Church donates over 30 streetlights

Love Community Chapel, as part of its 20 years anniversary has donated over 30 street lights to Bubiashie, Orgle road and its environs to brighten up the community.

The church embarked on the project as part of their corporate social responsibility to meet spiritual and physical needs of society.

Rev. Benjamin Idan, a Senior Associate of Love Community Chapel, told Ghana News Agency (GNA) on Wednesday that the inspiration behind the church’s kind gesture was in fulfilment of the mandate handed down to the church to be pace-setters and to follow Christ’s example.

“As a church, we believe in corporate social responsibility, in actual fact, corporate-social responsibility is a fallout of the salvation message. The scriptures inform us of the corporate-social works that the early church did for the community. Jesus Christ, at certain points in His ministry, fed His hungry congregation.

“If you look at the history of universities, you’d realise they were started by churches with free tuition. The church provided the needed workforce for the society and looking at what God Himself did for us by giving His only begotten son Jesus Christ to the world to come and die for our salvation, it tells a lot about the principles that govern Christianity, which is giving.

“All these and more informed our decision to donate these lights to the community.

“We just want to light up the community. We are not called as a church to only nourish the society spiritually, we are called to also nourish them physically. With the lightening up of the community, crime would go down and everyone would be free to move at night”, he added.

Rev. Idan explained that over the years, the church embarked on a number of social intervention programmes aimed at feeding and meeting the health needs of the community.

“There has been other projects the church has embarked on. The medical personnel of the church organised a medical mission to donate blood, check hepatitis B, run eye tests, and provided medicine for many other diseases that were diagnosed so that we could boost their health.

The church also had a hospital, which run for the community and occasionally, organised a food bazaar to feed the community. When we celebrate anniversaries, we come up with a number of social interventions like paying school fees and others to help meet the social need of the people”, he said.

He further stated that even though the church was expecting to fix over 30 lights, they were not able to receive all of them on time and so they only fixed over 20 of them for the purpose of today’s launch and that the others would be in soon.

“Today, we fixed over 20 lights and each street light costs Gh350, but as at now, all the lights are not in and we are expecting over 30 of them. In total, we are expected to spend over Gh10, 500 and more of the lights are going to be fixed very soon. Funding was solely from the church”, he explained.

Rev. Idan urged all other churches to “intervene in people’s social lives, just as Christ did because that was the only way the church could be a light to this increasingly dark world”.

Mr. Albert Fletcher, Assemblyman for Awudome Electoral Area was grateful to Love Community Chapel for the step they had taken to meet the light needs of the society.

He told GNA that even though he had already provided a few since he took over office, they were not sufficient to provide light to every part of the community.

“When I came into office, I managed to provide some of the lights but they were not sufficient to provide light to every part of the community, so when I heard that Love Community Chapel wanted to embark on such a project, I was very happy.

“As a community, we are grateful to the church for this example they have set and I am entreating all other churches to follow suit”, he added.

Mr Emmanuel Abbey, a member of the Bubiashie community explained the ordeal they went through in the hands of thieves at night when they had no lights.

“During those times, the community was very dark and anyone moving about at night was in danger of being attacked by thieves and we were all living in fear because you could not tell who was hiding somewhere ready to pounce and harm you”, he said.

“I know all the dangers we were faced with previously would come to an end, with the lights. This step that has been taken by the church is an example to all of us to endeavour to meet a need everywhere we find ourselves in the corporate world”, he added.