Post by JEM on Jan 11, 2014 18:45:53 GMT
3 SAMUEL AMISSAH – WITHOUT BITTERNESS
Any African who has grown up in the modern world has reason for thanksgiving even though many African countries have of recent years descended into ungovernable chaos, civil war, tribal warfare, attacks by foreign Islamist insurgents or pirates.
Despite all that, which is partly caused by importing Euro-American feuds, quarrels and competitive struggles for land, or minerals, Africa has long ceased to be the “dark continent” – and yet it's leap forward is no more than a couple of generations or so old.
So much has been achieved in so short a time, that in the UK has sometimes taken centuries. Despite the highlighted failures with comparatively little violence that an African from Ghana, for instance, may well light up his heart. He is part of a continent on the move.
At the same time, bitterness is hard to banish. In many parts of the continent, especially in Southern Africa, “rights” are still described as “privileges” given or withheld by a minority.
In some parts until fairly recently, and in a few places still, a man may be regard as less than fully human because of his religion or lack of it, or because the colour of his skin.
Samuel Hanson Amissah was an African of the modern world, a leader of the Church, who had been exposed to scorn as well as praise. He was a man without bitterness.
A Methodist – for many Ghanaians belong to that Church. - he was accepted for teacher training at Wesley College and was asked to remain on the staff after he graduated. In 1952 he became the first African Principal of the College where he had trained. It was not a surprising choice. In the years between he had shown a deep understanding of what education should mean for the African people. It must underline those values which have stood the test of time and are deeply cherished by Africans, – fellow feeling, sharing what one has with others, a sensitivity to the other world...”
On his appointment as Supervisor of Methodist Schools in 1940 he was sent to London by his Church to study at the London University Institute of Education.
It was a frightening journey and an even more terrifying arrival. After a 6 week's voyage, dogged by German submarines he reached London when it was suffering the worst of the German air raids. . The peril was vividly illustrated when a friend persuaded him one evening not to wait for a bus but to go back with him to his own lodgings. Next day he learned that a bomb had killed all those in the queue.
On his return to Africa hurt by many of the things he had seen and shared in, in Britain, but with his faith in god and his own mission unshaken, he quickly found himself involved in the affairs not only of his own Church but of all the Churches. Representing Methodism on the Christian Council of Ghana and in Church Union negotiations he was easily marked out as a man of deep faith, swift perception, and broad vision.
When the All-Africa Council of Churches met in Kampala, Uganda. In 1963 , he was appointed as it's Secretary.
A new appointment in a new Council in a rapidly changing Africa – what could he make of it? There were no precedents, and no one to guide him. God alone must direct him. He set out to create a programme for the Churches that would help them share their insights, strengthen each other, and begin to offer guidance and help to those who sought it. Working quietly behind the scenes, rather than setting out to become a public figure. He began to build a fellowship between Churches which hardly knew each other and also between the African churches and the rest of the world.
He came to his office, and lived through it, in a period of turmoil.
The Nigerian conflict strained the fellowship of the Church. But he refused to rush into mediation until both sides were prepared to accept it. In the southern Sudan, less publicised, the situation was bitter and intransigent. Here he sought to put pressure on the Sudanese government to accept it's own responsibilities.
In Rhodesia, with a fellow member of the A.A.C.C he suffered humiliations common to all those then called black men, and was stopped and searched in a Salisbury street by policemen who offered neither reason nor excuse for doing so.
When he left his A.A.C.C. Office in Nairobi in 1969 at the end of his term as secretary, he was a man known throughout the Councils of the Church all over the world. Geneva knew him, and New York, and London, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Indeed in stead of returning straight to Ghana, the plane from Nairobi took him to Moscow – to represent the churches of Africa at the enthronement of the new Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was his last official act in his old capacity.
Nothing that he saw or shared – the war that the white nations fought out across the world, or the physical dangers he faced in the Nigerian conflict, the divisions of the church, or the struggle for power in his own land, the self seeking of men of many races, or the narrowness of vision and concern amongst church people both black and white – has touched his soul with bitterness, Least of all did it destroy his belief that God has great purposes for the Church in Africa.
He is now with his Lord and King, Jesus Christ, in Heaven, but maybe more aware than we who are left here, citizens of Heaven behind enemy lines, of the thousands martyred in Africa since he passed over, or of the Christian revival in East Africa, or in West Africa, of the overthrow of apathied in South Africa, or the massacres in Uganda, Rwanda, Eastern Congo, the Central African Republic, Angola, Mozambique, or the Islamic terrorism of North Africa. All of which have changed those nations and the Churches in them, and brought Christians together across the continent to work together and support each other.
