Bishop Oyedepo, founder of Winners Chapel, and Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, founder of Christ Embassy, have been chafing over the inclusion of the churches in the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. It is their holy ghost informed view that the federal and state governments were wrong to include the churches. They have been making statements unbecoming of men leading the stray flock to the lord since then at every given opportunity. This is far more dangerous and unfortunate than you might think.
Their chafing suggests that they are more concerned with the contents of the collection plates in their churches than with the lives of their congregants, the harried men and women who believe they are laying their treasures in heaven and feel compelled to scrape and search for the mites to fill those plates and fund the lavish lifestyles of the sleek shepherds.
Last week, an online newspaper, TheCitizen, quoted Oyakhilome, and not for the first time, as berating church owners in Lagos, who despite the green light from the state government, feel that the coast is not that clear and decided to keep their church doors locked and watch and assess how the pandemic plays out. Some of these responsible church founders are Pastor Tunde Bakare of The Citadel Global Community and Pastor Sam Adeyemi of Day Star. Oyakhilome described them as fake pastors because, according to him, “if you refuse to open church for fear of being infected, you were never a believer.”
The pastor is wrong. Those of them who are anxious to open their church doors are actually the fake pastors. They are the men and women who lead their church members astray by throwing at them irrelevancies attributed to characters in the bible. They are the men and women who have turned the church into a commercial enterprise with little or no initial investments save a fat copy of the bible, some plastic chairs and a tree or a disused warehouse under which the new crop of flock would be gathered.
The church as a commercial enterprise yields the most rapid returns on investments. The wealthiest pastors in the world are in Nigeria, exploiting the failure of federal and state governments to make the people secure, less poor and less hungry. This much we know and this much we can do nothing about. Still, it is painful that Christianity that derived its relevance from its principle of shunning wealth here on earth has been turned on its head by the likes of Oyakhilome, who place the funding of their lavish lifestyles above those who make that lifestyle possible in the first place. I am willing to bet that if Jesus the Christ comes now he would weep that his father’s house has been turned into a den of fake pastors who work fake miracles and lead the flock astray.
Church leadership carries grave responsibilities – moral, ethical and religious. Those responsibilities impose on a pastor the moral duty and ethical duty not to cheat their church members with misguided tirades against sin and sinners. They impose religious duty on a pastor not to mislead his congregants by stitching bits and pieces of quotations from the bible together to advance some stupid arguments to convince the people that they have a religious obligation to make themselves poor and make their pastors wealthy. Pastors who do not appreciate these and other responsibilities are obviously fake.
As soon as the pandemic struck in our country, wealthy Nigerians needed no one tell them that they have a duty to help an unprepared nation tackle the challenge. They donated generously in support of government efforts to stave off the pandemic and rescue the Covid-19 patients from the claws of death. I must have been mistaken, if so pardon me, but I did not see Oyakhilome, a wealthy man by all standards, among the generous donors. I understand that Pastor Tunde Bakare has donated his church hall to be used as a Covid-19 treatment centre in Lagos. I consider that responsible societal and religious leadership, not the mark of a fake pastor.
It churned my stomach to read this from Oyakhilome: “These guys don’t have any research that shows that using a mask saves you from Covid-19. On the contrary we have abundant research results that prove that the mask doesn’t save you; in fact it kills you slowly. So why the mask? It keeps you subject to them. It reminds them of their power over you.”
I shudder to think of the many simple-minded folks among his church members sold on the belief that the pastor is always right and everyone else is wrong. They will ditch their face masks and ignore other precautions and open themselves to the obvious dangers of infection and possible death because an ignorant pastor masquerading as a fake scientist has misled them. The danger is that Pentecostal church goers believe that their pastors have God’s mobile phone number and talk to him any time and give the people his message. It is irresponsible and unethical for a pastor to exploit the fear and the ignorance of his church members this way and expose them to the Covid-19 infection.
In laying the cane across the back of the pastors he called fake, Oyakhilome said: “If Jesus is real and you have him inside you, shouldn’t you be a healer of diseases? Should you be afraid?’
Christ is in the pastor; let him now be a healer of this pandemic virus. Oyakhilome advertises his miracle-working power every week in his church. Sometime at Newswatch magazine, we tried to confirm the lame that walked and the blind that saw, among others, on the say so of the bible-wielding pastor. We thought the pastor would be proud to show evidence of his miracle-working power and thus attract more harried miracle-seekers. We were wrong. We tried as hard as we could to penetrate the fog of lies wrapped in opacity but we drew blank because there were no miracles and there was no evidence of the instant miraculous cure that led the unwary to Christ Embassy and its founder.
But the pastor can do himself a favour. He should desist from denigrating responsible pastors who rightly place a high premium on the lives of their church members. The collection plates are filled by the living, not the dead. He can even go one step better by going from one hospital to another miraculously curing those infected with the virus.
This man, this slick preacher, is leading the flock stray. God help his church members.
