CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION IN GHANA

Paper Presented at the Meeting of the

International Association for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education

At the Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon, Ghana

Thursday October 11, 2007.

Rev. Prof. J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

In September 2007 some sections of Ghana’s print and electronic media run series of sponsored advertisements and promotions for one of Ghana’s leading private Christian universities, the Central University College (CUC) belonging Pastor Mensa Otabil’s International Central Gospel Church (ICGC). ICGC belongs to a new stream of Pentecostal churches that have been burgeoning in sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1970s. A number of these such as the Living Faith Worldwide ministry of Bishop David O. Oyedpo have started the establishment of Christian private universities and have so far proven their merit in that area. Bishop Oyedepo’s Dominion University in Nigeria has become one of the leading institutions of higher learning in that country in less than ten years of its establishment. On October 26, CUC in Ghana relocated a greater part of its campus from the heart of Accra, the capital to Miotso a small community near Dawhenya in the Greater Accra Region. One of the reasons why CUC has been in the news item is that it is one of the first privately owned university colleges in Ghana. Secondly, it is owned by a Pentecostal church which belongs to stream of Christianity not traditionally connected with formal education, at least not at the tertiary level. Thirdly, its founder and President, Pastor Otabil has within the last two decades, emerged as a leading voice in African Christianity advocating for a proper synthesis of Christian religious expression and the translation of spirituality into practical everyday action. The desire to establish an institution of higher learning that facilitates such an agenda led to the birth of CUC in 1988.

CUC started as a short-term pastoral training institute mainly for pastors of ICGC. It became a Christian University College in 1993 expanding its programs over the years to include the academic study of Christian theology, Business Administration, Economics, Computer Science and a select number of modern languages including French. Most of its current programs are offered up to the graduate level and plans are far advanced for the establishment of schools of architecture, planning and pharmacy. A newspaper feature on CUC that appeared in The Spectator of Saturday October 16 described CUC as ‘a university college in a class of its own’. The Valley View University of the Seventh Day Adventist Church was established before CUC but the latter was the first private university to run a weekend school that affords workers the flexibility of combining work and study in their desire to improve their standings in life. In that newspaper article, Prof. V.P.Y. Gadzepo the current head of CUC, is quoted as saying that he is happy that ICGC under the leadership of Pastor Mensa Otabil ‘has been able to fulfill its dream of giving holistic higher education to its students who will serve as agents of change as its contribution to address the needs of Ghana and Africa as a whole’.

Christian Higher Education and the Church as an Agent of Change

The reference to ‘agents of change’ in this context is important. Taking a cue from the admonishment of Jesus Christ that his followers are to be agents of change, serving as salt and light in the world, Christianity has always been a religion with a strong moral ethic. Given that education is the foundation of civilization and development, the involvement in Christian higher education affords the church the opportunity to bring its moral message to bear on the lives of the men and women who are training to become the leaders of industry and political and economic policy makers in Africa. Although the emerging Christian universities in Ghana, as elsewhere in Africa are open to people from diverse religious backgrounds and moral persuasions, there is some conscious effort to draw attention to the importance of morality in public life. Thus in the Methodist Church of Ghana University College graduands, irrespective of programs being pursued, are expected to offer a general foundation course in religion, morality and ethics. 

Pastor Mensa Otabil’s initiative in Christian higher education is not the first in the recent history of independent Ghana. On the road to Dodowa in the greater Accra region, the Seventh Day Adventists, as referred to earlier, had been running the Valley View University for a significant number of years before CUC came along. The field has been expanding since them. At the turn of the 21^st century, the Methodist Church Ghana, inspired by the ICGC initiative established the Methodist University College that operates under the academic tutelage of the University of Ghana, Legon. Since then, the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church have all either established University Colleges or have announced their intentions to do so. As far as Christian higher education in Ghana is concerned things can only get better partly because the field has become competitive but more importantly there is great public demand for higher education in the country. More than any other institution in Ghana, the church is trusted to deliver in this new field because of its own heritage as having established some of the best basic and secondary educational institutions in Ghana. Until fairly recently, it was impossible to point to any secondary institution of repute in sub-Saharan Africa that was not church related and the tradition has been sustained as I point out below.

