History of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: Chapter 5 Addendum

Testimony: The Ghana Mission of First Presbyterian Church

by the Rev. Dr. G. Christopher Scruggs

In order to understand the mission of Advent Presbyterian Church to Ghana, several pieces of background information are important, some beginning many years before that mission began. Before attending seminary, I was an attorney in Houston, Texas, and an elder at First Presbyterian Church of Houston, which was then pastored by John William Lancaster, a founding Trustee of The Outreach Foundation. While in seminary, I had some relationship with Outreach via Donald Marsden and Dr. Bill Long, a former Trustee who was my pastor at Third Presbyterian Church in Richmond, VA during those years. Shortly after seminary, Kathy and I went to First Presbyterian Church of Brownsville, Tennessee, where I was the pastor. During those years I visited Russia with Don Marsden, thanks to the generosity of a member of Third Presbyterian in Richmond. In addition, Bill Bryant, who was by that time the Executive Director of The Outreach Foundation, came to speak at First Brownsville at a renewal weekend and on other occasions. Our congregation began to support Outreach.

History of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: The 2008 South-South Mission Consultation on Lay Ministry

Chapter 5 The 2008 South-South Mission Consultation on Lay Ministry

Results of the 2006 trip to Ghana

Following their return to the United States, several members of the 2006 Ghana trip went to work, connecting their respective churches with Ghana. The Rev. Dr. Dianne Shields, Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church, Arlington, Illinois, developed a church-church relationship between First Presbyterian and the Kaneshie Presbyterian Church in Ghana. The Rev. Gayle Walker, Associate Pastor at Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee, involved her congregation in a project in Ghana through Living Waters for the World, a Presbyterian mission organization that installs clean water systems. Idlewild’s Living Waters team installed a clean water system for a women’s retreat center we had visited in Ghana. Elder Don Brown began his service as a Trustee of The Outreach Foundation and developed a particular passion for God’s work in Madagascar, Egypt, and Ghana.

History of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: Learning at the Feet of African Christians

Chapter 4

Kwame Bediako and the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission, and Culture: Learning at the Feet of African Christians

Africa as a resource for mission and theology: We have seen in the preceding two chapters that by the middle of the 1990s African Christians had inspired American Presbyterians to a renewed engagement in mission and evangelism at home and abroad. Over the next ten years, another side of the Christian movement in Africa would begin to impact Presbyterians in America—theology. That is to say, more and more American Christians, including several of us in The Outreach Foundation, began reading works by African Christians which offered fresh understandings of the Good News of Jesus Christ for faith and practice. The impact was like seeing new facets of a diamond, the “gospel diamond.” [1]

History of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: The Northern Outreach Program

Chapter 3

The Northern Outreach Program: Missional Renewal in Ghana That Encouraged New Evangelistic Initiatives of the PCUSA

Beginning of the Northern Outreach Program

On several of their trips to Ghana in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bill and Nancy Warlick met two dedicated young Presbyterian pastors, John Azumah and Solomon Sule-Saa. They were leaders of a specialized evangelistic outreach of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana to people from northern Ghana who had moved to southern Ghana in search of work. This initiative, the “Northern Outreach Program,” caught Bill Warlick’s attention, and he included it under the umbrella of the Project for Evangelism and Church Growth in Africa. This chapter will chronicle the history of the Northern Outreach Program and its impact on several evangelistic initiatives that were emerging within and beyond the PCUSA.

History of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: The Project for Evangelism and Church Growth in Africa

Chapter 2

The Project for Evangelism and Church Growth in Africa

John Pritchard, PCUS Africa Secretary: Mr. John Pritchard and his family served as missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) to the Belgian Congo which became Zaire (and still later, Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. Afterward, he joined the staff of the Division of International Mission of the PCUS, eventually becoming the Africa Secretary by the 1980s. He loved Africa and was deeply committed to the African Church.

Pritchard was also pragmatic. He knew that African churches had great needs and that the American church had great resources. He saw it as part of his work to connect the needs of the one with the resources of the other, and he was extremely effective at it. According to Pritchard’s successor in the Africa Office, the Rev. Dr. Hunter Farrell, “there were perhaps twenty tall-steeple pastors John could call on a moment’s notice and make a ‘big ask,’ and they would generally respond quickly and positively.” [1]

The Outreach Foundation in Ghana: 1984-2020

Chapter 1

American Presbyterian Encounters with the Presbyterians of Ghana, 1957-1983

This volume is the third in a series of histories of The Outreach Foundation in countries for which I was the primary liaison of The Outreach Foundation. The story of The Outreach Foundation in Ghana predates my arrival at Outreach by more than a decade, and the story of the Church in Ghana precedes The Outreach Foundation’s existence by over 150 years. Some of the themes that I will be emphasizing in this history are the collaborative nature of the mission work in the early years of The Outreach Foundation’s involvement in Ghana, the role of personal relationships that we developed with key leaders that have driven the work over the years, and above all, the sense that Christianity in Africa, of which Ghana is but one example, is in some sense “representative Christianity.

Outreach Stories

Testimony: The Ghana Mission of First Presbyterian Church

Chapter 5

The 2008 South-South Mission Consultation on Lay Ministry