Recently, a consulting firm released the ‘Alder Church Report 2019’, an outcome of a nationwide survey on the church and millennials. In this interview, Godman Akinlabi, the senior pastor of The Elevation Church, Lagos, speaks on the many ills bedeviling Nigeria, especially the increasing rate of suicide among young Nigerians against the seemingly carefree attitude of the government and its agencies. Excerpts by SEYI JOHN SALAU
Some of the things highlighted by the Alder Church Report 2019 seem to indict the church in Nigeria on its response to the youth; what is your view on this?
I would say that I don’t consider it as indictment; I consider it more as motivation. Sometimes, you do things but the way people perceive it is different and if truly we want to serve people we need to get feedback from them; feedback is very important. Even Jesus asked a question, who do men say that I am? So, the church in Nigeria – it’s ok for us to ask the question; who do men say that we are, and we shouldn’t say we don’t care about what people say if truly we are sent to lead and influence these people: then we should be willing to accept what their perception is. There is difference between real need and felt need; sometimes felt need is more important than real need but people feel this is what they need and if we don’t fill that, even their real need we may not be able to fix. This is more for me from the point of view of felt need because this is what people are saying and we should respond appropriately to them without feeling indicted – it is a motivation in my opinion.
What do you think is responsible for the increasing rate of suicide in Nigeria?
I think suicide comes from hopelessness, and hopelessness is not something that happens in one day. It’s something that starts from cluelessness from not knowing what to do; from feeling helpless; from feeling constrained; then to the point you feel there is no point living. And when the economy is down, when the aspiration of the youth is becoming unrealisable, when people can’t make ends meet, relationship/marriages are breaking up, when people have issues in their emotional lives they are very quick to judge themselves as being hopeless or useless. When there is lack of economic empowerment; when you see what your mates are doing and what you are doing, it’s also possible for you to feel that you are hopeless. For anybody to take his or her life, the person has to get to the point where it feels like this life is no longer worth living – there is an atmosphere that can put people off easily; that is the kind of atmosphere we have in Nigeria right now, which we are believing to change over a period of time but that is the atmosphere we have, and that is why we see more people wanting to commit suicide. Also, as churches, civil societies, government there has to be a response to that; I believe that right now the government as policy makers should come up with enlightenment campaign that tells people that ‘look, this is what we are doing – give us some amount of time, things are going to get better, don’t kill yourselves; we recognise that things are going up’, but they behave as if nothing is happening. In fact, governmental organisations that should keep the records (the data) of how many suicide we have on a weekly basis in Nigeria, I don’t think they have it. Because we do not even measure the level of these things, it’s difficult for us to make statement about it. We who are pastors know that we get reports: people write us saying they are depressed; people write us about suicide, for instance somebody called this morning saying,‘my father is about to die and we are not in good terms; what should I do, and the doctors have said that he is going to die anytime’ – then I said you need to go see him, so you can make peace because I know somebody I have counselled like that before whose father died: this guy in his 40s is still depressed because he feels that it was that unresolved issue that killed his father and that is affecting him. He is not an emotionally healthy human being, and that is how we create lack of emotional health; so we know what is going on but like we said the real issues cannot be addressed only by churches. Churches lay hands on people to be healed for instance, but if there is a health policy that can make healthcare available en-masse to all Nigerians so that headache does not become something else before I am able to go to the pastor to say – pray for me; so that I can access healthcare easily. That is the kind of things we are talking about; as church we will respond but government also have to respond and not bury their head in the sand and just behave as if everything is ok: because everything is not ok.
In other words, what are you telling the churches to do?
In other words, what am saying is that the churches should get this report; download it, read through it, know what the yearnings and aspirations of young Nigerians are and tailor solutions towards it. I mean young people want jobs; how can the church and religious organisations help them to be more employable. We have a graduate employability programme that we run – we run like two sections with a hundred people in attendance in each. A lot of these people have gotten job because when you coach them and give them the right skills that the employers are looking for – the next interview they go for; they will get a job. Because if they cannot use Excel before or PowerPoint, or do not know anything about project management and now if they ask them those questions, they know about it and this is the skills that we are giving them. For instance, in the church that I pastor, we said this year we want to help a thousand people to get jobs, not that we are going to provide the job but we are going to prepare them because we have researched what jobs are available in the market; what is the skill level and help them to bridge the gap so they can get jobs. It’s the same thing to help 200 people to start a business, it means we are going to train them on entrepreneur; we need to know they are cut-out for entrepreneur, we need to make a little fund available as start-up funds for them which will run through a microfinance institution and the church guarantees it – they get guarantors, have something to start the business. So, rather than church looking to start a bank, we don’t have to start a bank; work with existing banks, guarantee that they can pay back – you have a pool of funds with which you can guarantee that, that’s how wealth is created, that’s how a nation can get better. So, if we see many more churches doing this, that would be the appropriate response and when the government creates the enabling policies, it will then make that happen on a higher scale. Let me give you another example about what am talking about: when we say that young people are not going to school, a lot of the time it is because they don’t have anybody to pay their school fees. In developed countries, government collaborates with corporate institutions to make student loan available for graduate and undergraduate studies. Many more people from the down-trodden homes will be able to go to the university if they know that if they get a loan to go to school; your first 10 years of working can be used to pay back the loan. It is a government policy that can solve that, the church cannot create student loan for instance, the church can only give a few scholarships and how many people will be able to participate in it. We have a mass problem but we are using small scale solutions, so the number of people that are excluded are too many and that is what is resulting to all these crimes and other things because many people feel excluded – so you mean I have to come to your church to get all these things; why can’t we create something at the policy level that is available to everybody and then we see massive changes happening in our country.
The church has been contributing to help the less-privileged in society; what is the motivation for this?
It is an understanding of the scriptures first of all. Acts 10:38; the bible says how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Ghost and with power, he went about doing good – the doing good there in some interpretation is an art of philanthropy. When it said he went about doing good; some people thought he went about preaching; doing good is about creating solutions for people, so the church as it was configured will not fulfill our potentials if we focus only on the spirit of man without the soul and the physical well being of man. Martin Luther King Jr., said ‘Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.’ In James Chapter 2 or so, the scripture says what is pure religion? Pure religion is to bridle your tongue but apart from that, is to visit the widows and the orphans – so this is pure religion. Religion is beyond, we want to go to heaven; we want to go to heaven quite alright but how do we make the earth better and how can we be the good neighbor? Remember the story of the ‘Good Samaritan’; who is your neighbor? and he said anybody that is around you is your neighbour – make sure that they are ok. So, we need to go beyond religion, just come together every Sunday, we clap and worship God and pray fire over our enemies; that would not be church anywhere.
