A comprehensive demographic study of
more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of
all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated
2010 global population of 6.9 billion. The number of Christians around
the world has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years. Christians make
up about the same portion of the world’s population today (32 per cent)
as they did a century ago (35 per cent). From the remotest and most
obscure nook and cranny of Nigeria to the main street of every
monumental mega-city, it is not a struggle to find galleria gatherings
of people shouting “Alleluia, Praise the Lord”, with enthusiasm and
fervour.
In our nation today, there is almost no
street spared of a church building in-situ. Some of these church
structures are shacks and shanties, and lots of them look like royalty
dwelling places. Even in the most treacherous parts of Nigeria where
Christianity is adamantly abhorred, the audacity of church-planters to
take their messages to those cities, villages and towns has neither
flickered nor waned. Nigeria, I will declare, is a “church nation”.
Continue reading after the cut...
With a paltry population of about 5,000
people, my home town of Imesi-Ile in Osun State boasts about 20
churches! This fact further confirms that churches in Nigeria are on a
fast-track spurt. About one-mile radius of my residence in Ibadan, there
are at least 30 churches with imposing, mind-boggling, eye-popping
edifices from where worshippers are not austere at all with speaking in
tongues, singing, dancing, and shouting any hour of the day, and any
minute of the night. Over the last decade in Nigeria, the church has
exponentially exploded in numerical strength.
Some people frown on this growth and tag
it “too much religion”, while a significant number of people say; “we
need more”. What is truly behind the sudden growth of churches? There
will never be a consensus answer. However, if spiritual renewal of the
society and celestial sanitisation of the citizenry become the results
of the phenomenal growth, great applause goes to the initiators.
What I express in this treatise is not
done self-righteously, but it is about the fungi among us on the other
side whose walks are questionable, and whose drives are dastardly.There
are men and women of God scattered all over our nation who are doing
awesome work of help and relief on the mission field. There are many men
and women, names you have never heard and faces you may never see on
televisions who are committed to helping the helpless. These people have
no access to the internet, no Twitter account, no Facebook
page and website, but they have character, integrity and commitment to
do the needful for others who are in squalour. I know great men and
women of God in Nigeria, men with impeccable character, and men of
integrity, men who say what they mean and insist on what they say even
if the weather is not comfortable. Men who do not attempt to help God
with miracles from the oracles, and signs and wonders that make many
families sigh in pain and ponder. True men and women of God they are,
and we salute them.
However, the church is more than
somebody shouting, Alleluia! it is more than an excited group of people
humming, “Amen”, after each prayer point, and more than just an arm of
liberation from spiritual illiteracy. The church is to function as a
sanatorium of societal reformation, a builder of the character of the
citizenry, a refuge for the helpless and hopeless, and a living example
of righteous living and lifestyle. The church is to walk a path that is
asphalted with integrity, purity, probity, and straight talk. The church
is to keep a distance from gloating after filthy lucre which is the
root of all manner of evils that are now our bedfellows in Nigeria. The
church ought to help build a country by building its members who are
assigned to build the country in various political and governmental
capacities. A Christian president, governor, senator, administrator,
and civil servant should listen not just to their pastor’s talks, but
watch and walk also his walks. The lifestyles of church leaders are what
our political leaders should emulate and mimic.
If the church leader’s word is a waffle
and his walk a wobble, if his behavioural gaits aren’t steady, if his
gluttonous gestures are all that we see, and everything he pursues rises
and falls on an insatiable salivation for money and more money, and
anaide to the Calisthenics of crippling cascade of corruption that has
erected edifices in all corners of Nigeria, then there is a problem that
we must address.
If the church is becoming an eyesore, a
conglomerate of con-artistry, a domain of maddening mercantilism, and a
haven where both the lettered and unlettered are celebrating their
multi-million dollar vessels and vestries on a feverish frequency, then
there is a problem we all must address.
If the church of the Living God has
become a deliberately designed escape parachute from poverty,
unemployment and un-employability, if it has become an audacious
advertisement and advancement of boisterous bling, a rambunctious rape
and rake of the meagre pennies of the poor in church, then there is a
problem we must address.
If the church is an enclave of
mind-manipulation, arm-twisting, and a centre where Godly truth is
thwarted to serve a selfish goal and hidden agenda of church leaders,
then there is a problem we must address.
If the church of the Living God has
become a pavilion where known thieves among our affluent population are
celebrated in the pews’ front-row or seated high up on the altar, and
the pastor deliberately mutes his own voice of correction against these
erring men and women in order to encourage massive donation to church
projects, then there is a problem we must address.
If the church turns blind eyes to those
who have become thorns in the flesh of our society causing the nation to
keep haemorrhaging to a panic level as a result of greed, graft and
gluttony, then there is a problem to be addressed.
If the church of the Living God
encourages looters to loot as long as they agree to drop a bite of
their loot on the “altar” of God, and truth-telling on the altar is
compromised by recurrent and repeated slabber, slobber and slaver for
funny money, then there is a problem we all need to address.
If some churches seem to have become a
dormitory for demons in the images of men, and an arsenal of illicit
activities perpetrated by those hungry for control, payroll, and power,
then there is a problem we must address.
If men go into the church as innocent
hopefuls but come out battered and bruised with life worse-off as a
result of immense pressure to satisfy self-serving, aggrandising
“servants” of God with their meagre incomes, then there is a problem we
must address.
The church in many nations of the world
is losing its savour and flavour, and in Nigeria, many churches are
turning many people off and this in turn cranks up the heat of hatred
and disregard for Godly pastors on Godly assignments. The reverence for
Holy men and women of God is fading off fast, and many are losing
confidence and trust daily in the church and its shepherds. There are
people who sit in the church every Sunday who are now unsure if the
sermons we hear on the pulpit and the gymnastic gyration of some giants
on the altar of God in Nigeria and even beyond may not be, after all,
about the soul, but about the dough!
To be continued…
•Ojo wrote in from Houston, USA, via willieojo@yahoo.com/Punch
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