Bonnke Gospel Crusade comes off at Suame Roundabout
The Steering Committee of this year’s Bonnke Gospel Crusade in Kumasi has explained why the upcoming Gospel crusade in the Garden City will not be held at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium.
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The committee, made up of heads of churches and para-church organisations, including the Roman Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, the Church of Pentecost and Assemblies of God, together with ministries such as Aglow International, says the stadium is small to hold the sheer number of attendees.
Slated for Thursday, November 6 through to Sunday, November 9, 2014, the crusade will now be held at the Suame Roundabout.
Briefing journalists in Kumasi on the decision not to use the stadium, Reverend John Darko, the Ghanaian Executive Director of Christ for all Nations (CFAN), organisers of the crusade, said, “We expect in excess of 600,000 people at the crusade. The Baba Yara Sports Stadium has been built to hold a capacity far below that figure. Any numbers beyond 60,000 people may be dangerous for the structural integrity of the stadium.”
Founded by the German international evangelist, Reinhard Bonnke, the CFAN is used to huge crowds in open-air city-wide meetings across the continent, with as many as 1,600,000 people attending a single meeting at which towering sound systems that can be heard for miles are used.
Meanwhile, the steering committee has also decided that on each of the four days, the crusade should start at 4 p.m. and last up to 7p.m.
Explaining the choice of time, the CFAN Executive Director said, “Crusades are not all-night prayer sessions. Besides, it is economically unprofitable to a nation if its citizens are so delayed at crusades that they struggle to get home late at night and are unable to get sufficient rest for work the next day.”
On whether the organisers did not take into consideration the convenience of the time to civil and public servants who closed at 5 p.m., Rev Darko said, “There are hundreds of thousands of people who are not on regular government working time. Many people do their own work. Many more may not even be in employment and may need the touch of God for job openings.
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“As it happened in Accra last year and has happened in all our crusades in the last few years in the major cities of Africa, the programme starts at 4 p.m. and the regular civil and public servants join after 5 p.m. — in time to receive the message of salvation.”
The four-day crusade will feature Rev Bonnke and Rev Daniel Kolenda, the American evangelist who has taken over from Bonnke as President of the ministry.
Rev Darko assured churches in the city that the CFAN was not a church and that “as has always been done in all our crusades everywhere in the world for the past 40 years, the new converts in the four-day Kumasi crusade will be handed over to the local participating churches”.
“In the history of CFAN meetings, some churches have grown from a congregation of 500 to 3,000 as a direct result of the life-changing Gospel proclamation,” he said, emphasising that “all that CFAN prays for is that the new converts will be discipled into truly repentant people who fear God, and also that the communities in which the churches are situated will change for the better, spiritually and economically”.