World Cup Churches: 30.Ghana

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Ghana, it must be said, is not short of Christian churches.  In fact, even if Ghana started last year where Saudi Arabia is - with no Christian churches - it would still not be short of churches given the exponential growth it has.  New churches appear every Sunday.  It is an example of why, despite the miserable decline in many European countries, the Christian Church across the world continues to grow.

Spoilt for choice (or more accurately overwhelmed and bewildered by choice) I am going for Action Chapel International for this World Cup Churches blog. This probably has more to do with the founder-pastor Nicholas Duncan-Williams (or perhaps rather his current wife) than with the church itself, which is 'just another' vast Ghanaian church (with a Communion table that might trump the ones in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican).

Speaking of Trump - here he is on the front row in the rather more humble (at least in size) St John's Episcopal Church, Washington, prior to his Inauguration, with Melanie at his side.

There on the platform is the Archbishop, Patriarch, Founder-Pastor and General Factotum of Action Chapel International, headquartered in Accra, Ghana, leading prayers.  Those of us that have not heard of Nicholas before are probably revealing more about ourselves than about him by not knowing him.  

How does he end up in St John's on that auspicious day?  I am not privy to that, but it has something to do, I feel sure, with his wife.  Rosa Whitaker is American, but not just any American (with apologies to the others).  The CEO (and founder of course) of TWG (The Whitaker Group) a US based African Investment enterprise she has served different Presidents, represented the US in Trade negotiations and agreements across Africa yet also worked in various Christian enterprises including Mercy Ships International and Pan African TV.

Or to put it another way, to step into the vast auditorium of ACI is possibly to fail to grasp the reach of this and some other African churches across the world where Western churches have often lost their voice.

Whether Nicholas prayed for the right things - and whether his prayer was answered - I leave to the wisdom of Almighty God.

World Cup Churches: 25. Brazil

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

A few years ago I was going about my business in Wood Green Shopping City a mile or so from where I live.  A young woman was enthusiastically giving away a free newspaper and, either because of something she said or by glancing at the paper, I realised this was a kind of Christian thing.  

The initials UCKG meant nothing to me.  Once I worked out that U stood for Universal I was quite suspicious as for some reason that is a word favoured at the cultic and extreme margins of Christianity.  

As the conversation continued it became clear that the girl was not antagonistic to someone from a Baptist Church (of course not knowing I was a Pastor).  This was a good non-cultic signal.  Yet at the same time she was not remotely interested in my church or anything about it: she was there solely to recruit to whatever the UCKG was.

Curiosity led me to find out later what I had met with - as I still didn't know.  I learned that this was a Pentecostal denomination founded in 1977 in Brazil and part of the great, growing exponentially, get-rich-quick Protestant movement in formerly Catholic Brazil.

Which brings me to a church in Brazil built 2010-2014, the HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and a larger-than-life rebuild of the Old Testament Temple of Solomon:

The eccentricities of this campus are legendary, but before we dismiss its (unintended) hallmarks of parody we should note that it has been visited by two Brazilian Presidents.  In its homeland it is a serious business.

You may feel that imitating Solomon's Temple is a bit grand, even for a money-spinning Neo-Pentecostal enterprise.  In which case you'd be underestimating the enterprise because this building together with its imitation Ark of the Covenant is way bigger than poor old king Solomon's effort - we are trying to impress a lot more than the Queen of Sheba these days.  Indeed so much bigger that Solomon's original build was more like a large scale model prototype.

This may seem out of step with the supposed founder of its faith, a carpenter from Nazareth.  But it is well in step with the founder-pastor of the enterprise itself who is 'worth' over a billion dollars.  Though we may want to tease out the meaning of 'worth' in this context . . .

And perhaps it is better to remember that Solomon's temple was not a prototype of a church building but of Christ himself and his people.

Pentecostal Church Worship Leader leads worship for Redeemed Christian Church of God Pastor preaching at Methodist Central Hall

I enjoy the Baptist Assembly.  And I enjoyed the one that has just finished.  Many thanks to those who worked hard to make it happen.  Given that these are tense times of financial shortfall it was especially good that spiritual focus and Christian courtesy were maintained.

True, in Baptist Churches (and others) large and small I attend occasions that are more worshipful, more prayerful, more Biblical, more challenging, more comforting, more encouraging, more friendly, more inspiring or more valuable.  Yet the general sense of the occasion is that the Lord Jesus is at the centre and the machinations of church structural life are at the margins and this is something that many a meeting of church groupings fails to achieve.

