Operational Christianity started 267 Years ago. (As at December 2020)
The most momentous discovery in western Africa came in 1471, when Portuguese captains first reached the coast of modern Ghana between the mouths of the Ankobra and Volta rivers.
Yes! Some of the missionaries came with them (549 years ago) but many died from the cruel tropical weather of forested West Africa.
After earlier unsuccessful attempts by the missionaries Chretien Proten, Henrick Huckuff and Jacobus Capitein, the Anglican, Rev. Thomas Thompson, arrived in Cape Coast in 1752.
Among his pioneering achievements, he arranged for three youths to be sent to England for training as evangelists.
One of them, Philip Quaque, returned in 1765 as an ordained priest.
He worked zealously as an evangelist and schoolmaster in the Castle School until his death in 1816.
His work, however, did not extend much beyond Cape Coast and the neighbouring area.
Renewed evangelism started when the Basel (later known as Presbyterian) missionaries started work at Osu (Accra).
Soon after, in 1835 they moved up to Akropong on the hills in Akuapem, where the pioneer missionary the Rev. Andreas Riis, assisted by a team of West Indian evangelists, laid the foundations of the Basel Missionary Church in the country.
In the same year as the Basel missionaries settled in Akuapem in 1835, the Wesleyan (later Methodist) Church was established at Cape Coast by the Rev. Joseph Dunwell.
He was followed, three years afterwards, by the Rev. Thomas Birch Freeman, son of a London-based West Indian father and an English mother.
He introduced the Methodist Church in Asante in 1839, and won the support of the Asante king, Otumfour Nana Kweku Duah I who reigned between 25th August 1834 to 27th April 1867)
In 1880, two Roman Catholic priests of the Society of African Missions (S.M.A.), Father Auguste Moreau and Father Eugene Murat, arrived at Elmina and revived the Roman Catholic Church in Ghana.
The American Episcopal Evangelical (A.M.E.) Zion Church owes its foundation in Ghana to Bishop J. Bryan Small, who started work first at Keta in 1898.
The city of Akuropong capital of the Akan state of Akuapem in Ghana, has known the Christian presence during the last 186 years, initially centered on the Basel Mission, then on the Free Church of Scotland, and now on the Presbyterian Church of Ghana.
Today almost all of the population is Presbyterian, although the ancestral royal cult and many spirit cults still flourish.
From 1835 to the middle of the nineteenth century the Church was in opposition to traditional religion.
But with the abolition of slavery, the introduction of cocoa, and the Church’s efficient school system, she gradually became the Church of the social elite.
It also plays an important role in organization of inheritances within matrilineal “houses” and thus exerts influence from a legal point of view.
Although most people are Presbyterians, they can also go to spirit and other cults, mostly Christian and Pentecostal movements, to find cures for disease and lack of success in this world.
More women than men attend church, and the more strict churchgoers tend to be wealthier and of higher social status than less churchgoers or non-Presbyterians.
It happens that some people convert at the end of their life in order to be buried in the prestigious Presbyterian cemetery.
From 1870 to 1914 the Basel Mission succeeded in extending its work from the Akwapim Ridge to Kwahu, Akim and Asante and across the Volta as far as Yendi the north in 1913.
During this period, difficulties encountered were different from the initial difficulties which will more related to sickness, deaths and the suspicion of indigenous people in accepting the Gospel.
Now, with the burgeoning Cocoa industry, the expansion of commercial activity, the development of gold mines and the building of roads and railways disturbed the traditional lifestyle.
This decreased the zeal with which people began to accept the Gospel leading to nominal Christianity.
Moreover, the Islamic religion was also being introduced to the southern section of the country by Muslim immigrants from the north of the colony.
In spite of all this, with the advent of the First World War in 1914 in the Kwaku District there were 21 congregations with a total of over 2500 members.
The Akim area had about 3400 converts over 32 villages and there were about 900 children distributed in 27 Schools.
The Basel Mission, as a result of this phenomenal expansion trained many local personnel to man the new stations.
After World War I was declared in 1914, the German missionaries were restricted in their movements by the British in the British colonies.
The restrictions intensified until in the second week of 1917, when all German missionaries were rounded up, brought to Accra and deportations began on December 16.
The work of the Basel Missionary Society was taken over with the consent of the Basel Mission Home Board by the United Free Church of Scotland whose ecclesiastical organization was Presbyterian.
The Scottish Missionary Society had been working in Calabar, Nigeria, also a British colony adjacent to the Gold Coast and it was from the Calabar Presbyterian Church in Nigeria that a missionary was sent to take charge of the Presbyterian work in the Gold Coast after the deportations.
This was a bitter pill for the Basel Mission to swallow after 19 years of devoted service in the mission field in the Gold Coast but they were not dismayed when they considered that “in education and agriculture and artisan training and in the development of commerce, and medical services and concern for social welfare of the people, the name Basel by the time of expulsion of the mission from the country, had become a treasured word in the minds of the people”.
By February 2, 1918, all Basel missionaries had been deported from the Gold Coast.