Education and Mission

Thus in most sub-Saharan African countries like Ghana, formal education has always been an integral part of Christian mission. Wesley Girls High School, Mfantsipim School, Adisadel College, Mawuli, St. Roses, the Presbyterian Boys Secondary School and many other such leading secondary schools in Ghana, to name only a few, were established by Christian missions. It is these educational institutions, combining academic work and Christian moral virtues that helped to form the core of the leadership of post-independent Ghana following the collapse of colonialism. In venturing into higher education at the tertiary level therefore, the churches are building on a rich intellectual and religious heritage that has always seen formal education and Christian mission as inseparable entities in the building of society. It is instructive that in sub-Saharan Africa, as competently documented by John Kofi Agbeti, higher education as far as the missions were concerned, was provided within the context of seminary training. This year, 2007, the Trinity Theological Seminary is celebrating her 65^th anniversary making that institution the oldest tertiary educational institution in Ghana. Its alumni served mainly as church pastors but many of them also served as chaplains to the secondary schools, an initiative that got the church directly involved in academic training and character formation just before people moved into independent lives as young adults in the universities.

Ghana’s universities have always had a Christian orientation too. For example every single hall of residence at the University of Ghana has a chapel attached to it. During my years as the resident pastor of the University of Ghana based Legon Interdenominational Church, an evangelical Protestant congregation that used to meet in the Legon Hall Chapel, I always wondered why the pews were built to face each other. A senior member of the university once explained to me that they were built that way to maintain and protect the integrity of the chapels as places of worship. It was feared that with the growth of the universities in future, it was possible for her leadership one day, to want to convert the chapels into lecture halls. To make it difficult for that switch to occur, the pews were fixed permanently to the floor and made to face each other so that it is difficult to convert them into lecture halls. Given the lamentations for extra teaching space at the University of Ghana today, those fears have proven very insightful, clairvoyant and genuine. 

Although Ghana’s universities could be said to have been established on Christian moral foundations, the institutions are not Christian in orientation as such. At the University of Ghana even the former Divinity Faculty was, following the attainment of independence, prevailed upon to broaden its outlook to include the study of non-Christian religions or risk the loss of support by the government of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. In response the name of the Divinity School had to change to reflect the religious neutrality of its new programs, hence the current name, Department for the Study of Religions. Christian influence on the lives and future of university students in Ghana has thus mainly come from the churches and Para-church organizations, many of them evangelical in orientation, that have proliferated on the campuses since the 1960s. Until the influx of neo-Pentecostal churches into the campuses of the country’s main universities in the 1990s, the trail blazer in the provision of Christian education and fellowship for students was the Ghana Fellowship of Evangelical Students the local arm of the well-known International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

Potentialities of Christian Higher Education

Christian higher education has many potentialities but here we can only list a few. Among these is the fact that it could potentially help in accountability and stewardship and help promote social responsibility in the community. Any form of education that promotes Christian morality and also ensures the formation of credible leadership and thereby helps the church to gain a greater influence and voice in society. In the pursuit of those endeavors there could be challenges along the way. One of these is that the cost of higher education is generally too high since it is offered at the private level and the churches have been caught in that trap. It is beginning to look as if the churches established the new universities for the children of the rich and well to do. Further, the private universities, including those run by the churches, are drawing too heavily on the existing faculty of government universities. The higher salaries offered by the Christian universities made possible by the charge of economic fees means that existing government institutions attended by the poor are left without enough lecturers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is pertinent to point out that education remains the key to the future development of Africa. The churches, by getting directly involved in education therefore, have identified a key area of mission through which her influence could be felt in public life because leadership with integrity is the key to Africa’s future.