To convince people to believe that the more you give during and after the church service, the more your wealth will increase. Some of these members come to church to show off their cars and clothes; the pastors have peddled the notion, to their own advantage, that prosperity and well-being are determined by how faithfully members pay their tithes and offerings. The amount of material possessions that one has is now perceived to be an indicator of one’s spiritual well-being. Some of them say that the reason the take offerings is to get you out of poverty. When you give offerings you’re sending money to heaven. Then after church, there are plenty of ways to spend more money. How about olive oil for N10,000 per bottle? In a country with a minimum wage of N30,000 per month, that is a small fortune. Then the vendor explains to you that this is a very special oil because it is blessed. And once you believe and use the oil, it cures sickness, it cures anything, people have been cured from HIV by using just this oil.
Martin Luther King J said that “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”.
Our governments regard churches as charitable organisations and exempt them from paying taxes but our wealthy pastors plunder their followers and spend their spoils on self-indulgent existence. Let judgment start from the house of God. They can run their businesses according to existing corporate laws, and members who donate to such ventures as private universities should become shareholders. This will lead to transparency and accountability.
Unfortunately, mass illiteracy and fundamentalist bigotry against other religious families have contributed to creating a wrong narrative about religion. Christians now see these Spiritual leaders as demi-god. The way some Christians even worship their pastors and crawl at their feet is even more than the way they worship God Himself. And the most annoying thing is that these same people can’t even take a bow for their own husbands or parents. Most people like that are people who normally disturb their pastors every now and then for things that can practically be solved with common sense. People who can actually ridicule their Mothers, Aunties and relatives because the Pastor saw a vision and tagged them witches as the believe so much in witches and wizards even more than they believe in God. The don’t blame themselves for their own misfortunes but will always look for a way to attribute any human error to the devil’s attack. That is when they experience accident due to lack of safety precautions, it’s usually the plot of witches for their lives; when they are poor because of misplaced priorities, it’s usually the plan of devil for them to be poor.
In fact, ignorance thrives in the lives of many Christians in Nigeria, to the extent that you will see them gather to accuse a sick woman that needs medical attention to be a witch who just evolved from a bird to a human. Why don’t these things happen in Lekki, Victoria and Banana Island and the likes? Why does it only happen in a place where poor and ignorant people dominate? The annoying one is that innocent animals are even stigmatized as witches by the people of my country, for example snakes, owl, vultures, cat, dog, scorpion etc.
James Nwachuya #EMBA28
ALLITERATION AND BUSINESS PROBLEMS