There is a popular song with this refrain: “I have got the Midas touch. Everything I touch turn to gold.” Christianity in Nigeria has lost its gold standard.
The dross around the gold is too glaring to miss. Gold is eluding our worship. We are settling for bronze when the goal should be gold. What has taken over the center ground in our worship is excessive emotionalism, subtle control, jealousy, condemnation, jostling for positions, mutual suspicions and pastoral dictatorship.
We have come to accept all these orthodoxies because Pastors are breeding sheep and not shepherds. They are breeding captive audience and not liberated souls.
Lola is back in her father’s house. Lola is a devoted, emotional and obedient worshipper. She loves her church and has never missed any Sunday worship in five years. She cannot distinguish between religion and Christianity. She is fanatical about the things of God. She is a member of the choir and could be seen segueing between roles in the church. She is a boon to her Pentecostal church and the Pastor is very fond of her devotion. She accepts any word from the lips of her pastor as final.
But Lola has been sent packing by her husband. For years Lola has been sleeping naked on her matrimonial bed. That’s the husband preference. He prefers to sleep beside a naked wife every night. Except when she is having her monthly period. Then she could wear a pant to save the bed from being soiled by period blood. Recently, the pastor called Lola and spoke of his vision. Pastor advised Lola to stop sleeping naked. The pastor reasoned that a naked woman in the night is an easy target for spiritual husband to prey upon. Lola is a passionate and obedient Christian. The pastor’s word is supreme.
She spoke to her husband about what the Pastor said. That was the tipping point. The husband had been harbouring resentment over Lola’s obsession with church activities over her matrimonial home. This new pastoral order from the church was the tinder and Lola allowed it to engulf her home. Lola began to implement the order. She began to dress like someone going to war to bed. There was massive argument over the Biblical basis of this order anywhere in the Bible. The husband argued that being naked or clothed, spiritual husband can ravage any woman through supernatural power.
Anyway, Lola stuck to her pastor’s order. That stubborn obedience to her pastor’s decree destroyed her marriage. That is a picture of Christianity in Nigeria. We dilute our worship with religion, superstition, tradition and offend God all the way.
How can a professing Christian still believes that he must return home to participate in traditional yam festival with masquerades entertaining the crowd? Did Christ not rebuke us for holding to our tradition that has led us astray? In Nigeria, Christians participate in Eyo festival, Osun worship, Ogun ceremony, Alagemo and various other idol worship that God hates and frown against.
Christianity in Nigeria encourages Ogboni members to worship with all the paraphernalia of their grove. ‘Shaki’-wearing Ogboni members have been allowed to participate in worship. The simplistic argument is that that is the best and fastest way to convert these heathens. This is desecration of the house of God.
Christianity in Nigeria is all about power. Pastors are obsessed with having power, natural or supernatural. Many of them run to Synagogue, Guru Maharaji, India, Cotonou and villages looking for supernatural power. Prophets in Nigeria give out black soap to their members. They organize spiritual clinic where animal sacrifices are encouraged, ritual bath and burial are carried out to ward off demonic oppression. Gullible Nigerians run to these evil groves call churches for solution to their earthly struggles.
Christianity in Nigeria has been abused by government. Back in the days when the Peoples Democratic Party was in power, top pastors used to be private-jetted to Abuja to collect their own dividend of democracy in dollars. Government was able to silence pastoral moral and spiritual voice. Government used to buy jeep for compliant pastors who have agreed to be fodders for politicians. In Nigeria, churches are now richer than our institutions. Bank managers will tell you that. Pastors now expand outwardly building mega churches, estates, schools, universities and international branches.
Yet, stealing goes on in government. Ritual killings are on the increase. Political unrest are in full swing in a nation with the highest numbers of churches in the world. What happened to pastoral sermons? Or, we should ask, what message is being taught in our churches?
Messages of earthly riches, power, fame, position, covetousness, dominion and elitism are too rampant. A popular pastor in Nigeria recently announced that he heard from God that he should run for the president of Nigeria. At once, the captive audience dissolved into a loud roar in support. Christ refused all worldly positions to save the gospel. He was the natural king of the Jews but allowed it to go for the sake of our salvation. The Bible says that we are in the world, but not of the world.
That is why in Nigeria, Christianity has become a vehicle for self-promotion, self-adulation, self-exaltation and self-congratulation. Whatever our pastors have achieved is no longer through his grace but through their superior thinking, ability, cleverness, intellectual clout, connectedness, oratorical skill, persuasive dexterity and rare vision. Many pastors are dry wells. No depth. No anointing. No Holy Spirit. And to cover their weaknesses, mega edifices are being built with billions of naira to attract more worshippers who are more interested in a building than the Word of God.
In closing, I will share the testimony of my pastor here in London. He was invited to an African country to preach. When he got to the pastor’s house he had a culture shock. His Eurocentric sensibilities and feelings for the poor and the disinherited kicked in immediately. This African pastor, his host, parked over five expensive cars in his compound. Living around the pastor was unbelievable poverty of shack dwellers, unemployed youths and hunger. My pastor could not understand the rationale behind that contrast. He made his mind up at once. To him, this African pastor is greedy, selfish and materially covetous. To him, he has no humanity. Mortified by what he saw in Africa, my pastor quietly cut him off from among his contacts.
In a nutshell, Christianity in Nigeria is defined and sustained by greed, material acquisition, lack of humanity for the sleepy sheep, deception, monetary gain, false prophesy, cuddling up with politicians, hypocrisy, arrogance, complete insensitivity to the needs of the poor in terms of assisting to distribute the fortunes of churches to the poor and the neglected in a poor nation like Nigeria.
Concluded.
. Deacon Oladeji writes from ridet@hotmail.co.uk.
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