Lighthouse Chapel snubbed The Fourth Estate despite Bishop Agyinasare’s involvement – Manasseh Azure Awuni tells Court

The Fourth Estate contacted the Founder of Perez Chapel, Bishop Charles Agyinsare, to facilitate a meeting with Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI) to address allegations of exploitation and abuse raised against the church by six of its former pastors, but the church declined the request.

The former Editor-in-Chief of The Fourth Estate, Manasseh Azure Awuni, told an Accra High Court in an ongoing defamation suit against the news portal that this compelled The Fourth Estate to proceed with its series of stories about the pastors’ allegations without the church’s reaction.

“One side[pastors] made an allegation and the only way to have gotten verification from the other side [the church] would have been to speak to the church, but the church refused to cooperate with us,” Mr Awuni told the court during cross-examination via video conferencing.  

“It is worth noting that even before we wrote the letter to the church, we had information that the church wasn’t going to cooperate with us or give us any information. That was why we decided to reach out to Bishop Agyinsare. So even before we wrote a letter, we had used [Bishop] Agyinasare as an intermediary and had been told that the church would not cooperate with us. We took these steps because of the possibility of factual inaccuracies on the part of one side of the parties in the matter.”

Mr. Awuni’s response was to claims made by the lawyer of Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI), Kwaku Paintsil, that Mr. Awuni, as a journalist, failed to verify statements made by Seth Duncan, one of the former LCI pastors who sued the church. Mr Duncan claimed to have suffered losses, including losing a school he built and the breakdown of his marriage.

However, the LCI lawyer claimed that the information was not true as Mr Duncan’s marriage was still intact.  Mr. Awuni in response stated that he had no reason to doubt the former LCI pastor.

Background

Six former ministers of the church sued the church in April 2022 for non-payment of their pension contributions, economic exploitation, and emotional abuse.

The church counter-sued the pastors and accused them of causing The Fourth Estate to publish “sensational” allegations even before and after they came to court to sue the church.

The church also sued The Fourth Estate for defamation, claiming among things that the publications sought to suggest that the church was “not only intolerant but extremely callous, insensitive, inconsiderate and cold-hearted in its treatment of and abandonment of its volunteers and employees with exacting demands calculated to house them out of their posts.”

For relief, it wants The Fourth Estate to apologise for the stories and also pull them down.

Those stories also contain the former pastors’ accounts of the sacrifices they made in establishing churches they were allegedly forced to abandon because of a church policy.

The LCI and The Fourth Estate have been in court since December 2021.

Verification of allegations

During the hearing last Thursday, the church’s lawyer, Mr Paintsil sought to suggest that even when the church failed to respond to The Fourth Estate letter requesting information, Mr Awuni could have gone on the ground to verify the information from the school’s administration.

However, Mr Awuni disagreed.

My lord, there was an attempt to verify [Seth Duncan’s claim] from the most credible source in this matter, which is the employer of the pastor against whom the allegation was made. Any other source would not have been complete until the party [against] whom the allegation was made was contacted,” Mr Awuni explained

The LCI lawyer also insisted that the issues around Mr Duncan’s loss of investment and his broken marriage published by The Fourth Estate were not in the former pastor’s suit against the church and also missing from the letter The Fourth Estate wrote to the church requesting its side of the story.

“I put it to you that those two allegations were your invention,” the lawyer said, looking sternly at the video conferencing screen.

However, Mr Awuni shot down the claim. He insisted that The Fourth Estate did not rely only on documents flowing from Mr Duncan’s suit against the church.

“My lord, the said pastor mentioned that he personally raised funds to assist in establishing the church. But as I’ve said, we didn’t solely rely on the court document. We interviewed them, and even the plaintiff [the church] didn’t speak to us, but we quoted some of its responses to the issues through third-party sources.”

During the hearing on November 13, 2024, the LCI lawyer claimed that the church responded to The Fourth Estate’s request for information that it would “defer to a determination by the Court.”

Again, Mr Awuni disagreed.

“That is not accurate. The Plaintiff Church did not respond to our request for information I think the Plaintiff’s Witness gave reasons to that effect. Besides, our letter to the Plaintiff’s church was written more than a month before the suits were filed,” he explained.

Meanwhile, a bishop of the Lighthouse Chapel International, Bishop Marcel Aboagye, admitted to the court on January 10, 2023, that the church “refused” to respond to a letter The Fourth Estate wrote for a response before publishing the “Darkness in the Lighthouse” series

“We suspected there was collusion between the former pastors, Kofi Bentil and the defendants [The Fourth Estate]. We thought a response to the letter would mean giving away the potential defense to an imminent suit,” he told the court.

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