This past Sunday morning I took part in the most universal of Ghanaian rituals: I went to church. Nana, a young woman working at Opportunity International, offered to take me when I asked her last week where I could find some good gospel music. She met me at 7am at the grocery store and drove me to her family’s house (the service didn’t start until 9). We arrived at a beautiful compound and went inside. Her house is a sprawling villa with large sitting rooms, a beautiful kitchen with an industrial-size freezer, a plasma television with digital cable, bathrooms with bidets, and a parrot in a cage. After a light breakfast of toast and coffee we headed off.

Church was in the ground floor multipurpose room of a local hotel. It is about 30’x 40’ with a low ceiling and fluorescent lights and about 50 plastic patio chairs arranged in rows. When we arrived a few minutes before 9, we walked inside where it was nearly deafening. A young man sang lead in front of five backup singers, who in turn stood in front of a rock band: drums, electric bass, electric guitar, keyboard, and trumpet. They were singing mostly in English but one could hardly tell—it was loud, and the four large speakers stacked in pairs on either side of the front of the room were overmatched. In addition, the twenty or so members of the congregation who had arrived by that time were armed with tambourines and, of course, the spirit. So they added to the clamor.

Before half an hour had passed the multipurpose room was mostly full. Men were dressed in slacks and button-down shirts without ties and women were wearing the brightly-colored outfits I’ve seen before on traditional-dress Fridays. Everyone was dancing and above the gospel strains of the lead singer one could hear the whine of the electric guitar bending the pentatonic scale. It was a strange but incredibly captivating marriage of early Allman Brothers and Janis Joplin-style wailing. Everyone was moved (literally) and most of the congregants swayed with varying levels of vigor in front of their seats while some tall skinny men, sweating until they shone like smooth black riverstones, lurched in the aisles like an epileptic’s marionettes. One such man stood apart from the crowd in a blue and bright green tie-dyed shirt with his back to all the others. He was directly in front of one of the speaker stacks, holding his hands over his ears and hunched far over, sometimes violently thrusting a spread-fingered hand against the wall for support. The whole scene might have been his own ecstatic dream.

Meanwhile I was moving, too; but my inspiration was the red Stratocaster and the unlikely skinny Ghanaian in a plain navy blue necktie who piloted it.

The music continued for about 90 minutes, after which Pastor Mike came to the lectern (with the hotel logo on the front) and delivered a passionate sermon. The theme was: “God wants people to worship him.” So for the better part of an hour Mike recited single verses from the New Testament confirming that sentiment, and interspersed his own insights and interpretations with his selections. To me it seemed like a meaningless concatenation of words of praise. An example: “We are here to celebrate the majesty, the excellency, the greatness, the power, the righteousness, the might, the wisdom, the awesomeness of God with our praises to him and to his son Jesus Christ. And as Bible says, God sees our rejoicing and also rejoices.” Also consider his discussion of the following:

Psalm 95 (King James Version)

1 O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

2 Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.

3 For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.

5 The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.

6 O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.

7 For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice,

8 Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness:

9 When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.

10 Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways:

11 Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.

Pastor Mike recited verse 6 and the first sentence of verse 7, and explained the meaning of “the sheep of his hand”: a shepherd leads a sheep with a stick, but only God or Jesus could lead sheep gently, could guide them with His hand. That was all. Where was God’s wrath? Isn’t this Psalm a cautionary tale about lack of faith and the consequences that follow? Doesn’t this inspire one to worship out of fear? Not this Sunday.

During the course of the sermon I also learned that God loves alone those who worship him; that God will make his worshippers “spiritually rich, materially rich, and financially rich”; and that the Devil, incarnate now as AIDS, wishes to infect us all, but that we can close the door on him through our praises to God. (Note: no mention here of obedience to the abstinence-until-marriage law.)

For believers maybe every sermon is an eloquent tautology. And maybe a more discerning critic would have also identified the music as abuse of the power of the pulpit. But I had the feeling that I had fallen for a bait-and-switch: the inclusive and even universal power of music hijacked by a gospel of exclusivity. So it was with mixed feelings that I walked in both parades past the collection plate, which achieved complete participation of all attendees. Here the Pastor said, “As you have rejoiced with your hearts and your voices, now rejoice with your wallets!” Maybe it should be noted that they switched back to upbeat music and dance during these segments.

I know I sound bitter; but that’s only because I enjoyed the first half of the service so much.

After the second collection everyone shook hands with one another and filed out into the parking lot. Nana invited me back to her family’s house for lunch and I went and enjoyed a delicious meal of rice and chicken stew.

When I returned to the VA house, members of the Africana drumming and dancing group were trickling in. Laura, a young Canadian woman who’s returning home this week, has spent ten months in Ghana and started dancing with them soon after she arrived. So they were coming (about fifteen of them) to have a feast and a night of music and dance. A bunch of us ripped the heads off small silver fish, cut up tomatoes and onions, ground up maize, and made a fire in an old car wheel while the remaining troupe members played drums and cowbell and shakers and sang and danced and kicked a soccer ball and laughed, laughed, laughed. It was so enjoyable that I forgot to curse the midday heat. When the sun set and the food was ready we held hands for a prayer (common practice) and dug in to the spread of salmon, tilapia, the little silver fish, banku (cassava flour and cornmeal), and spicy tomato/onion/pepper sauce.

After cleaning up we walked down to the beach with four drums, two shakers, and a cowbell, and had homemade palm wine out of gas-can type plastic jug and danced in the dark by the waves. The drumming is an irresistible force. Actually it is a force field: if you’re far enough away you can just listen, but there is some radius (about 20’) inside which even a rhythmically-challenged obruni like me can’t keep still. There are also lyrics (in Twi), vocal melodies and harmonies, and specific dance patterns to accompany different songs. All of these were out of reach. But just to move while they moved, a bunch of sunburnt North Americans sharing in the ancient African night—that’s religion if anything is.