AFRICA HEADS OF CHURCHES SUMMIT GHANA 2016

The venue: The Pentecost Inernational Conference Centre

The African Heads of Churches Summit

It was held in Accra, in her Suburban, in Fevbruary 8 to 12, a conference of African Leaders of Churches, Unions or Federation of Churches, to discuss the responses our churches must bring to the challenges they are facing in the world today particularly regarding the rise of Islam, specialy a fundamentalist Islam in Africa.

It was not easy to mobilize the Christian leadership from ouht to North and from East to West of the Continent. Despite some coordination problems, we finaly met in Ghana at Pentecostal International Conference Centre.

This meeting was aiming to find the best pratical way of promoting increased collaboration between ministries, churches and mission networks within Africa and beyond, in the global church, in pursuit of the overall goal of seeing a local Church-driven missional engagement in and out of Africa. This meeting had also to be a forum for connecting and strategic moblization of Church Leaders in Africa to reposition their denominations in seeing  missions become the main concern of the local Church. Leaders of the Church in Africa should b the main drivers in obedience of Lord’s command to go and make disciples in all nations.

We used to tart our days with a meditation on the seven churches of the Book of Revelation. Through

the reproaches that Christ had made to the seven churches, we were led to understand  those He would make to the Church in Africa today. After an exhortation by the Chaplain on these passages, we had to let ourselves be challenged by God around a discussion table, by  examining the flaws and the faults of the Church in Africa that would make us look like the churches of the Book of Revelation, in order to find solutions.

Then the plenary interventions were intended to bring light on the challenges that the Church in Africa faces. While it is true that there is a growing churches in Africa, mainly due to the exponential growth of evangelicals, it is true that Africa is confronted with a very aggressive Islam, especialy radical, whose groth is more exponential than evangelicals’. This one has moreover the finacial support of the Arab-Muslim powers, while Christians are increasingly released by Western powers. The consequences of these situations are multiple : The conquest by Muslims in Central African Republic (CAR), the « Selekas », consisted in ¾ Muslim fundamentalists; attacks of Boko Haram, whose name means "Western Education is Cursed » and whose goal was (and still is) to overthrow the government to establish an Islamic state (even before IS). Their aim is to tranform Africa into Muslim territory and they think that by sizing the Centre of the Continent they will reach their goal more quickly and occupy the whole of Africa. Their modus operandi : the massacre and terror. The history of killings of Christian students in Kenyan University are an example.

The question that arises then to the leaders of African Churches is: what are the solutionss of this problem, what is the Christian witness to these challenges. The rally was intended to motivate the Christian Leadership in Africa to address  the challenges. It will not be easy, it will take a big motivation because there will be much suffering but this is what will take us forward with the awareness of the mission entrusted to us by Whom we believe in. (Matthew 5: 14-15)

As authentic Christians, we must understand that being salt and light of the earth will not only address to a denomination, ours : the message of the cross is a result of God’s love for man made in His image. May God be gracious to us !