EBENEZER, This is How Far the Lord Has Helped us.



Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture/ Akropong-Ghana  


Graduation on 7th December 2019.





Dear Guest of Honor, Honorable Guests, ACI Council, Faculty members, Staff, families, and Friends, on behalf of all graduates, I say welcome and thank you for celebrating this special day with us. Let me start by saying “EBENEZER, This is How Far the Lord Has Helped us.” We thank Onyankopon, Imana, God, Dieu, Mungu, Nzapa, Jwok for walking with us on this journey. Indeed the Lord has Helped us, we can now sing that “the Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.” My name is Joel Kubwimana from Rwanda, and I’m grateful to my fellow graduates for giving me this opportunity to speak on their behalf today.  


We are grateful to our lecturers, yes; you made us sometimes rush to attend morning devotional without combing our hair or to look for our glasses while wearing them, to forget our laptops in the library and search for them in our pockets while on our way or in our rooms. Some of us lost our way back to bed during the night. Thanks to our colleagues for knowing what was happening and carefully directed us back to our beds while saying, aahh Akrofi, studying at ACI is not easy ooh, is not easy. I cannot recount all the revisions that were required from the feedback from essays, project essays, dissertations or Thesis. But we know that your feedback on our work, either written or verbal, was intended to enable us to understand better our mission and be effective where we are serving or going to serve.  Thank you for being Jesus Christ’s faithful servants and our prayer is that the Lord will keep using you to reach out and transform the lives of many for the Kingdom of God.   


To the entire ACI community: faculty staff, registry staff, Accounts staff, Library staff, IT staff, Cafeteria staff, Hostel, and Sanitation staff, transportation and security staff, we are grateful to you all for your care and support.   


We have a saying in Kinyarwanda which says, “umutwe umwe wifasha gusara”, literally “one head helps itself in madness,” whose true meaning is, “you cannot achieve good results alone.” Thus, we thank our families, churches, and sponsors, thank you for your love, moral and financial support. May God bless you all.  


Brothers and sisters, servants of the Lord, who want to be effective in their calling especially in the African context. You who want to serve the wider Christian community in Ghana, Africa and worldwide, we would like to recommend ACI to you. Your life will not be the same after your training at the first graduate theological institute in Ghana, and the first in Gospel and Culture engagement in Africa.


Today is the day, the day of joy, jubilation, and it is not a day of lectures. But dear colleagues permit me to point this out before closing. For our founding late Rector Prof. Kwame Bediako, Christianity is a universal faith, which has answers for particular questions arising out of every context, including Africa. This means that Christianity as a universal faith has answers to socio-economic and the political situation of our nations. Let us celebrate today and tomorrow go for thanksgiving, but by Monday we must wake up and embark on the mission of transforming our communities. Thus, a theology of responsibility is now ahead of us.  It is our responsibility to move from theory to practice and fulfill the Great Commission.  


I wish you a day full of joy, Nyame nhyira mo.


 Thank you, Merci beaucoup, Pwoj, Asante sana, Murakoze cyane, singila mingi, meda mo ase.    




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