Ghana Pastors Charging Money for Prayer

It’s normal for any mostly-Christian nation to have many believers that
are no more than nominal, but what’s slightly more disconcerting is when
church leadership does not appear to be on board with the gospel. In
Ghana, a wave of corrupt pastors are popping up, dabbling in dangerous
territory by leading the church astray.

“They are simply not interested in the salvation of the people,” a church leader lamented to Ghana Web last month.

Christian Resources International
regularly sends crates of Bibles and Christian books to Ghana.
Executive Director Jason Woolford says they’ve heard similar reports out
of Ghana.

“Some of the things that we’re hearing is that so-called Christian
pastors are charging consulting fees to basically pray with
people—anywhere from $20 to $50,” says Woolford. “Outside of that being
wrong biblically to be a pastor and charge consultant fees for prayer,
you’re talking about people who have a minimum wage of about $2 a day.”

In even worse cases, some Ghanaian pastors have been reportedly going to
ritualistic priests for assistance in ministry, introducing occultism
into their teaching. “One of them was quoted as saying that he had
helped 1,000 pastors in Ghana through witchcraft in hopes that their
churches would grow,” says Woolford.

Clearly, pastors are confused, and many are corrupt. But not all have
evil intentions, Woolford suggests. “There are those that are crooks;
there are those that are bad; and then there might be just some that
aren’t trained the right way.”

Thus, good training in the Word is vital in Ghana. And CRI has been
helping pastors get sufficient training by sending Christian books,
commentaries, Bibles, Bible dictionaries and more to Ghana for years.
Currently, the ministry is working on filling a crate with pastor
libraries to send to a Bible college in the West African nation.

“They’re in desperate, desperate need of commentaries, New Testament
surveys, Old Testament surveys—you name it. So basically, people can go
on [our Web site] and they can buy at a discounted rate which we’ve
gotten from a book company: for $150, we can send an entire pastor
library for each individual pastor.”

Good teaching is crucial, but CRI also knows the resources must fall
into the right hands in order to be useful. Woolford says CRI goes to
great lengths to ensure that pastor libraries aren’t sent to people with
shrouded character, like the pastors charging their congregations for
prayer. The pastor packs to be sent in September will all go directly to
a Bible college which has scrutinized its students.