Campus Currents

“So … What Did You Do This Summer?”

In America, if someone named a business “God’s Grace Chicken Feed” or “Jesus Christ Motors” people would think it was quaint at best. Not so in Ghana, Africa.

When Walla Walla College students and faculty traveled to Ghana in August to deliver a series of evangelistic meetings, they discovered a major cultural difference in the way people in that country approach religion. Quite simply, it pervades everything they do, including their business.

Ghana has the highest concentration of Christians (60 percent) in West Africa. Fifteen percent are Muslim, and the remaining 25 percent continue the traditional African religions. Atheism is practically unheard of.

Twenty students and faculty from WWC and Pacific Union College traveled to Ghana this summer to each deliver a 16-part series of evangelistic meetings. They came prepared with a series of sermon outlines and PowerPoint presentations provided by Robert Folkenberg, global evangelist for the Carolina Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and former president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

After a day of orientation, each student paired up with a local Ghanaian Seventh-day Adventist pastor who would serve as his or her guide and translator. Each day the pastors would also drive the students from their hotel in Kumasi to their designated churches, all less than a two-hour drive away.

Walla Walla College theology student Tyrone Bryan recalls that at his church in Aboabo, “Attendance was low the first evening.” His pastor reassured him that it might take a couple of days for the word to spread, and each night the numbers grew.

Bryan found that Sabbath, a doctrine that is often tricky for Adventist evangelists, was one of the easiest to preach in Ghana. “Long before Christianity ever came to Ghana,” he says, “the Ashanti people kept the seventh day as a holy day.”

The Ashanti are one of the largest tribal groups in Ghana. Their word for the seventh day is “memenedaa” which means “I Am Who I Am Day.”

Walla Walla College theology student Howard Vandermark was excited at the way he was able to relate to the people through their culture. “One night,” says Vandermark, “at about 2:30 in the morning, I heard a huge, crazy sound—drums and screaming.” He found out the next day it was a rally for an upcoming soccer game, so he used a soccer illustration for one of his next sermons, which was well received.

An estimated 8,000 people attended the meetings, roughly a third of whom were non-Adventist. The trip was one of many that have been organized by Global Evangelism, cosponsored by the Carolina Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and “The Quiet Hour.” The goals of Global Evangelism include assisting churches in evangelism and making it possible for every ministerial student to conduct an evangelistic series before they graduate.

Participants in the Ghana trip included: Zdravko Stefanovic, professor of biblical studies; David Parks, retired theology professor; theology majors James Akers, Alin Apostol, Tyrone Bryan, Ron Cummings, Lucas Porter, and Howard Vandermark; elementary education major Melissa McGinnis; and former WWC student Jody Foster.W

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