Hohoe, June 20, GNA - A National Coordinating Centre for Ageing (NCCA) has been established at Peki E. P. Church equipped with recreational facilities and counselling centres. The centre is to provide an opportunity to harness the experience, training and accumulated wisdom and skills of the aged in significant social roles within the area.

This was announced by Reverend Dr Samuel S. Agidi, Principal of E. P. Seminary at Peki in the Volta region on Sunday, when delivering a paper on "Ageing" for consideration and replication within the Church and community in Ghana at Hohoe.

Rev. Agidi said the centre would develop a model programme for the aged to include services such as arrangement for periodic medical screening, teaching of new vocation and provision of regular meals in consultation with other non-governmental organizations (NGO). He explained that this new sense of vocation for the aged, would not be based on remuneration but on such values as feeling needed, bringing joy and pleasure to one another, exploring and expressing unknown and unused skills and abilities and developing talents that had been buried. Rev. Agidi expressed concern about the inability of churches to provide the spiritual, physical and material needs of the aged in society.

"Churches have taken for granted the traditional extended family system, with its structures and patterns of solidarity and blood ties, which could render the problems associated with the aged insignificant," he observed.

Rev. Agidi noted that recent disintegration of the extended family due to social change including modernisation; formal education, industrialization and urbanization had made traditional procedures inadequate.

He therefore, called for the establishment of a mission and ministry for the aged by churches to enable them play an active and meaningful role through sharing their accumulated wisdom and experiences towards national cohesion and development with the youth and society.

Rev. William R. Sakoe, Hohoe Parish Pastor of E.P. Church, Ghana said rights of the aged should be paramount in the society and assisted to gain access to services from the Government and NGOs.