He was a lone voice, championing change for the better and helped laid the foundations of co-operation.
Well done Samuel Amissah !
Any African who has grown up in the modern world has reason for thanksgiving even though many African countries have of recent years descended into ungovernable chaos, civil war, tribal warfare, attacks by foreign Islamist insurgents or pirates.
Despite all that, which is partly caused by importing Euro-American feuds, quarrels and competitive struggles for land, or minerals, Africa has long ceased to be the “dark continent” – and yet it's leap forward is no more than a couple of generations or so old.
So much has been achieved in so short a time, that in the UK has sometimes taken centuries. Despite the highlighted failures with comparatively little violence that an African from Ghana, for instance, may well light up his heart. He is part of a continent on the move.
At the same time, bitterness is hard to banish. In many parts of the continent, especially in Southern Africa, “rights” are still described as “privileges” given or withheld by a minority.
In some parts until fairly recently, and in a few places still, a man may be regard as less than fully human because of his religion or lack of it, or because the colour of his skin.
Samuel Hanson Amissah was an African of the modern world, a leader of the Church, who had been exposed to scorn as well as praise. He was a man without bitterness.
A Methodist – for many Ghanaians belong to that Church. - he was accepted for teacher training at Wesley College and was asked to remain on the staff after he graduated. In 1952 he became the first African Principal of the College where he had trained. It was not a surprising choice. In the years between he had shown a deep understanding of what education should mean for the African people. It must underline those values which have stood the test of time and are deeply cherished by Africans, – fellow feeling, sharing what one has with others, a sensitivity to the other world...”
On his appointment as Supervisor of Methodist Schools in 1940 he was sent to London by his Church to study at the London University Institute of Education.
It was a frightening journey and an even more terrifying arrival. After a 6 week's voyage, dogged by German submarines he reached London when it was suffering the worst of the German air raids. . The peril was vividly illustrated when a friend persuaded him one evening not to wait for a bus but to go back with him to his own lodgings. Next day he learned that a bomb had killed all those in the queue.
On his return to Africa hurt by many of the things he had seen and shared in, in Britain, but with his faith in god and his own mission unshaken, he quickly found himself involved in the affairs not only of his own Church but of all the Churches. Representing Methodism on the Christian Council of Ghana and in Church Union negotiations he was easily marked out as a man of deep faith, swift perception, and broad vision.
When the All-Africa Council of Churches met in Kampala, Uganda. In 1963 , he was appointed as it's Secretary.
A new appointment in a new Council in a rapidly changing Africa – what could he make of it? There were no precedents, and no one to guide him. God alone must direct him. He set out to create a programme for the Churches that would help them share their insights, strengthen each other, and begin to offer guidance and help to those who sought it. Working quietly behind the scenes, rather than setting out to become a public figure. He began to build a fellowship between Churches which hardly knew each other and also between the African churches and the rest of the world.
He came to his office, and lived through it, in a period of turmoil.
The Nigerian conflict strained the fellowship of the Church. But he refused to rush into mediation until both sides were prepared to accept it. In the southern Sudan, less publicised, the situation was bitter and intransigent. Here he sought to put pressure on the Sudanese government to accept it's own responsibilities.
In Rhodesia, with a fellow member of the A.A.C.C he suffered humiliations common to all those then called black men, and was stopped and searched in a Salisbury street by policemen who offered neither reason nor excuse for doing so.
When he left his A.A.C.C. Office in Nairobi in 1969 at the end of his term as secretary, he was a man known throughout the Councils of the Church all over the world. Geneva knew him, and New York, and London, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Indeed in stead of returning straight to Ghana, the plane from Nairobi took him to Moscow – to represent the churches of Africa at the enthronement of the new Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was his last official act in his old capacity.
Nothing that he saw or shared – the war that the white nations fought out across the world, or the physical dangers he faced in the Nigerian conflict, the divisions of the church, or the struggle for power in his own land, the self seeking of men of many races, or the narrowness of vision and concern amongst church people both black and white – has touched his soul with bitterness, Least of all did it destroy his belief that God has great purposes for the Church in Africa.
He is now with his Lord and King, Jesus Christ, in Heaven, but maybe more aware than we who are left here, citizens of Heaven behind enemy lines, of the thousands martyred in Africa since he passed over, or of the Christian revival in East Africa, or in West Africa, of the overthrow of apathied in South Africa, or the massacres in Uganda, Rwanda, Eastern Congo, the Central African Republic, Angola, Mozambique, or the Islamic terrorism of North Africa. All of which have changed those nations and the Churches in them, and brought Christians together across the continent to work together and support each other.
He was a lone voice, championing change for the better and helped laid the foundations of co-operation.
Well done Samuel Amissah !