Mega Churches amid mega crimes

The Nigerian society is a contradiction. Full of religion, but crime rate is alarming. The level of religiosity has not been able to check crime; it has even helped to fuel criminality of all kinds. Even in places where such things should not be contemplated, the stench oozes. In some cities across the country, some streets currently house over 10 religious centres, majority of which are Pentecostal churches with various nomenclatures. Yet, such streets are dens of robbers and of kidnappers!

Nigeria is a country where everyone that goes to church claims to be a “born again”, yet the list of criminals are getting longer on a daily basis. Many members of the political class that hold important positions in their churches are known to be the “chief troublers of Nigeria” as they serve their stomachs and not the people. Some of them steal more than they need.

Unlike before when churches worshipped in ramshackle buildings, today’s mega churches worship in mega edifices. It is on record that some church buildings in this country gulped as much as N3 billion and above in construction cost. Churches are now being constructed by world-class construction companies. It is now a huge business!

But critics claim that many of the Pentecostal churches nowadays are encouraging corruption among their members by the messages being preached and the lifestyle of the pastors. Stories abound of some people who steal their companies’ money to donate same to their churches. There was a report sometime ago about a church member that moved a big generator belonging to his employer to his church as an “offering”.

“The argument in many places is that the church may have lost its calling of soul-winning. While money and ostentatious living have become the order of the day in many Pentecostal churches, the orthodox churches are on the other hand doing their own things. Many of the top leaders are there fighting and quarrelling among themselves,” Lawrence Madu, a social commentator, said.

“Many of them have since embraced dangerous cults and have even initiated their children into such dangerous groups. Yet, they hide under the cover of being leaders in the church,” he said.

According to Madu, “You don’t need to investigate deep to know why members of these churches now engage in all manner of crimes. They see their pastors in excessive wealth, the source of which is difficult to explain. They see their pastors divorcing and remarrying; they see them fraternizing openly with enemies of society; some of the pastors go with thugs as their security details; they belong to cults and boast openly of such fraternities. If an armed robber comes to church and discovers that his pastor steals church money, would that robber see anything wrong in what he is doing?

“If a prostitute, a cultist, or a politician stealing public funds goes to church and finds that the pastor is a serious womanizer, a cultist, a thief, a reveller and one who is not interested in soul-winning, they feel relaxed because, ‘like the pastor, like the followers’. And that is what is happening in most of these worship centres. The people know the lifestyles of their pastors and they are no longer positively influenced by their messages.”

“We have been crying in this country for good leadership. In the last 16 years, have we not had Christian presidents, governors, ministers, councillors, etc? Where did that leave us? They left us more bruised than ever. Some of them have special seats reserved for them in their churches. They helped their churches build magnificent cathedrals, yet they are known to have run the country aground and by their thieving habit they have left blood and tears on their trail,” he added.

A journalist with a national newspaper expressed disappointment at the way “Nigerians have been so deceived by religion to the point that they cannot stand up for their rights”, despite excessive provocation by their leaders.

“Elsewhere, people would not tolerate the situation we find ourselves in Nigeria. What sparked the Arab Spring? Was it not government corruption and failure to provide the basic things of life for the people? But here, if you say there should be civil disobedience and that our leaders must be made to know we are not happy with the state of affairs in the country, some people will say they are Christians, they are not supposed to carry out a demonstration against government. It is that sense of gullibility that our leaders have continued to capitalize on to prey on us,” the journalist, who asked not to be named, said.

Indeed, the increasing spate of criminality in society appears to raise serious questions over the role of too many churches springing up in all nooks and crannies of Nigeria.

Critics and some members of the clergy point fingers at the excessive influence of the world into the church; the quest to have all that the world could afford and the uncomfortable intermingling of many men of God with politicians.

Like in political arena, money is threatening sweet fellowship among church members. As many Pentecostal pastors revel in ostentatious lifestyle, poor members of their congregation pine away in abject poverty. With much emphasis on miracles and prosperity, the leadership of many present-day churches place little or no emphasis on soul-winning which is the nucleus of Christian faith. This has eroded the high moral values that were once placed on the clergy.

Days were when church business was strictly for the called. Those were when some prophets and apostles of Jesus Christ left their lucrative engagements for prophetic and evangelistic work. In our contemporary times also, examples abound of people who took the poverty lane in order to seek the souls of men.

But many are indeed riding on the crest of evangelistic work to amass wealth for themselves. Since the 1980s and 1990s, establishment of churches has become a booming business.

Some analysts believe that the mushrooming of Pentecostal churches in every nook and cranny of society was given impetus by the hard times that hit fraudsters, otherwise called 419ners some years ago. The military government of Sani Abacha, for instance, had taken a hard stance against conmen, jeopardising their untoward businesses.

The affected 419ners were said to have recruited pastors, who they promised and indeed paid handsomely to oversee the churches established by them. Over the years, as a result of escalating unemployment rate in the country, many more recruits are being made into the ever-growing church business.

Added to this, the influx of worshippers that troop to churches as a result of the biting and frustrating economic situation and other circumstances that daily threaten the very existence of the poor masses, especially in a poorly-run economy, which is in sync with the Karl Marx’s definition of religion as the opium of the masses, may have forced many people to seek divine intervention in their lives.

This influx has made the new generation churches thick and the operators are not looking back.

