Methodist church holds biennial conference

Page 21, Mon Feb 9, 2009
Story: Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah
THE Lay President of the Methodist Church of Ghana, Mrs Araba Arthur Sam, has called on leaders and members of the orthodox churches to put in more efforts to ensure the growth of their congregations.
She noted that low church growth figures reported in recent times were a cause for concern, since the trend was a “confirmation of the ineffectiveness of our evangelism programmes.”
Mrs Sam was speaking at the sixth biennial evangelists conference, which was organised by the Evangelism, Mission and Renewal Division of the Church at the Methodist University College of Ghana (MUCG) in Accra.
About 200 evangelists of the church took part in the conference, which was held on the theme: “The Holy Spirit, the Evangelists and the Mission of the Church”.
Mrs Sam noted that something was not right with the church’s evangelism strategies and called for measures to make evangelism the core business of the church.
She called for the re-thinking of the place of evangelism in the church’s activities and suggested that all members of the church should engage in evangelism “so that our lives, words and works will become a magnet in our workplaces and wherever we find ourselves.”
In his welcoming address, the National Chairman of the Fellowship of Methodist Evangelists, Mr J.K. Bissaw, commended the church for its intention to double its membership within the next five years.
He gave the assurance that evangelists within the church were ready to contribute their quota towards the attainment of the goals of the church and called for financial and material assistance to enable them to effectively perform their core duty of winning souls for Christ.
Mr Bissaw revealed that a lot of evangelists within the church were not “given anything”, adding that even though such evangelists were being frustrated, they were working hard to ensure that the church achieved its set targets.
In his keynote address, a Senior Lecturer at the MUCG, Rev Dr Richard Foli, said although the Church of Pentecost was established in the country in 1953, many years after the establishment of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, it had done far better in terms of the planting of branches and membership drive.
He said recent figures indicated that while the Church of Pentecost, operating with only local resources, had 10,634 branches and 1,468,726 members, the Methodist Church had 3,814 branches with 634,689 members while the Presbyterian Church has 2,173 with 616,391 members.
Rev Dr Foli, therefore, called for an all-hands-on-deck approach in the implementation of the church’s evangelism programme to enable membership to be doubled within the five years that it had set for itself.
The Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, Most Reverend Dr Robert Aboagye-Mensah, encouraged the evangelists to work hard to meet the demands of their calling.
For his part, the Director of the church’s Evangelism, Mission and Renewal Division, Rev Dr Emmanuel Asare-Kusi, called for more action rather than talking by the entire membership to enable the church to achieve its aim of doubling its membership.
Present at the ceremony were Right Rev Abraham Tagoe, Bishop of Accra Diocese, and Right Rev George Ayisi, Bishop of the Takoradi Diocese.