The service is off to a chaotic start, in true Nigerian fashion. The band is missing a member. The head pastor is nowhere to be found. With some delay the lead vocalist, wearing a pink sequinned turban, begins to sing: “Iwo l’oyẹ, Baba iwo l’oyẹ” (“You are worthy, Father you are worthy” in Yoruba, which is spoken in south-west Nigeria). She could be in Lagos, Nigearia’s commercial capital. But the church is in Croydon, on London’s southern fringe.
It is one of over 50,000 global branches
of the Redeemed Christian Church of God
(RCCG), a Nigerian Pentecostal church.
With more than 870 parishes, RCCG is perhaps the fastest-growing church in Britain, bucking the broader trend of secularisation in the West. The contributions from its foreign branches are an important source of hard currency for the church. Yet for the congregants in Croydon, it mainly
serves as a slice of home.
More than 95% of Africans have a religious affiliation, compared with just over half of Britons. More than half of the Africans say they are Christian. The influx to Britain of Nigerian and other West African immigrants since the 1980s has thus been lucrative for the RCCG. Until recently
Enoch Adeboye, its leader, preached an aggressive version of the prosperity gospel, telling his followers that “anyone who is not paying his tithe is not going to heaven”.
The church has since turned things down a notch: this month Mr Adeboye apologised and admitted the Bible said no such thing. The branch in Croydon is still aligned with RCCG’s teachings. But like other Nigerian churches abroad it has found ways to appeal to its young congregation. Services feature grand testimonies about resolved immigration woes and celebrations of visa-sponsoring job offers.
The church also helps keep alive Yoruba. For many the monthly services it has held for a decade are the most of the language that they will hear, or speak, for weeks. It can be tough to keep up: at one
point the preacher giggles as she struggles to find the Yoruba word for “Bible”. Yet, “people believe that the type of prayer that they pray in Yoruba is more powerful than when they do it in English” says Femi Adebanjo, who pioneered the Yoruba services.
The sound of talking drums and shekere, a percussion instrument made of dried gourd, adds to the feeling of home.
Digital evangelising has made that feeling more accessible: two-thirds of the congregants in Croydon dialled in online. It has also made it easier to attract new members. RCCG has a “digital missionary” bot
to answer scriptural questions one might ask a minister. Live prayer sessions on Instagram and sermon clips on TikTok can bring in new flocks. Pastors often ask worshippers mid-service to “like” the YouTube livestreams so that the algorithm boosts their messages. QR codes let congregants
pay their tithes from wherever they are, without a velveteen offering basket.
For all the outreach, RCCG does not try particularly hard to attract members without African heritage. For now, appealing to devout and increasingly mobile young Africans is enough to sustain it. “I pray it continues like that”, chuckles Mr Adebanjo,
“before people all start speaking the Queen’s English.”
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