The Church Of Pentecost And Customary Marriage In Ghana

Abstract

The researcher investigated the reason The Church of Pentecost prefers ordinance marriage to that of the customary. The researcher observed that some members of the Church preferred only customary marriage, but the Church does not support their position. Although the customary is unarguably, the oldest form of contracting marriage and its practices reflect Ghanaian values and biblical principles, much importance seems to have been given to the ordinance marriage with no stated reasons. The case study approach was used to investigate the problem under consideration. This is due to the large size of the population involved. Mixed method was used to text for convergence or divergence of views of congregants and top leadership view on marriage. Three instruments including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and documents analysis were used. Although the study revealed that members view on customary marriage deviate with that of leadership, there are significance reasons for these divergent views. For instance, the study uncovered that the polygynous nature of customary marriages pushes top leadership of the Church from fully embracing the customary marriage. Another aspect of divergent view was security; whiles top leadership sees customary marriage as a type which does not guarantee security to the marriage, most members and lay-officers sees it as the best form to adopt. Again, it was discovered that the position of the Church is not to bless marriages that ends at customary, meanwhile, this has not been effectively communicated to majority of her members. The study further revealed that, most of the churches used as case studies in this study do not have the required registered church buildings to officiate ordinance marriage. The implication of the research is that proper appraisal of the marriage processes in the church should be carried out in order to adopt the best practice for the upcoming generation. Since the study reveals that some of the members are unformed about marriages that CoP accepts, it calls for education of members on marriage issues. Again, a general open forum is recommended for members to share their concerns on the subject. Lastly, it is recommended that the Church should promote the review of the Marriages Acts Law to favour Christian marriages.