficulties” (p.93).…”

Marketing a new African God: Pentecostalism and material salvation in Ghana

“…In Ghanaian traditional religion, bad fortune (epidemics, droughts, wars, famine, etc.) and good fortunes (money, children, and accumulated assets) are attributed to a Supreme Being (Asamoah‐Gyadu, 2005). That the new Pentecostalism seeks to extend this inalienable right of the Ghanaian to experience the religious in all things human makes it easy for locals to relate to the practice.…”

Transformation and Migration Among Members of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and London

“…Larbi (2001), for example, takes discontinuity seriously by allowing for Pentecostal ideas of 'atonement, forgiveness of sin, and reconciliation with God', while revealing continuities with an Akan this-worldly focus that 'permeates their here and now' (407). Asamoah-Gyadu (2005a) has also commented that the Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) can be viewed as playing a similar role to the Ghanaian Spiritual Churches (Sunsum Sore) before them, even if the theological orientations of PCCs appear to be discontinuous (32). Newell (2007) demonstrates how Pentecostalism and witchcraft discourse in the Ivory Coast are 'competing imaginations of power, wealth and illness' that 'are strategically and varyingly employed by actors in everyday life' (462).…”