Profiteering Pastors

Many Nigerian churches are giving Christendom such a bad name by their barefaced craze for money at the expense of their salvation and wellbeing of their flock.

By Babajide Kolade-Otitoju

Yet the tithe is just one of the numerous ways through which pastors fleece church members. They, however focus more on tithes because money realised from it is always bigger than other forms of donation to the church. They also rob church members through offerings, building project funds and the evangelical fund. And increasingly, churches are being set up solely as business concerns rather than to win souls or to depopulate the kingdom of darkness as Pentecostals like to say. Many pastors are no better than common thieves who turn to the job because they cannot find any other job to do.

Church members are always going to be “robbed” anyway because unlike their pastors, they have no direct access to church funds. Gripped by the desire to make more and more money, churches are diversifying into all kinds of businesses, including outright trading, banking, setting up schools. For example, the Redeemed Christian Church of God owns not just a money-spinning university, it also own New Life Microfinance Bank. Like Bishop David Oyedepo’s Winners Chapel, its (RCCG) university is for the well-heeled in the society.

Nothing illustrates the greed for money by pastors who run Nigeria’s big churches like the story behind the birth of Covenant University, owned by Winners Chapel. When the University was being conceived and built, every church member was expected to contribute meaningfully to the university project fund and during Sunday services, young and old, poor and rich were made to part with their hard-earned money because like the offerings and tithes, the church demanded handsome contributions from its members for the project. However, when the university project was completed and the school opened; the school fees pegged at almost half a million naira per semester, effectively ensuring that an overwhelming majority of Winners Chapel members cannot send their children to the Covenant University.

Indeed, Bishop Oyedepo, intent on having his church members contribute to the Covenant University Project, told them that if they could not contribute money they could contribute their labour. As a result, young men and women who are members of the church streamed to the project site in obedience to their president and founder, carried sand, bags of cement and generally worked their socks off to ensure that the church’s university dream became a reality. Today, many of them have discovered that they laboured in vain, as they are not rich enough to send their wards to the school. This particular case shows how pastors manipulate church members for their selfish ends. This is also true of Redeemed University set up by the Pastor Enoch Adeboye-led Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG. The average Redeemed Church member cannot raise the money to send his ward to Redeemed University, even though the money he contributed at his local church went into building the university.Because pastors preach prosperity, salvation and miracles so well, many church members are so keen to achieve these three goals that they do not ask questions of their preachers, who often do not lead by example, even in the payment of tithes. Worshippers hold their pastors in very high esteem, as they desire spiritual redemption. They believe that by obeying these pastors, they will automatically land before the throne of God in heaven. The womenfolk, especially, are ready to part with anything and everything. Financial contributions by church members are often recklessly put to use. No explanation is often made about how church money is spent and pastors, knowing that they are the signatories to church accounts and that they will not be asked questions often help themselves to church money, using it to buy private jets and generally living a life of luxury and pleasure.

Reverend Moses Iloh, Presiding Pastor, Soul Winning Ministries, in validating the payment of tithes, admitted that many pastors today misuse tithes and other church funds. “You cannot fault the Bible just because a pastor is crooked. But if a pastor decides to steal the tithe, use the tithe for comforts as it is being done now, using the tithe for holidays, it does not mean that tithing is wrong. Let us not try to oppose God because the pastor is not doing well,” he argued. These days, the activities of many pastors throw up moral, ethical and even religious questions. Most set up churches for no other reason than to make quick money. The so-called churches are, therefore, not better than business places. Bello Ayoola, a theological student, speaking with TheNEWS in Ilorin stressed that what the pastors are doing should not surprise anyone because many of them see the churches as their personal properties.

“They registered the churches in their names with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Their wives and children are the trustees. So, why should you question the way they run their churches. Without question, they are their personal properties,” he argued. Early this year, crisis rocked the Lord’s Chosen Charismatic Revival Movement over the sum of N370 million. The crisis deepened on Tuesday, 22 January when a former pastor in the Church, Nnamdi Ofoegbu, accused the General Overseer, Pastor Lazarus Muoka, of obtaining the money from him to build the church, but refused to pay back. He claimed that Muoka told him that the profit they make from the church would be shared equally. It is that bad.