It was a rainy morning in Odumase-Krobo, the kind most of the residents of this small Ghanaian village avoid. But it was also a rainy Sunday morning, which meant that there was church. I was on holiday, visiting my sister as she finished up some research for her Master’s thesis in Ghana. Her friend and colleague Michael had invited us to come to his church, so we met him at the main road and jumped into a crowded minibus taxi that would take us to the church. As we rode to church, Michael handed me a book—a biography of an American evangelist named William Branham.

A Pentecostal preacher from Kentucky, Branham had evidentially had quite a career in the mid-twentieth century, hosting large revivals across North America, Europe, even gaining a foothold in Africa. An interesting story, but in many ways not particularly unique. The 19th and 20th centuries had seen countless missionaries come to the African continent to start churches. What made Branham unique, however, according to the biography in my hand (and later, according to conversations with several church members) was that he was the prophet of “the end times.”

The church service was not unlike many I had been to in other countries in Africa. A wooden structure with a thatched roof just off a narrow dirt path, the building housed a congregation that took the teachings of Branham very seriously. My sister had been there a number of times at Michael’s behest and prepared me for what to expect: Jesus is still pretty important, she wrote in an e-mail a few weeks before my arrival in Ghana, but so is William Branham.

Photo credits: Brandon Gilvin

During the service, we sang many of the same hymns my sister and I used to sing in the small rural church we had grown up in. But instead of the slightly out-of tune piano from my childhood, the hymns were backed by the strumming of an electric guitar. And most different of all from my childhood were the pictures a procession of elders brought into the sanctuary and hung for the congregation to face. To the left of the pulpit hung a portrait of a light-skinned, auburn-haired Jesus; to the right a copy of a photograph taken by William Branham of a cloud that was shaped like the face of Jesus—a miracle, I was told—one of the many divine events that Branham had experienced throughout his life.

The third photograph, placed at the apex of the triangle made by the three hanging pictures, was of William Branham, a halo of fire just above his head. Yes, Jesus was clearly important; so were miraculous signs of his presence. But if the position of the photographs was any indication, in this little church in Ghana, they didn’t have anything on the prophet from Kentucky whose ministry would eventually usher in the end of the world as we know it.

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I have thought about that little church in Odumase a number of times since my visit, but it wasn’t until I came upon this passage in Acts . . .