Currently, there is a disturbing practice in the Church where leadership as embodied in the pastor is considered inerrant and therefore above scrutiny. Since the pastor is the servant and mouthpiece of God, it is usually reasoned that anything he says or does carries divine approval that cannot be questioned. And the Scripture most often cited to buttress this bizarre logic is
1 Chronicles 16:22, “Saying, touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.”
Hiding behind this false facade, pastors are engaging in all manner of iniquitous impunity ranging from financial recklessness to sexual anathemas. Because people generally equate exposing a pastor’s sins to judging the pastor, they mostly look the other way: they believe that responsibility is exclusively God’s. The consequence of the people’s inaction is that this impunity worsens.
The case of the killing of a pastor inside church over his alleged affairs with his parishioner seems to be getting more attention and pity probably because it happened in a church.
According to Akusobi Daniel, in a conversation I fortuitously dabbled into: “it is time to discuss some of these issues more openly especially the predatory activities of our so called "men of God" into our families.
These men take advantage of people's adamant ignorance about god and wanting signs and miracles, to mess with women, especially the married ones. One pastor I know once told me his target is to get more women members than men because the women are easily more convertible and more loyal.”
This subject is one area that defines the hopelessness, the decadence, the utter stupidity and seemingly irredeemable immorality of our society!
A very recent case involved a pastor and a family in his church. The pastor told a married woman that god had revealed to him that her husband is not hers in real life as such she has to find a way to leave her husband so she can live and get all the blessings god has kept for her. This woman's husband has a good job and busy too. This woman has married same husband that suddenly became a ghost husband for 24 years and even have a 22 year old son.
The woman capitalized on all the promises her pastor made to her and started being troublesome, seeking to have her marriage ended. They have 2 grown up children.
When her husband could not take her headache anymore, he moved out of the matrimonial home to another nearby state.
No one knew that the pastor has been messing around with this woman and planned to push the woman to divorce her husband. He took total control immediately the man left.
However, when her relationship with the pastor turned sour because she discovered that the pastor was also secretly doing the same thing with some other women in the same church, she got heart broken and then realized that her life did not get better after her husband left.
All the heaven and earth the pastor promised she will inherit never came to pass 2 years after.
She went back to her husband and begged for forgiveness. She also told her husband all that the pastor told her that caused her unruly behaviours towards her husband.
Did her husband take her back?
So my people, I warn you once more to be very vigilant if your wife becomes very devoted in her church. There may be other attractions other than these 2000 year old stale stories that condemned all and put us in constant fear of hell even when we know that by what goes on even in the churches, it is almost impossible to be without sin.
One man said it is safer to befriend married women than the single ones because the married ones will not tell on you.
May be we can agree on why if we can discuss it. Pastors have it easier. Did the bible say women are more gullible or have softer spots?
It is certainly amazing that having been away from the country, indeed, the continent for about a decade and a half after the war, I came back to behold Nigerians, indeed, it seems, all our people, all over the continent, engrossed in this mindless self-deception, and self-inflicted delusion expressed in empty gushy religiosity! What more, it is even inexplicably more ravaging in the Diaspora!
Said a former Nigerian Federal Minister of Finance: "it is such a mortifying sight to behold our youth, single and married adults so seemingly overpowered by the mere “language, incantations" of biblical phrases from different Christian hues, imagine that this is RELIGION, and the web of deception, fraudulent conduct and immorality that hat has gone in the guise of religion!
Yes, our civil governance has in the meantime failed utterly to provide the usual structured opportunities, in both numbers and quality, for enabling a wholesome and predictable advancement on the basis of due learning, aptitude and experience, thus putting pressure on "roundabout" and quick ways of getting such advancements, "blessings" almost exclusively by plying other "advantages" other than by sheer dint of acquired knowledge, aptitude, and experience garnered from proven performance, objectively assessed!"
The eminent gentleman continued; "it is a tragedy of major proportions, and we must really be a laughing stock in the "heavens" for our suppositions that we deceive "them" even as “we have mastered the art of our own self- delusion".
