The Chairman of the Church of Pentecost (COP), Apostle Eric Nyamekye, has appealed to Ghanaians not to turn the upcoming general election into a religious battle.
Rather, the contest, he said, should be based on issues geared towards an improvement in the lives of Ghanaians.
He said for instance, Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully, so the election should not be used to divide Ghanaians.
“This election is a bit different from the past because of the fact that there is a Muslim who is standing and there is a Christian contesting. “We don’t want it to be a religious battle and so as a church we are mindful, and we are going to educate our members not to turn this election into a religious kind of battle,” he said.
Meeting
Apostle Nyamekye said this on the sidelines of the opening of the 18th Extraordinary Council Meeting of the COP at the Pentecost Convention Centre (PCC) at Gomoa Fetteh in the Central Region last Wednesday.
This year, he said, such a campaign would be intensified, looking at the crucial nature of the elections, so that the country would remain peaceful before, during and after the polls.
In the last elections, he said, some persons lost their lives and, “we don’t want that to happen again. No Ghanaian should die for someone to become a president or a Member of Parliament”.
He added that the church would supervise the elections in areas that it could
State of the church
In his state of the church address, Apostle Nyamekye said in the year under review, God in His unfailing love for the church continued to raise individuals from both within and outside the COP to support its work.
Those people, he said, included the ones who fervently offered intercessory prayers for the church in their closets and others who participated in the Tuesday night virtual prayers.
As of December 2023, he said, there were a total of 453 non-ministerial headquarters staff on the official payroll of the church, made up of 229 employees at the area offices and 224 at the head office.
He mentioned that during the same period, the total number of ministers worldwide stood at 3,405. While 116 served as missionaries, 1,933 ministered in Ghana. “The church also has 165,345 officers, comprising 53,762 elders, 36,088 deacons, and 75,495 deaconesses,” he said.
Apostle Nyamekye stated that by December 2023, the church had established its presence in 170 countries across the world, with a total membership of 4,534,644, representing a 7.9 per cent increase.
Notably, he added that the church in Ghana alone had a total membership of 3,864,355, accounting for 85 per cent of the total membership worldwide. The Chairman of the COP said last year the church undertook 390,545 evangelistic outreaches, representing a significant increase of 19.8 per cent from the previous year’s 325,893.
Challenges
On challenges, Apostle Nyamekye pointed out that the effectiveness of discipleship intervention such as Bible study, home cell meetings and Sunday school classes continued to be hampered by the high level of illiteracy in the rural areas.
Moreover, he said there was also the migration of members, especially the youth, from rural areas to urban centres to seek greener pastures due to unemployment. Again, he said poor attendance at evening services persisted, particularly in the urban areas.
At the event, some individuals who had constantly exhibited excellence and hard work in various fields of endeavour were honoured and presented with citations.
