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Mensa Otabil is a Ghanaian pastor, author and founder of the International Central Gospel Church.

Mensa Otabil is the founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church and Chancellor of Central University in Accra. A pastor, author and broadcaster, he has spent four decades teaching on doctrine, leadership, stewardship and African identity to congregations and audiences across three continents.

Mensa Otabil is the founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church, which he began in Accra in 1984 and which has since grown into a network of assemblies in Ghana and beyond. He is Chancellor of Central University, the institution he founded to place Christian conviction alongside rigorous academic work, and the guiding voice behind Central Aid, its social intervention arm. Through the Living Word broadcast, carried on networks across Africa, Europe and the Middle East, he addresses religion, education, economic development, family life and public affairs. He is the author of more than twenty titles, among them Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia, Buy the Future, Four Laws of Productivity and The 2:42 Church. His teaching is marked by an insistence that faith be thought through rather than merely felt, and that the African continent take responsibility for its own future.

Mensa Otabil was born in Ghana in 1959 and founded the International Central Gospel Church in Accra in February 1984, beginning with a small gathering that grew into one of the most influential church movements on the continent. From the pulpit at Christ Temple he developed a body of teaching that refused the split between spiritual devotion and intellectual seriousness: doctrine taught systematically, stewardship taught practically, and identity taught historically. Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia, published in 1993, set out a theology of African dignity that circulated far beyond church audiences and remains his most widely read work. He founded Central University to institutionalise that conviction in higher education, and Central Aid to carry it into scholarships and community intervention. Otabil and Associates extends the same teaching into leadership formation for business and public life. Through Living Word, the weekly radio and television broadcast, and now a weekly podcast and an indexed sermon archive, the teaching reaches audiences across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has been honoured by the Republic of Ghana with the Order of the Volta for his contribution to national life, and continues to preach, write and teach from Accra.