Ghana
Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Ivory Coast to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south. While Christianity came as early as the fourteenth century to the area that is now Ghana, the presence of Orthodox Christianity in Ghana is recent, having arisen through an indigenous search for Orthodoxy.
History
Orthodoxy came to Ghana in a noncanonical form when a charismatic African named Bres-Ando and his followers began the "Orthodox Catholic Church" with the intent of finding the true church but with only a vague understanding of the meaning of the term "Orthodoxy". In 1959, organized Orthodox Christianity came to the area when the Church of Alexandria established the Diocese of Ghana, the predecessor of the Archbishopric of Accra, but without contact with the indigenous population. The quest by the Bres-Ando group took on greater meaning to the group when in 1972 one of its church and youth leaders, Gottfried Manta, read Timothy (Kallistos) Ware's book The Orthodox Church that further strengthened the group's quest.
In 1974, Gottfried Manta and Kwame Labi personally met Orthodox clergy during the World Council of Churches meeting at the University of Ghana. Having finally made contact with the Orthodox Church, members of the OCC began to travel under scholarships to study Orthodox theology in Greece. On January 15, 1978, Archbishop Irenaeus of West Africa began visits to the faithful of Ghana. By September 1982, with Kwame Joseph Labi having graduated from St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York and had been ordained a priest, the group was admitted into communion with the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Church of Alexandria and active missionary work began among the indigenous population.
During the following years, the Orthodox community grew as thousands of the local population became Orthodox Christians. On June 26, 2008, Pope Theodoros II, Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, opened a seminary within the Metropolis of Ghana to serve its theological education needs. By 2007, the Orthodox faithful were under the pastoral care of 23 indigenous Orthodox priests.
In October 2009, the metropolis was elevated to that of an archdiocese, the Archdiocese of Accra.
Sources
- A Brief History of the Orthodox Church in Ghana
- OCMC Joins Ghana's Orthodox Christians in Celebrating Their Silver Jubilee
- Wikipedia: Orthodoxy_in_Ghana
External links
- OCMC Mission Team to Ghana Lives Orthodox History
- Archbishop Joseph René Vilatte’s Apostolic Heritage in Ghana (1932 – 1970)
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