Purpose Beyond Paycheck
Amma Amegashie, from Accra, Ghana, completed her MBA in China. She planned to stay there to pursue a PhD and work a job she’d already secured. She returned to Ghana simply to get her work visa in order but suddenly felt uncertain about returning to China.
The job market in Accra is not robust. Friends urged her to go where she had work. So she prayed. “The more I prayed, the more I felt like I wanted to stay in Ghana,” Amma said. “But I was staying with nothing in hand.” She decided to give it a year.
She reached out to a ministry friend to see if he had any projects she could help with—something she could do while looking for full-time work. The friend was Sam Boateng, CTCA* catalyst for West Africa. His answer was definitely yes.
After organizing and administering several events for CTCA, Sam asked Amma to join the staff in a more official capacity. She’d worked in ministry before and did not intend to return. She even had another job lined up by then. But God changed her heart, and in 2019 she joined the staff of CTCA.
That same year, Sam started a church in Accra. Amma helped launch and then joined the church. From the start, Amma was impacted by how Sam ministered to professionals. “In the way he preached, in the examples he gave, in the way he ministered to them—even visiting them at their workplaces—he was committed to making sure these younger professionals were integrating their faith at their workplace,” Amma said. Sam preached a series called “Purpose Beyond Paycheck,” highlighting how Daniel integrated his faith and his work. The topic energized Amma. Sam wanted to start a faith and work ministry and asked Amma to lead it. She loved the concept but felt ill-equipped. She said no.
Sam didn’t give up. He asked Amma to create a video series called “This Time Tomorrow.” Amma filmed church members as they identified the gospel’s effect on their work. Shown monthly on Sunday mornings, the videos invited congregants to consider what they would be doing “this time tomorrow,” when they were at their workplaces. Amma spotlighted people with all sorts of jobs, including a stay-at-home mom and a student, because whatever God calls a person to do, even if unpaid, is their work. This series impacted the filmed and the viewer—calling both to see God glorified in and through their work.
Amma finally agreed to step out in faith and lead this ministry: Purpose Beyond Paycheck. She and a group of her friends piloted a cohort study group that has now been adopted by another church in Accra and offered to a larger audience through CTCA.
Adopting a curriculum from RCTC’s Global Faith & Work Initiative, the Purpose Beyond Paycheck cohorts cover topics like Your Work Matters, Calling Matters and Heart Matters. The goal is to help people see their work not as a means to an end but as the space God has called them to serve his creation.
And they’re seeing that goal come to fruition. When a man who worked for a large telecommunications network realized an app he created was inaccessible to those with impaired vision, he added an accessibility feature. Unable to find work in his field, a trained journalist started selling insurance. He hoped it wouldn’t last long, but through the cohort, he saw an opportunity to lighten the burden of people in crisis. Helping others became his focus and joy. A woman had always tried to find the one thing she was called to do. Through the training, she learned wherever she is at the moment is where God has called her and where she is to serve and give her best.
And for Amma, God is helping her release her drive for success and perfection and center the gospel instead. She looks to Genesis 2:15. When God put man in the Garden of Eden, it was to work the garden and keep it. Work existed before the presence of sin, but sin tainted it. Work designed to make the world flourish is now a tool to satisfy selfish desires. But Christ came to restore all things. “Through the gospel—by his death on the cross—Jesus has redeemed all things, including work,” Amma said. “It is important to see our work as God's means to care for his creation—humans and things. Therefore, when we work, we work as unto the Lord and not to man.”
Amma wants more people to understand these truths and feel their effect on their work. “People spend so much more time in the workplace than in church. My hope is that every Christian—from Accra to the whole continent of Africa—is integrating the gospel at their workplace. My big dream is to see churches begin to have faith and work initiatives and pastors begin to minister to professionals in their churches about how to integrate their faith—whether it's in the form of cohorts or pastors being intentional about their sermons. Every Christian integrating their faith in the workplace they find themselves—that's the big dream.”
*CTCA refers to CTC Africa