Pastor Akwasi Boakye, Senior Pastor, Vineyard North Church, Columbus-Ohio, USA, has called on African leaders to manage the national resources at their disposal to improve the lives of the people.

“As religious and political leaders if the love of God is in us, then we must express this through the manner we administer, governor lead the people with the way we plan to use the resources on their behalf,” he said.

Pastor Boakye, who is also the Mission Director for Ghana, made the call at the end of a three-day international leadership conference – Vineyard Africa Conference, hosted by the Ghana branch of the Kings Vineyard Church at Madina in Accra for pastors and leaders.

It was on the theme: “Transformed to transform together.”

Pastor Boakye said it was very important for leaders of all segments of society to live by example by showing Godly love and concern towards the welfare of the citizenry, which would make the people content.

“If we truly love God as real Christians, we should be able to express it by approaching a neighbour who is in distress and help him or her out once we are in the position to do so. This depicts the true hallmark of Christianity as a practical expression of love from the foundations of society to government administration,” he said.

He bemoaned the situation where leaders gave little thought to the well-being of those they led and were only concerned about their selfish interest.
He expressed the hope that the conference would go a long way to speak to the hearts and minds of leaders to cause a change.

Pastor Boakye asked the citizenry to love each other despite their religious, political, economic or tribal differences, and that should be impacted in the small communities, saying “it is important people practice these virtues before they ventured into leadership positions to enable them to satisfy the legitimate expectations of the people”.

Rev Christian Balagi, the Resident Pastor of the Kings Vineyard Church, said when the transformation takes place in the church, it affected the society and by extension the nation, adding that; “We can only bring about transformation in every facet of life when we transformed ourselves positively”.

He urged the church to continue in its disciple-making mandate, saying “The church believes in going to the world to make disciples and in doing this the church also believes relationship plays a key role which was the reason for the theme chosen.”

Pastor Jim Pool, the Director-in-Charge of Africa, Vineyard Global in the United States, said the Global Vineyard Church sought to empower local leaders from Bible-believing, and Holy Spirit filled churches to be more effective so as to be able to reproduce more healthy churches.

He said: “The philosophy of the church is to embody the practice of Jesus Christ which is to love our neighbour, serve the needs of the community and serve other people outside the church”.

Pastor Moses More, the Chairman of the Planning Committee of the Church, said the conference sought to train pastors and societal leaders in a more efficient way to lead the church and society to enable them to train other emerging leaders in the churches.

The Vineyard Global Church is a global family of churches mainly in the US, which began about 40 years ago and active in over 70 countries across the world, including 20 countries in Africa with an emerging presence in West Africa.