Ghana #7: Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission, and Culture

The team visits the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission, and Culture

by Jeff Ritchie, for the team

Today we visited the Akrofi-Christaller Institute for Theology, Mission, and Culture (ACI) located on top of a ridge outside Accra. ACI has long been a mecca for me to go deeper into African Christian studies, and I hoped our Palms Presbyterian friends would be as inspired during their visit as I have been the numerous times I’ve been there. We were not disappointed.

The Rev. Dr. Solomon Sule-Saa, Director of the Center for Interfaith Studies and Engagement in Africa, is pictured holding his PhD dissertation.

Our first meeting was with the Rev. Dr. Solomon Sule-Saa, Director of an initiative at Akrofi-Christaller Institute titled the Center for Interfaith Studies and Engagement in Africa. Solomon has been a personal friend since 1992, and I had followed his ministry over the years. Caryl Weinberg also had a very long friendship with him and was eager to see this new ministry.

After receiving “elephant-sized” hugs from this dear friend, Solomon and his colleagues introduced us to the Center. Its primary mission is to equip Christian leaders, resource Christian scholars and develop biblically-based reflection on interfaith issues in general, and Muslim-Christian interface in Africa in particular, through teaching, research, publications, and consultancy. One phrase in the presentation jumped out at us. A “dialogue of life” is going on every day at the grass-roots level of Ghanaian society as Christians and Muslims interact. Professor Sule-Saa and his colleagues, Michael Nortey and Emmanuel Tettey, are developing the Center for Interfaith Relations to enhance that dialogue of life for deeper relationships between Christians and Muslims as they speak about their respective faiths and as they cooperate for the common good in which they all have a vital stake by virtue of their shared humanity. They look forward to working with their colleague and friend, Professor John Azumah, whose Sanneh Institute we are going to see launched tomorrow.

We then toured the library at Akrofi-Christaller Institute, for which we had brought a suitcase of books. It looked like a place where one could spend a couple of weeks of study leave or even a sabbatical!

The greatest treat of our time at ACI came next. Dr. Gillian Mary Bediako, Deputy Director of Akrofi-Christaller, brought two colleagues with her to speak to our group on the “primal worldview” that many of the world’s peoples have as the substratum of their beliefs and practices. Briefly, a primal worldview is one in which people acknowledge that there is a spiritual realm that is just as real as the physical realm. The spiritual and physical realms interact with each other in ways that those holding this primal worldview can perceive. By way of example, Dr. Bediako cited the Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales whose primal worldview prepared them to adopt Christianity with great fervor. Their concept of “thin spaces,” places where heaven seems a bit closer to earth than other physical spaces, illustrates that primal worldview and how it became the soil out of which the distinctive spirituality of early Celtic Christianity emerged.

Another speaker in this forum, Dr. Joshua Settles, testified that his years at Akrofi-Christaller have given him language to describe his lived experience of Christianity in the African American Church. Why had his forebears, who were enslaved by professing Christians, adopted the gospel and seen it as good news? Dr. Settles said that it had to do with the primal worldview that they brought with them from Africa. Reading the Bible through that primal worldview, they could identify with the biblical story and see themselves as the Israelites who had been enslaved in Egypt and then were delivered supernaturally by a mighty God who is greater than all human evil.

The more we heard, the more interested we became in this phenomenon of “primal worldview.” We continued our conversations over lunch, and it was with great reluctance that we parted. We had come to Ghana for many reasons, but a new “take away” that was emerging from this trip was a desire to see our faith more and more from the “Majority World” perspective: namely, that all of life is spiritual, that the sacred is present in the ordinary stuff of life. This awareness is present throughout scripture and is the lived experience of the majority of the Christians in Africa today.