Life After Kumasi – The Kumasi Mission Experience.
Ben Sachie, AE Ghana Team Leader
Our God-given task is to reach the unreached, and to encourage brethren in the faith to strive for excellence.
In 2016 the Kumasi Mission sought to do exactly that. Both the reached and those unreached with the Gospel were our targets. By the grace of God, doors were opened to us to share the Gospel with the young and old, men and women.
84,078 people were reached with the Gospel during the mission. Out of these, 2,865 made a first-time commitment for Jesus Christ and 4,800 rededicated their lives to God.
We are rejoicing for God’s incredible impact in Kumasi! Our joy will continue to flow if in two years we can boast that the new Christians from Kumasi 2016 are still growing in the Lord as disciples.
It is obvious from the Scriptures that our mandate is to make disciples, not converts. In view of this, we put in place several action plans to enhance the work of discipleship for the Kumasi Mission.
- Kumasi Mission decision cards were carefully sorted and distributed to participating churches in Kumasi for effective follow up.
- Telephone follow-up calls were made to both the new Christians and the pastors, who were given the decision cards to help support the new Christians and recommitted people.
- Special follow-up meetings were organised for the pastors and church leaders to ascertain how much has been done, so far as discipleship is concerned.
Pastor Peter Mba & AE Ghana Team Leader Ben Sachie
So far, comments from most of the churches have been positive and the new Christians are doing very well in various churches. Asokwa Baptist Church was given 25 new members. The senior pastor at Asokwa has created an ‘adoption family,’ who were assigned to take care of them and report monthly to the senior pastor about how the new Christians are doing in the Lord.
Pastor Peter Mba (Unity of God Ministries) shared another story with us during the follow-up meeting in Kumasi in February 2017. He received 30 decision cards from the mission. In the course of the follow up, he found out that these new Christians didn’t have a church – so he used the opportunity to plant a new church branch! All 30 new Christians are growing in the Lord.
We have scheduled visits to some of the churches in March to meet with new Christians, so we can give out Bibles and Christian literature to help them grow in the Lord.
Several lessons have been learnt from the Kumasi Mission. My team realised that for a big mission to be successful, we need 18 months to plan, because it takes time for some of the pastors to come to understand what AE mission is all about. After the Kumasi Mission, some of the pastors said if they had better understood the nature of the mission, they would have put in even more time and effort to make the partnerships successful.
We have also learned that mission participants should receive adequate training for them to be effective in their quest to share the Gospel. A lot of the mission participants did not know how to properly fill in the decision cards. It will take training to help them perform well. Another lesson worth mentioning is the fact that when people are assigned a responsibility, they must be checked and encouraged to deliver.
We also found out that cross-pollination in mission is good. When teams from various countries and cultural backgrounds work together, it promotes good sense of unity and people become more receptive to our message of hope – the Gospel.
The way forward for Kumasi
At our last meeting in February in Kumasi, the churches requested AE to continue working in partnership with the Kumasi churches so that the fire kindled will not be quenched. The Mission Chairman, Rev. Dr. Kofi Amfo-Akonnor suggested that we continue to have programs in Kumasi so that AE will be well established in the minds of the churches in Kumasi. We believe that as we embark on follow-up programs such as conferences for pastors and church leaders, seminars for mission participants and more, we will leave a lasting impression. We hope to tap into the human resources of the churches in Kumasi to expand our mission activities in Ghana and beyond.
