Religious excesses ‘getting out of hand’; law-backed regulation needed – Opuni-Frimpong

former General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, Rev Dr Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong, has raised an alarm about some churches and pastors who sell bottled water and bottled ‘sobolo’ at outrageous prices in the name of miracles to fleece gullible Christians and the public.
“Now you get pastors who are selling water. You buy somebody’s water, Bel-Aqua, Voltic and [tell church members to] now come and buy it at GHS1,000. You buy this from the company for how much? And now you get pastors who are selling ‘sobolo’ [for] GHS2,000. [This is] corruption in the church, in the name of God,” he complained during an interview with Benjamin Akakpo on Class91.3FM’s Executive Breakfast Show on Wednesday, 30 January 2019.
ADVERTISEMENT
Among other things, Rev. Dr. Opuni-Frimpong is also calling for the regulation of churches in the country. “As the Ghana Bar Association is able to do it, as GJA is able to do it, GPRTU and other various professional bodies are able to do it, we must do same.”
“We can have self-regulatory arrangements backed by law. At the moment, what the Christian Council and other bodies are doing are voluntary but we can have an arrangement that has some level of legal backing to self-regulate, and those who will not belong to any of them, the laws of the land must apply because you cannot go in the name of God and prophesy to dehumanise people.”