The same day Rev. Dr. Agradaa was released from prison, another self-styled preacher in Uganda, Rev David Ochieng, closed down his church after winning 100 million Ugandan Shillings ($1 Million) in sports betting.

When his congregants stormed his church on a normal service day for worship, their anointed preacher delivered the shocker that he had set up the church just to make money.

With millions coming his way–from a lottery ticket he bought with church money–there was no need serving God. He confessed that he was never a man of God.

The first time the phrase ‘man of God’ appeared in the Bible was in Deuteronomy 33:1, in reference to Moses. As accomplished as he was, Moses did not have the honour of enjoying that title until at the twilight of his service, near his death.

Today, a man or woman of God may be conceived in strange locations.

Every person of faith is working with something: they are in the secret place of God or in the secret cult of the underworld. Whatever they are using becomes their theology.

So, Rev. Dr. Evangelist Agradaa (Mrs Patricia Asiedua Asiamah) has some theology, too.

Her homiletics (the art of preaching) and her hermeneutics (interpretation of scripture) may not come with a seal of approval from Dr. Mensah Otabil or Archbishop Nicholas Duncan Williams, but the Lord’s vineyard is big enough to accommodate all shades of labourers under various guises.

Strange prison arithmetic

Before her incarceration, Agradaa delighted us with her mumbo-jumbo exegesis of scripture and the turbo-charged gyrations that vibrated the dancing floors at Heavensway Champions International Ministry.

Every Sunday was a cocktail of themed dances, profanity, raw insults, and innuendos targeted at her competitors.

In between, people lost their monies in schemes carefully knitted together under her sika gari enterprise.

We tolerated her excesses on social media for a while until she was jailed for 15 years for charlatanic advertisement and other crimes.

Following her release, public commentators and media practitioners, including 3FM’s Blakk Rasta, have questioned the special provisions in our criminal jurisprudence, where by some strange arithmetic, a fifteen year sentence would be reduced to only one year.

Prophet Nigel Gaizie had prophesied that her days in prison were short.

Yet, Agradaa’s early release seems to confound many.

Musician Efya worries that Agradaa would reoffend and go back to prison. We can’t wait for Agradaa to fail.

Would Rev. Agradaa change her ways after prison?

Not until all of us have stopped pretending to be decent people because we have not yet been caught.

Not until the way church is done these days changes from just being performative charismaticism to sincere religion intended to reform character.

After her release, Agradaa asked what she had done wrong to serve 15 years?

Sobolo theology

That rhetorical question provokes even deeper questions: Agradaa may be asking why our society has tolerated the purveyors of the prosperity gospel and merchants of fake prophecies for so long.

She may also be asking why we have lived with a hypocritical community of Christians who do not see anything wrong with the near commercialization of the gospel.

She may be asking why our society has become used to a transactional God who needs to be bribed with money to work.

In Agradaa’s theology, selling sika gari to greedy people who are hooked on quick fixes, is a bit like selling divine sobolo or anointed water in any church.

We mocked Agradaa’s use of apostolic titles reserved for our favourite preachers, but we have also failed to ask how the eloquent sermons of our anointed bishops, archbishops and prophets have impacted the growing corruption in our country. We have become used to the popular theology that endorses the glorification of money in church while the people who fund the prosperity gospel remain poor, praying for neverending hours for some divine enablement to alter their situation.

Agradaa did not just surface on the charismatic scene; she is a product of the system we all helped to create.

Unlike Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, we do not seem to have the bite of social regulation to close down churches in Ghana.

We are almost numb to tales on private radio and television stations about religious leaders who lure young women to strange places for anointed sex.

Social media has a running dossier of shocking stories that are happening in our places of worship.

Dr Mensah Otabil

Yet, new churches emerge everyday at street corners and nobody questions their motive.

From the pentecostal to the charismatic to the prophetic, serious questions abound–about fake miracles, flesh-dictated end-of-year prophesies, and interesting money generation schemes, while their helpless congregations remain sedated on blind hope.

One of the respected voices of the Charismatic community, Pastor Mensah Otabil, has repeatedly warned that the charismatic and pentecostal movement is on a “one-way highway to self-destruction”.

Thankfully, Agradaa seems to be embracing a new theology upon release from prison.

For the first time, her messages matched her Bible verses.

She quotes Acts 12 about Peter’s spiritual rescue from prison, and the miraculous jail escape of Paul and Silas in Acts 16.

A new chapter has opened for Agradaa. Social media will be boring without another Agradaa aboozigi video while she works in the secret place of the Most High, to deliver Ghana from the likes of ex-Rev David Ochieng.

Tissues Of The Issues

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin

bigfrontiers@gmail.com

Ottawa, Canada