A Ministry of Two Callings

Reflections on Seven Years with Rev. Prof. Joseph Osafo Adu

By Emmanuel Boateng, The Finder

On August 10, 2019, Rev. Prof. Joseph Osafo Adu arrived at The Church of Pentecost as Resident Minister of what was then Rhema Worship Centre, a congregation renamed East Legon Worship Centre in August 2022. He came bearing what would soon prove to be two inseparable ministries: a distinguished academic career at the University of Ghana, and a pastoral charge over a growing urban congregation. Seven years later, as he transitions to Born-Again Worship Centre in keeping with the Church’s cherished tradition of itinerant service, a tradition that continually renews congregations even as it widens a minister’s reach across the connexion, the record of those years offers more than a personal tribute. It offers a case study in what the Ghanaian church stands to gain when it makes room for ministers who serve God from within, rather than apart from, the secular professions they hold.

Prof. Osafo Adu is a Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology in the Department of Psychology, University of Ghana, with a special focus on suicide and other mental health related issues. His research spans suicidality; religion and mental health; maternal and child health; adolescent mental health and sexual behaviour; and self-construal within interdependent cultural settings, a body of work that has shaped both scholarship and public discourse on mental health in Ghana. While serving as Resident Minister at East Legon Worship Centre, he was concurrently Head of the Department of Psychology, and he currently serves as Director of the Centre for Ageing Studies, University of Ghana. Within the Church of Pentecost, he has also served as National Director for the Counselling Ministry, extending his pastoral and clinical expertise well beyond the walls of a single congregation.

A Congregation Shaped, Not Merely Led

Under Prof. Osafo Adu’s leadership, East Legon Worship Centre grew, not only in numbers, but in depth of discipleship and breadth of ministry. Children’s ministry, youth ministry, women’s ministry, men’s ministry, and evangelism each bore the marks of a pastor who treated no age group as peripheral to his calling. He was as attentive in a hospital ward as he was behind a pulpit, as available for private counsel as he was for public exposition of Scripture.

Members of the congregation, this writer included, can point to specific moments of intervention: prayers offered in seasons of crisis, counsel given in moments of confusion, and in a number of documented cases, direct assistance toward scholarships that opened the door to tertiary education for young people who might otherwise not have gone. These were not the actions of a minister discharging an obligation. They were the actions of a man who treated the flock as an extension of his own household.

Scholarship and Sanctity, Held Together

What distinguished Prof. Osafo Adu’s ministry, however, was not simply its pastoral warmth. It was the example he set of a mind fully engaged in scholarship and a heart fully surrendered to Christ, operating not in tension but in harmony. He taught, both by precept and by demonstration, that academic excellence and spiritual devotion are not competing pursuits requiring a believer to choose one at the expense of the other. Rather, they are complementary expressions of the same calling: to glorify God with the whole of one’s capacity, in the lecture hall as much as in the sanctuary.

This is not a minor point. Ghanaian Christianity has, at times, struggled to reconcile the pursuit of secular achievement with the demands of spiritual formation, particularly among the young. Prof. Osafo Adu’s own life, a professorship earned through rigorous scholarship, held alongside a pastoral office discharged with equal seriousness, offered a living rebuttal to any suggestion that the two must be kept apart. For a generation of young people navigating universities, careers, and faith simultaneously, that example carried a weight that sermons alone could not have supplied.

Honour Rightly Directed

It would be a disservice to Prof. Osafo Adu’s own theology, and indeed to the Gospel he preached, to end this reflection as though the honour belonged finally to him. Those who sat under his ministry will attest that he consistently redirected attention away from himself and toward Christ. His preaching, his counsel, and his personal example were never oriented toward building a following around his own person. They were oriented toward forming men and women who look increasingly like Jesus. Any honour due to Prof. Osafo Adu, therefore, is honour that he himself would insist on passing further up: to the God who, in the words of Scripture, gives the increase, while the minister does no more than plant and water (1 Corinthians 3:6-7, NKJV). The greater honour belongs to Christ, whom Prof. Osafo Adu’s ministry served to magnify.

A Broader Case for Bi-Vocational Ministry

Prof. Osafo Adu’s seven years at East Legon Worship Centre also invite a wider reflection for the church in Ghana. Ministers who carry what is sometimes called a “tent ministry” (bi-vocational ministry), a term drawn from the Apostle Paul’s practice of supporting his apostolic labour through tentmaking, bring to the pulpit a vantage point that full-time clergy alone cannot always supply. They understand, from the inside, the pressures of secular institutions, the demands of professional excellence, and the particular temptations and opportunities that attend a life divided between office and altar. A professor who is also a pastor speaks with credibility to the student wrestling with faith and ambition, the young professional torn between career and calling, and the parent anxious about a child’s future in both worlds.

This is not an argument against the itinerant and connexional structures that have long served the Church of Pentecost well, structures that Prof. Osafo Adu’s own transfer this month exemplifies. It is, rather, a case for the Church to continue recognising, developing, and deploying bi-vocational ministers deliberately, as an asset rather than an exception. Congregations that are exposed to ministers who hold both academic or professional distinction and pastoral office are congregations equipped to see, in concrete terms, that the Christian life is not a retreat from the world but a fuller engagement with it, undertaken for Christ’s sake.

A Debt Gladly Owed

As East Legon Worship Centre bids farewell to Prof. Osafo Adu this month, the congregation does so with gratitude that exceeds what any citation or tribute can fully capture. He leaves behind a body of believers stronger in doctrine, more established in prayer, and more confident that faith and scholarship were never meant to be enemies. He leaves behind young people in universities they might not otherwise have entered, and families restored by counsel he offered without reservation.

He would be the first to say that none of this was his own achievement. It was, in his own oft-repeated words of blessing over the congregation each Sunday, a matter of “Shalom, peace, and life” extended by God through an imperfect servant, to a people who needed exactly that.

The writer is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Ghana Business School and a member of East Legon Worship Centre.