Dr. Samuel Sarkodie-Addo, a lecturer at Christian Service University (CSU), has declared that environmental care and excellent service delivery are two expressions of the same biblical mandate of stewardship, not separate concerns. He said this at the institution’s academic retreat on Friday, September 4, 2026.
Dr. Sarkodie-Addo delivered a theological perspective on the retreat’s theme, “Transforming the Campus through Environmental Care and Excellent Service Delivery,” drawn from Genesis 2:15. The retreat, held ahead of the 2026/2027 academic year, brought together staff to reflect on campus sanitation, order and institutional excellence.
Dr. Sarkodie-Addo challenged the notion that Ghanaians are inherently untidy, arguing instead that the state of the physical environment reflects a deeper spiritual and cultural attitude toward order. He cited the eighteenth-century aphorism that cleanliness is next to godliness, tying it to Old Testament instructions on hygiene in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and argued that disorder in the environment “is not godly,” since order is a feature of creation itself, as seen in Genesis 1.
He addressed a long-standing critique in environmental scholarship, associated with historian Lynn White, that Christianity bears responsibility for ecological neglect. Sarkodie-Addo rejected the claim, arguing that any failure lies with individual Christians rather than with biblical teaching itself, and pointed to the stewardship mandate in Genesis 1 and 2, Psalm 24, and Romans 8 as evidence that scripture calls believers to care for creation.
Central to his address was the concept of “sense of place,” a framework he attributed to researchers Jenny Seifert and Bret Shaw, describing how the meaning and attachment people assign to a location shape how they treat it. Applying the concept to CSU, Sarkodie-Addo described the university’s buildings, water systems, furniture, vehicles and electronic equipment as the institution’s own “patch of the earth,” a resource base for which staff and students bear shared responsibility before God.
On service delivery, Dr. Sarkodie-Addo drew on the biblical accounts of Joseph, Daniel, and the craftsmen Bezalel and Oholiab to argue that excellence is fundamentally a matter of character rather than a special spiritual gift. He said believers should pray first to identify their gifts and talents, resolve to apply the principles of excellence, and then seek grace to sustain that commitment, rather than treating an “excellent spirit” as something conferred through prayer alone.
He concluded that environmental care and service excellence share the same underlying principles of faithfulness, diligence and hard work, and that both ultimately serve to glorify God.
Dr. Sarkodie-Addo has lectured at CSU since 2021. He is the Director of Transformative Stewardship Africa, and the Author of eleven books on faith and stewardship, including “Prayer, Prosperity and Poverty in Africa.”