This year's Assembly was largely at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London.  This produced a very different feel to the balmy seaside locations in far flung corners of England that the Assembly usually inhabits.  The sound of police sirens replaced that of seagulls, strolls on the promenade gave way to escalators on the Underground and the proportion of white faces dropped in a minor version of the manner familiar to all who leave little English towns for a daring day trip to the Metropolis.

It was peciliar at times.  One peculiarity, captured in the blog heading, is the strange way that the Baptists themselves became the audience in their own Assembly.  This was not universally true but was a marked feature of the final gathering.  The Baptist Union has shrunk of course since its Edwardian heyday and indeed its current project is to attempt to shrink some more (for financial reasons).  But it still consists of thousands of churches, leaders and tens of thousands of Christians.  Worldwide, Baptist Christians make up one of Christianity's more populous and dynamic branches. Yet assembling British Baptists ended their Assembly at a location and with a worship leader and a speaker all from different expressions of the church.

I'm not sure what I think about this.  (I'm a lot surer about what I think of the second peculiarity but I'll come on to that another day when I've calmed down).  My instincts, like that of most Baptist Christians in the UK, are not very denominational (see earlier post).  Surely, though, Baptists have in their worldwide ranks some people who can lead worship at the three evening meetings as helpfully as the guy who did so.  Yes, I know he went to the Royal College of Music but so does the pianist in our Church Youth band.  Nothing wrong with what he did, but little variance from soft rock convention-style fare (well, perhaps that was what was wrong with it . . .).  The speaker was a national figure of considerable warmth and import but his visiting courtesy probably rendered him far less prophetic than he would have been to his own church grouping if it was in the same state that we are.

Perhaps the difference between visiting artistes and family members is that the artiste performs on the night but a family member behaves with an eye on the next morning.  The worship leader artiste imagines the next conference not next Sunday in Bloglington Baptist Church; the artiste speaker imagines ecumenical networking not Bloglington BC's (and the Blogshire Association's)  inadequacies inherited, incoming or self-inflicted.  Is this why the family counsellor will always make it their goal to get a troubled family talking to itself rather than listening to their outside input?

One connected observation.  If our speaker, worship leader or the Central Hall itself wish to become recognised as Baptist ministries (and no, I don't think this is likely!) they may yet be surprised at the paperwork, committee work, and possible rejection this would entail for them.  I think there is irony in that somewhere.

One of my problems has always been that, even when I'm enjoying myself, I think too much. 

Sweden

Someone asked me an obvious question, "Was it cold?".

Perhaps we can clear that one up with a couple of pictures;

I'm very grateful that several people helped to make my visit to Sweden worthwhile by giving me people I could visit.

Any Pastor visiting Stockholm is likely to find himself looking up the Filadelfia Church. For much of the 20th Century it was the largest Pentecostal Church in the world and although we have become accustomed to megachurches in contemporary-style buildings it is amazing to think that this cinemalike building was constructed in the 1930s. It was great to be shown a glimpse of the work of this great church.

Lewi Pethrus was Pastor for nearly half a century and was one of the instruments by which Pentecostalism became a great force in northern Scandinavia (though the original Filadelfia Church was that of T.B.Barratt in Oslo, Norway, perhaps the true Father of European Pentecostalism). Today, in this tradition, one of Europe's largest congregations gathers in the modest-size city of Uppsala at Livets Ord (Word of Life).

Lewi Pethrus began ministry in a small Baptist Church before the Swedish Baptist Union dispensed with him. Not so many kilometres from the Filadelfia Church I was shown round a more modest Baptist Church to which I had been pointed by a contact in Stockholm. The friendly man who showed me round was at pains to tell me what they weren't.

"In Sweden we are not conservative," he smiled. "I wish George Bush had never been born." (A comment that struck me as somewhat obscure to the purpose of a Swede explaining the church's work to an Englishman). And then out of the blue this classic comment,

"I've been coming to this Church for over twenty years and I've never heard hell mentioned. Not once, praise the Lord!"

So were the seats of this church in which you had a cat-in-hell's chance of hearing about hell filled with grateful, positive worshippers? You can probably guess the answer is No. "Young people round here are really sad. There have been a lot of suicides. But they never even think about Church."

A reasonable estimate of the Gospel material from the mouth of Jesus (as some miltant atheists have also pointed out) is that 10% of it is about hell, judgment and/or eternal punishment or loss. Jesus was switched on to a lost world. There is no more point in a Church in a lost society not mentioning hell than there is in an ambulance crew not wanting to upset anyone by flashing blue lights and sounding a disturbing horn.