Reflections on a visit to the Methodist Church in Ghana

I was delighted to see Doris Saah’s piece in The Recorder of 16 May, as I was not long returned from an Encounter visit to the Methodist Church in Ghana.

To say that the visit was remarkable does not begin to cover the richness of what we experienced. We were a mixed group: a circuit Lay Worker, seven students from the Cliff Year with two of their staff members, members of the Connexional Team, former chaplain of the Ghanaian Methodist Fellowship in Britain, and a District Superintendent from Ireland.

We were hosted with grace and generosity. We began and ended in the capital, Accra, with visits to the impressive new building that houses the Ghanaian equivalent of the Connexional Team.

Wesley Towers has fourteen storeys with offices for staff, Conference facilities, hotel rooms, a restaurant, and office space for rent to other organisations. Its size and position proclaims that the Methodist Church is a vibrant part of life in the capital and throughout the nation.

We travelled to Cape Coast, where the 190 year history of the Methodist Church in Ghana began, and then flew to Tamale to visit some of the services that the Church offers in the poorer, rural communities in the North.

Everywhere we went, we celebrated that we came as partners to listen and to learn. But what did we mean? Particularly, what do we mean in the context in which the Conference has directed that we move to a differ way of working from that which we have operated in the past, where we have fewer mission partners than once we did, and when the World Church Fund no longer has large amounts of money to dispense.

As I have reflected, I have come to wonder if a definition of what partnership is includes a number of overlapping elements.

Firstly, partnership (and this is the most obvious) means working together. Part of the distinctive story of the Methodist Church in Ghana is that it was born from the co-working of British missionaries and indigenous Christians.

When the Wesleyan Methodist Conference dispatched Joseph Dunwell to the Gold Coast in 1835, it did so in response to a request from the Fante Bible Band who had written to ask for copies of the Bible and for help in interpreting it.

As we met Ghanaian Methodists and learned more of the story, we were repeatedly hearing that this is how the British Connexion was viewed – not as the planter of a Church but as co-workers.

Joseph Dunwell died within six months of landing at Cape Coast. One of the memorials refers to him as ‘the pace-setter’. I find that an helpful image of this aspect of partnership – one who runs in order to help the other runners to give of their best, who might not be there in the longer term but acts as a catalyst at a key stage of the partner’s life.

Secondly, as Dunwell’s story makes clear, partnership means helping in time of need. There is a number of projects in Ghana in whose development the Methodist Church in Britain (MCB) has played a key role and a number of others where there were opportunities to do more.

We visited a training centre that is nearing completion which was funded by a capacity-building grant from the MCB. It was a comparatively small thing, but a clinic serving a number of districts lacked some essential equipment and one need we could immediately meet was the provision of funds for a refrigerator to store vaccines and other medical supplies.

The capacity-building grant was amongst the last that the Global Relationships committee has been able to offer. Partnerships change over time and we in Britain have been clear that we need to move towards a relationship that is built less on the granting of funds. In part, we want to honour the autonomy of our partners without compromising their independence; in part, we are simply not as wealthy as once we were: the World Mission Fund can no longer support the type or scale of the projects we used to support.

Recognising that partnerships change also means being honest about how we have come to the point we have reached, and for British Methodists that raises some very uncomfortable questions.

It is impossible to understand the relationship between our two churches without understanding the history of British government in Ghana, and it is impossible to understand that history without acknowledging the part that the slave trade played in colonisation.

The most challenging part of the visit for many of us was the tour of the castles in Cape Coast. Castles is a euphemism – these were the bases of the British forces on the Gold Coast in which enslaved peoples were held before they were transported to the Americas. The squalor of the conditions in which slaves were held was shocking and I struggle to imagine how it must have felt to pass through the ‘Door of No Return’.

We are currently wrestling with the legacy on both our churches and indeed on other West African Churches and the Church in the Caribbean and Americas, as we live out the commitment we have made to exploring what reparatory justice means following the resolution of the Conference in 2021.

Of course, John Wesley railed against the slave trade and was an early supporter of William Wilberforce; of course, by the time that Dunwell landed, the British Government had outlawed both the trade in and the holding of slaves; of course, we now find the very idea of slavery abhorrent and have in place procurement policies that assure us that suppliers are not part of human trafficking arrangements.

But none of that changes the facts that the economic prosperity of Britain in the 19th century when Methodism flourished was built on the atrocity that was the slave trade. If we are truly to be partners with African Churches, we need to have conversations about these things, however hard that is.

As we can have conversations about more recent issues, as partnership means learning about our each other’s contemporary reality. Many of our group were surprised at the nature of our visit to the mosque in Tamale.

The majority of the population in Northern Ghana in Muslim and we were honoured to meet the Chief Iman. Both men and women were welcomed into the same space (although the Mosque had separate spaces for prayer) and we learned about the vital role that education has played in enabling Christians and Muslims to view each other as fellow-worshippers of God with much to share with each other.

It was clear that the evident friendship between Methodist and Muslim leadership in Tamale was not taken for granted but offers precious signs of hope in a world where there is currently so much suspicion and prejudice.

Perhaps that is what partnership can mean more than anything else: our relationship with the Methodist Church in Ghana and with other Connexions can be one in which we are open about the things that are most dear to us, to inspire, encourage and challenge each other.

The reflecting will long continue.