Yesterday morning I went to church again. This time I went with Morris, a PCO staff member, to a Lutheran church. There were several different readings but the sermon was focused on the reading from the Gospel of John and the main point of the sermon was that the people of God should not question a Man of God (subtext: priest). This sounds problematic on the surface; I certainly had red flags waiving everywhere. But a Man of God is someone who does not hold power in his own right but only so long as he is inhabited by the Spirit of God. So because a Man of God is more an instrument of God than a super-human being, failing to follow him would be to fail to follow the directives of God. Bottom line: the internal logic holds.
The priest kept saying, "Moses was sent to lead the Israelites, not to be led by the Israelites." The priest used the story of Miriam and Aaron gossiping about the righteousness of the leadership of Moses as a moralistic tale (Miriam gets leprosy), but did not tell of how Moses was ultimately forbidden from entering the Promised Land because he flouted God's law. In fact, it was Aaron, the aforementioned gossiper, that God charged with leading the Israelites into the land of Canaan. A more contextualized reading would have illustrated the limitations of a Man of God as well as the importance of following his directives as given to him by God. I guess you can't read the whole Bible during one service... Regardless, the precept is only as good as the priest, who if you take him at his word is a very good man. Apparently he left a solid job in Liberia (I think in finance) that afforded him four paid for trips to the US every year, an air-conditioned living space, and plenty of other amenities to come to Ghana to preach in the Buduburam camp. Talk about sacrifice! I haven't been here long, but I've been here long enough to understand it. I guess it's no different than people leaving behind lives of comfort to serve a struggling or underprivileged community in any other fashion--like that girl who spent all her savings and put off college to build schools in rural communities.
One of the buildings in the camp (I'm not quite sure who it belongs to) says that one of the goals of its project is to empower people through Evangelism along with giving children access to education and reducing prostitution, teenage pregnancy, and the use of drugs. While I have many issues with Evangelism in the United States, but this is not Evangelism in the United States. So it's appropriate to try to understand it within its own context and not measure it by its correspondence with or deviance from Evangelism in the United States.
Religion is huge here, and I mean huge! At least 1 in 3 cars have some sort of prominently displayed Jesus sticker or painted sign. I cannot tell you how many businesses I saw in Accra that had names like Godly Thought Internet Cafe or Christian Mechanical Services. There you can pass 3 churches in a 5 minute walk in the camp. Both churches I've visited so far were preaching messages of humility, mercy, and thanksgiving. I've been more moved by the services I've seen here that those I've seen in the US. I'm not sure if it is because I'm jaded with my church back in the States (Remember the split over openly gay bishops? Guess which side we picked!) or because the joyful liveliness of the music and congregation is catching. Maybe it is because it is humbling to see people who have been displaced, whose families have been torn apart, and who are poorer than anyone reading this blog from back home. These are people of true faith.
It is because of this faith that religion is tool of empowerment. It can be used to promote equality to the extent that people come to believe that we are all equal in the eyes of God (or that we are all equal on the basis that none of us are God). It is because of this faith that religion can be useful in conflict resolution. It enables peace-builders to call upon people's shared belief in common principles like mercy and justice, and a people's common belief in a higher power (not even necessarily the same higher power) can serve to promote the idea that they have a high stake in their adherence to these principles. Talking to Morris has been really thought-provoking, and I've decided to attend service at as many different churches as possible while I'm here. Who'da thought? When in Rome, when in Rome...
UPDATE 01/05: So, I try to entertain the cultural relativist position as long as I can sustain it, but I've realized that there are some bad feelings about religion here that I just can't shake that are grounded in reason and observation and not just on knee-jerk reaction. In the first church I went to on New Year's Eve, all of the pastors were from the US. One was from Florida, and my mind wandered off to Terry Jones. The evidence of exported religion, coupled with the practice of selling the highest blessings to the highest bidder makes religion look like big business. Perhaps what it looks like is what it seems. I will investigate this theory more as I'm here. Either I'll find out that the churches are giving back to the people, or I'll find out that the money that the people of Buduburam are giving is being used to build bigger, better churches. If they are only collecting enough money to pay the priest, and the priest is making a reasonable salary by Ghana standard then that's a wash in my mind. The people of Ghana are generally poor, and the people of Buduburam are generally even poorer. Every church giver in the churches I went to gave money, and both churches encouraged tithing (the practice of giving 10% of your earnings to the church). I believe that the power that the church holds over the people should be aimed at minimizing hardship and suffering and on making the church community into more moral human beings that live by the principles of justice, mercy, equality, respect, honesty, etc. This is an area that stands in serious need of community development projects to alleviate poverty, increase access to clean water, improve access to education, etc., If the church is not giving back to its community when it has the means then that is using religion in the service of power, and that is wrong. I will post on this when I find out more.
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