By Kelsi Peace, Managing Editor
Fred Asare challenged Americans to change the world, drawing sharp parallels between the “incurable wound” in Micah and the one found across the world today, at a Lectureship session in Moody Coliseum Monday.
“While there is time, let’s not just sit down,” Asare said. “My brothers and sisters, let us rise up and change the world.”
Asare, the director of Village of Hope in Accra, Ghana, attended Lectureship for the first time this year and is the only speaker to be featured on “Oprah.” The talk show hostess invited Asare to “Oprah” after discovering that a slave she planned to rescue had already been saved and was residing at Village of Hope, a refuge for about 160 children from preschool to high school.
Asare said he was apprehensive about speaking as an outsider but found reassurance in the text, Micah 1:1-9.
“I am reassured by the fact that Micah was an outsider,” he said. Asare set the scene in Micah – a scene of inequity – where the
greedy rich crushed the powerless poor, perverting their religion to serve their interests. “Those who went to feed the
flock were fleecing the flock,” Asare said.
Little has changed.
“I see a nation that is strong and powerful,” Asare said to his American audience. “I see people who have so much and yet keep on grabbing more and more. I see a people who are never satisfied.”
Asare said Americans live in finery: fine clothes, fine cars, fine food. Students at Christian universities in America discard textbooks at the end of the semester.
But, Asare said, the world houses many who have very little.
In Africa, four of five children will die before they reach age 5, Asare said, because they have no food and dirty drinking water. In one year, more Africans will die because they cannot afford medicine than the number of Church of Christ members across the United States, Asare said. Teenagers scavenge through garbage for food; fathers send their daughters into prostitution.
“They would rather see their children become slaves than to see them die before their very eyes,” he said.
Much like the rich in Micah, Asare said, today’s wealthy continue to turn a blind eye.
“Those who call themselves the children of God are living in luxury,” Asare said. Just as Jerusalem’s fate warned Judah, it also warns America, he said. And just as Micah said Jerusalem had an incurable wound, Ghana
also has her own.
“An incurable wound is not a Band-Aid matter,” Asare said. “Will God sit in silence? Will God sit unconcerned? No.”
Asare reminded the audience that Jesus said, “To whom much is given, much will be expected.”
“God will do something,” Asare said. “America, there’s a judgment coming. Don’t just sit there – do something.”
