By Nadine Wilson Harris
Donald Stewart, a retired Jamaican pastor, now missionary in Ghana, is concerned that not enough local pastors are joining the fight against the legalisation of obeah, which he has seen destroy far too many lives in sections of Africa and Jamaica.
Stewart, who prior to leaving Jamaica, was the pastor most educators and parents called upon to deliver their demon-possessed children, did not hold back as he blasted church leaders.
“There is a thing called cowardice, where people are coward. They are afraid to confront what they need to confront and I have seen it continuing,” said Stewart, who left Jamaica for Africa ten years ago.
“Generally speaking, we have people who prefer to have a good name in terms of being nice people, don’t offend anybody, and that makes people like you, and you have a large church, and so on. But my understanding from the Bible is that we must call a thing as Jesus calls it. We must be willing sometimes to overturn tables. We must be willing, sometimes, to say you brood of vipers; that’s what Jesus did,” he asserted during an interview with the Freedom Come Rain.
“I do think that sometimes, especially, some of our leading ministers are too afraid to challenge things, and because of that, the churches they represent, the congregations they represent, are also unwilling to challenge certain things. The same is true for the homosexual agenda; the same is true for the abortion issues,” said the prominent clergyman, who commended the few pastors and Christian advocates who continue to protest ungodly initiatives.
Stewart, who has been involved in advocacy for the last 30 years, said he faced backlash, not just from the secular community, but also from religious leaders when he confronted certain issues. While he and his wife, Andrea, have been living in Ghana for only four years, they had lived in Zambia for six years. They had also travelled to Malawi, Tanzania, and several other African countries as missionaries working with Operation Mobilisation.
“We have observed that anywhere you have this strong belief in spiritism, and in mostly African countries they call it juju, whenever there is that, people become very superstitious and they are no longer thinking for themselves because everything is tied to the spirits.” He noted too that a lot of these people are manipulated by witch doctors and witch finders, who try to help them identify the source of the witchcraft. There are often ongoing family feuds as demonic spirits are engaged to destroy people.
“Sometimes what happens is that because some families believe in these things so much, they have their own middle family gods. We see some mention made of that in the old testament,” he noted.
“They pour libations, whether it is blood, chicken blood, goat blood, or whether it is oils of different kinds, or whether it is what some may call consecrated water or alcohol, and they pour these things in worship to their ancestors and worship to the gods of the mountain or gods of the trees and rivers,” he said. He pointed to the fact that God has warned against these practices, and urged Christians to renounce them from becoming an accepted part of daily living.
“We have seen where curses have actually been on people’s lives. We have seen where people have been demonised; some say demon possessed. Those who know what’s going on have had to be praying and casting out demons out of people, setting people free, breaking curses, and so on,” he told the Freedom Come Rain.
University of the West Indies Professor Clinton Hutton, represented by attorney Bert Samuels, filed a constitutional challenge in Jamaica’s Supreme Court seeking to repeal the colonial-era Obeah Act. The challenge argues that multiple sections of the law violate fundamental constitutional rights, including freedom of religion, privacy, conscience, expression, and the right to seek and distribute information. Others have also joined the call for its immediate repeal.
The first hearing for the case was set for Thursday, the 25th of September. The day before, Stewart called upon political and Christian leaders to push back.
“Where are all the New Testament Elijahs, the modern day John the Baptists, and the 21st century Pauls?” he asked in a recent Facebook post.
“Is the Jamaican Christian Church really going to sit still, do nothing, and watch our precious nation being taken over by “legalized” Witchcraft, Voodoo, Obeah, Juju, Sorcery, etc.?” he questioned.
The Jamaica Evangelical Alliance, which represents approximately 22 denominations and para-church groups, applied to join the case to decriminalise obeah. Christians across the island have been praying against the move.
Source: Freedom Come Rain