It is clear that in this area, as in education, politics and governance, we have to go back to first base!
We have to get the families, the adults to "un-learn" the garbage that we have delivered to the child, the youth that have put our entire society in this perilous and utter confusion! There is clearly no redemption on this path, but certain destruction.
The signs are too ominous and immediate to be ignored!
Religion is creating more havoc in our families and society than it is solving.
WHAT TO DO?
We have to help our people re-learn, to be more realistic about life than depending on delusions and falsehoods loaded in some verses of the bible (example is the concept of resurrection and ascension) and all the misinterpretations the so called men of god force on our gullible, especially our women and children.
A massive campaign such as this discussion for some of us with freer minds may be what is needed; or maybe we establish a "church" where we have to teach reality.
I cited church because calling it a school may not get us followers and we cannot beckon on our universities and other higher institutions in Nigeria to do it because some of the professors are more deluded and schizophrenic in their thought patterns than the bible has prescribed.
Again, I want to warn that if your wife is very devoted or fund of her church or pastor, it is time to rescue her because you do not want to live with a woman who honors another man more than you. We cannot say her devotion is to God because if what the Bible says about God being omnipresent is to be trusted, it makes sense to think he is also in your bedroom.
In his contribution, Tope Fashua said: If you come to Abuja these days, the city is under siege, dirtied and bastardized by these scam artistes who parade themselves as 'pastors', 'bishops' and archbishops.
The irony and fraudulence of everything is lost on almost all of us, and nothing points to the absence of governance than the way so-called leaders allow smart alecs to rip off the poor people in the name of miracles or transforming their lives.
Even Paul Biya of Cameroon got sick and tired of Nigerian scams posing as churches and recently sent them packing! As far as Zambia and the UK, they have put these Nigerian scammers under the spotlight.
I look at my people and their black faces, and wonder how come they are more Christian than the white man who introduced them to Christ.
How are we making our people spend most of their time praying, contorting, screaming when they should be thinking and working? Yet, some people say they want to 'transform' Nigeria or are they transforming it? When the very first thing they should seek to transform are the minds of our people.
The Aviation Minister who just said plane crashes are an act of God recently gave us an insight into the way the minds of those who lead us work and why they are leading us into the ditch.
When a nation is being ruled with superstition, when the corridors of government is paved with voodooism, prejudice, a contorted sense of right and wrong, that is what you get.
I learnt recently that those so called pastors, who deface the whole of Abuja with their posters, are actually doing so at the behest of our current leaders. In the days of Obasanjo and Yaradua, they dared not deface the capital territory like this, not to talk of under Abacha and IBB. We are on auto pilot these days.
I love my Anglican, Presbyterian Church; I have enjoyed services in Catholic churches, and I revere professionals who take religious teachings deeply and seriously.
I find "wild dances in churches, under the pretext that King David 'danced' mildly heretical the way it's done in our churches.
Above all, what I seriously depreciate is the clearly wanton excesses that are vulgar, pretentious and frankly downright un-Godly!
Going to church seven days a week, all the noise and pretences of vigil, Holy Ghost nights, and Miracle Events, scheduled with certainty on a regular basis, and the notorious contrived Deliverances and Miraculous cures of all manner of diseases that would otherwise require proper diagnosis being "instantly cured", and crutches instantly withdrawn with "immediate effect" – goodness gracious! It’s a big scandal!
Our people, Black folks, poor and not so poor whites, and rural country folks everywhere are all "victims" of this strange phenomenon!
Get the economy humming, open the factories and industries; provide people with decent jobs, 8-hour shift or two. They earn enough to fund their essentials and a little more!
When they go to worship, they are more contentedly thanking God for the abundance. They can do this, say on a Sunday, and occasional mid-week, and one or two special events in a month or within a quarter. But to do that every single day to answer "present" to some “man of God in some wild revelry, on a regular basis?
Who provides the sustenance for the mobs! It is decidedly a problem!!
The situation is indescribably more obscene, and cannot be exhaustively presented in a single seating!
May God save us from us!
Ogbuefi Ndigbo
+447460770987