It would be recalled that during the Olusegun Obasanjo era, the Federal Government had threatened to begin imposition of taxes on churches; this was as a result of the extravagant lifestyle of some of the pastors.

Government thought it was unbecoming of clerics to flaunt wealth as some of the members of the clergy decided to compete with politicians in society. Like politicians, they deck themselves in flowing babaringa; move around town in a convoy of exotic cars, accompanied by a retinue of aides and escorted by heavily-armed security guards. Some of them are known to maintain permanent suites in expensive hotels across the country, despite the fact that they have their own expansive and expensive mansions in choice areas of Lagos and Abuja.

Some of them have since acquired private jets, not for the sake of evangelism, but to show they have arrived.

Collins Egejuru, a Theology lecturer with one of the mission schools in the South West, told BDSUNDAY that “the disposition of the leaders in some of the churches in relation to their financial empire creates doubt about their calling. While a few tread cautiously, with all sense of modesty and high degree of discipline, majority simply spend their churches’ money with reckless abandon. Such misdemeanour is nothing but an apparent betrayal of trust and confidence reposed in them.

Sometime ago, Mike Okonkwo, presiding bishop of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM) and former national president of Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), the umbrella body of Pentecostal churches in Nigeria, said that money was the motivation behind modern-day Pentecostalism.

“The PFN leadership has discovered that money has, sadly, become the major yardstick for measuring success in the church, especially the Pentecostal, in this end time. Prosperity messages have, therefore, taken centre stage of most preaching at the expense of full gospel message,” he observed.

BDSUNDAY investigations revealed that a number of clerics truly live up to that name when it comes to refusal to be carried away by the allurement of money. Their modesty and simplicity attest to the gospel that they preach.

It would be recalled that one of the reasons the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) banned broadcasting of miracles on the television was the belief that some of the miracle claims shown over the television were not real, but deceitful.

A former director-general of NBC was quoted as saying that moneybag pastors employed all manner of strategies to get at the purses and pockets of their faithful. According to the DG, one of such methods is claim of working miracles through which they make people believe that some of the miracles are real, though overblown. He was also said to believe that in order to attract the crowd and make huge amount of money, some pastors employ deceit.

As Okonkwo rightly noted, prosperity messages are the mainstay of the ministering of some men of God who seek after wealth at the expense of the gospel.

“After such power-packed message in which they usually expend a lot of energy, the people are called upon to sow seed of faith which is a way of telling the faithful to turn out their pockets and drop whatever little is still left in there; so that God can prosper them,” Okonkwo said.

The bishop noted that the pronouncements which they erroneously make and support with bible quotations are made to extract money from the congregation.

One itinerant evangelist based in one of the states in the Niger Delta area of the country was quoted some time ago as nearly placing a curse on those who would not “sow a seed”. He was quoted to have warned the congregation while asking for donations that those who refused to sow seed of faith would not prosper.

“If you are not a giver today, you shall be a beggar tomorrow,” he said.

Today, a good number of clerics move around in their private jets. Acquisition of private jets appears to have become a fad and a measure of success in ministry.

Ayo Oritsejafor, a former national president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, recently slammed some men of God, saying that most people who claim to be pastors or men of God were not, as they were not called by God in the first place.

Oritsejafor expressed displeasure over how ‘these men of God’ have now turned the church into a business centre and living flamboyant lives, stating that the development was the reason kidnappers now see the church as a place to make money.

According to him, “The problem we have in the church is that a lot of these pastors are not men of God as they were not called. They are mercenaries, commercially-minded people. The duty of the church is to preach morality not materialism and because Nigerians are very gullible; they are easy victims of deceit. They fall prey to some of these pastors or prophets of doom. The way they live gives a wrong impression of what should be in a church of God. There should be no room for material possessions.

“I am not saying a man of God should not live a life of comfort but it should be a life of good comfort; that is why kidnapping is now a common thing even in the church.

“It is unfortunate that we are having this kind of problem because most places of religious gathering, particularly of the Christian faith, are seemingly reducing their faith to commercials. So many people think they have money and most of them live a flamboyant lifestyle.”

The Warri, Delta State-based cleric, urged, “We should preach values and not materialism. I think the churches themselves should look inwards and correct the poor impression they are giving people outside that there is money in the church, whereas there is none.”

In his reaction sometime ago, Pastor William Kumuyi, general superintendent, Deeper Christian Life Ministry, said pastors who revel in worldly pleasure were not leading by example. He flayed some clerics who use church money to procure private jets and state-of-the-art automobiles for showmanship-sake, wondering how such preachers expected their poor members (particularly those members who cast in their “widow’s mite” at fellowship meetings) to feel when they see their pastors revel in such inexplicable jamboree.

Leonard Umunna, general overseer, Bible Life Church, said Pentecostal pastors who help themselves with money contributed by their members “are not working for God, but for their bellies”.

“When government is talking about taxing churches, it is because of the impression some pastors create that gives them out as super-wealthy men of God. If you say you are a true pastor and you are using the tithes and offerings meant to do the work of God, and you are spending it on choice cars, that is a dangerous thing that attracts God’s wrath. Don’t forget that there are many hirelings nowadays who are working after their own belly. They mingle with politicians and live flamboyantly. So, when those in the corridors of power see them, they tend to believe it is the same with all the pastors. That is the problem”, Umunna said.