Beyond ‘repeat-after-me’: Rethinking self-support in Assemblies of God Ghana church planting from 1931 to 2024

Abstract

Background: The Assemblies of God church planting in Ghana grew out of the work by United States (US) missionaries in 1931. Inherited governance and funding templates have, in some settings, hardened into a repeat-after-me posture where ‘maturity’ is measured by a transplanted idea of self-support, at the cost of pastoral welfare in low-income contexts.
Objectives: This article explored how repeat-after-me dynamics shaped the operational meaning of self-support in the Assemblies of God Ghana (AG-Ghana) church planting from 1931 to 2024, and what a contextual redefinition should mean within Ghana’s uneven economic terrain for newly planted assemblies.
Methods: This study utilised a qualitative design combining historical document analysis with semi-structured interviews among AG-Ghana leaders and practitioners in church planting. Data were coded inductively through thematic analysis to trace institutional patterns and lived consequences.
Results: Early mission work blended contextual care with institutional replication. Self-support was operationalised as local assembly independence, intensifying pastoral precarity in fragile settings. Contemporary innovations, including pooled mission support and mobile micro-giving, provided meaningful relief but functioned as partial repair rather than structural redefinition.
Conclusion: Repeat-after-me tendencies remained most persistent in financial ecclesiology. Contextual self-support requires reframing from isolated independence to interdependent sustainability across congregational networks, with differentiated support recognising rural and urban realities.
Contribution: This article offers a missiological-economic reading of Three-Self (3S) practice in AG-Ghana and proposes a contextual framework for evaluating maturity and sustaining pastoral welfare beyond imported measures.