False titles and qualifications: Baptist Convention takes steps to clean clergy

The Ghana Baptist Convention says it has put in place measures to thoroughly screen any individual who is accepted to serve as Minister of the Gospel under the Convention.

Executive President of the Convention, Rev. Dr. Ernest Adu-Gyamfi, has described as unacceptable situations where people present false certificates to become pastors.

“Before you’re licensed, recognized or ordained, you go through security checks and we’re working with the security agencies to do these things for us to make sure that anybody that receives our certification is actually somebody that we can vouch for,” he said.

Concerns have been raised recently of the Ghanaian society being flooded with doctorate degrees awarded by unaccredited educational institutions.

Rev. Adu-Gyamfi, who is also Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, has indicated that the country’s clergy also has characters wielding educational titles they have not earned.

“Now there are all sorts of people around the country giving doctorate certificates everywhere and people are jumping into them and calling themselves reverend doctors when some of them have not even been to school or done anything,” he expressed.

He added that people will no longer have room to use fake certificates to gain admissions into seminaries.

The Baptist Minister spoke to Tv3 at the 2016 Ministers’ Conference of the Ghana Baptist Convention at Ejura in the Ashanti Region. The theme for the conference is “The Christian Minister, his Character and Attitude”.

Call for peace in Election 2016

As Ghana goes to the polls to elect parliamentarians and a President in December, Rev. Adu-Gyamfi wants Ghanaians to focus on choosing their servant-leaders and not be engaged in acrimonies that breach the peace.

He has cautioned politicians against the practice of making electoral promises which they know cannot be fulfilled.

“If you know that the things you’re promising, you can’t do them, don’t go ahead and be promising the moon. We all know that parliamentarians don’t carry the purse; you don’t have the money, so why do you go round making all kinds of unnecessary promises?” he quizzed.

Former General Secretary of the Christian Council, Rev. Dr. Fred Deegbe, expressed worry at the number of spoilt ballots in previous elections.

He has therefore entreated political actors to educate the electorates to vote appropriately.

“I hope we’ll learn how to vote and vote properly because there is nothing as disturbing as people who go there and spoil the ballots, so that we’ll be ruled by people who are not really our choice,” he noted.

By Kofi Adu Domfeh