A former pastor of the Lighthouse chapel international and one of the 6 suing the church, Seth Duncan, has revealed that he tried committing suicide 3 times due to too much pressure from the church to raise funds.
Duncan says whilst working with Lighthouse, he was placed under undue stress to raise money to run the missions he was put in charge of. He received no financial aid from the mother church and had to build everything from scratch using his own resources.
Worse, he was promised that whatever he managed to build his mission into would be his forever and he would never be transferred. However, after toiling to build his church to a level where it was sustainable, he was transferred.
Pastor Duncan says he put everything he owned into the mission he was in charge of in the Upper East Region. He used his money, his family’s money, plots of land he had purchased and every resource he could find, even to the detriment of his own family, to establish his church in Paga and two others nearby.
This came at great cost to his marriage and wellbeing but he did it anyway with the mindset it would be his.
“That was what I did because I was told that it was a permanent mission, and I should become who I could become. I programmed my mind that this is mine; that when I build it, I will have it,” he told the fourth estate, who are running an expose on the Lighthouse church.
“So even when [my] siblings outside and others sent me money, the next thing that I thought of was the church.”
After putting up three churches for Lighthouse from his own sweat and toil, Duncan said he was not allowed to manage any of them, he was transferred to a new mission to start the process all over again.
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His wife, who was bitter over how he used all their resources to build up the church only to be transferrred, left him. Darko said that’s when he grew suicidal and attempted killing himself 3 separate times.
“I attempted suicide three times. [In] my home at Paga, I hang myself on the ceiling fan and the fan dropped on me. Then I decided to leave Paga because I didn’t want to die in the presence of my family…So, I came to Accra, went to Kokrobite beach. Frankly speaking, between God and man, I drunk a bottle of alcohol, dived into the sea, hoping that the sea would take me away and everything would be over.”
However, the sea rejected him that day too. His third attempt occured at Kaneshie.
“Then I came to Kaneshie overhead [in Accra], trying to jump over so that at least a car could just smash me off. It didn’t work out.” he said.
Still unhappy, Pastor Darko said he next tried to castrate himself. He took a knife and cut off his scrotum but still survived.
“I ended up trying to castrate myself by cutting my scrotum and I found myself bleeding. Then I realised that it is not easy to die.” he narrated.
Two other pastors narrated how undue financial pressure from the church put them in physical, emotional and financial ruin. They also built new churches from scratch with the belief that it would be theirs only to be transferred around to start the process all over again.
Darko is one of 6 pastors suing the Lighthouse Chapel over their unpaid SSNIT benefits over years. He and two other pastors also narrated to the fourth estate how they were exploited, controlled and betrayed by the Lighthouse Chapel and Dag Heward Mills.
The full story is available to read on the Fourth Estate. Click here.
Source: GhanaCelebrities.Com