NIGERIA HOUSES OF HORROR (PART VIII)

“Myth & Mystery Churches of Nigeria”

By Akin Ojumu

This commentary series remonstrates the spiritual abuse and the misuse of spiritual authority that have come to characterize the horror houses, called Churches, in Nigeria.

We’ve said that Churches in Nigeria fall into different broad categories. While the grouping may be somewhat loose and undefined, the specific category a particular denomination belongs can be determined by the type of sermon they preach, beliefs they hold, customs they emphasize, and the practices for which they are best known.

So far in the commentary series, we’ve discussed the Motivational Churches as well as the Buying and Selling Churches.

Motivational Churches, we said, are supposedly “Christian” religious denominations where the preaching of the true Gospel has been subjugated by motivational sermonizing.

The latest trend among the leaders of the motivation-centered Churches – many of whom are proficient in the use of intelligent sounding catchphrases and pseudo-profound rhetorical flourishes – is the renunciation of the title of pastors. These people now wish to be known simply as “global speaker, strategic leadership expert and author, who is focused on shifting people’s mindsets so they can see possibilities and become those possibilities.”

Known for their low view of Scripture, which they see as an antiquated relic of ancient past not particularly suited for issues confronting modern-day Christians, Motivational Churches tend to employ human psychology and secular philosophies as important tools to help their members navigate the vicissitudes of their everyday experiences.

Ignoring the fact that all a Christian needs in order to be what God wants him to be is to seek the knowledge of God by immersing himself in the Scripture, motivational speakers only manage to sprinkle a few Bible texts on the multitude of spiritually ponderous platitudes they shower on their followers.

With single-minded emphasis on material success, Motivational Churches feed their flock with a steady diet of courses and contents that activate, motivate, and inspire individuals to reach their goals. Laser focused on temporal fulfilment, they teach their members strategies for acquiring leadership skills, growing in business, and becoming extraordinarily wealthy.

The mission of a typical Motivational Church can be summarized in four words, “Your best life now.” It’s an outlook to life that reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what’s most important in this world. For if your goal is to enjoy your best life now in this world, you invariably set yourself up for a world of pain and misery in the afterlife.

Next in the category of Nigerian Churches we discussed are the Buying and Selling group of Churches.

In this category, the House of God is turned into a den of robbers where charlatans transact the grace and mercy of God like cheap commodities. Here, the blessings of God are auctioned to the highest bidder and the size of a man’s tithes and offerings is directly proportional to the degree of God’s favor he gets. General Overseers, Apostles, Prophets and Pastors of the Buying and Selling Churches are known to con their victims into thinking that with their tithes they can purchase their way into Heaven.

In fact, the General Overseer of the leading Buying and Selling Churches in Nigeria once told a gathering of his pastors to go back to their different parishes and make it abundantly and unequivocally clear to their members that, “anyone who is not paying his tithe is not going to heaven. Full stop!”

Buying and Selling Churches trivialize the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, reducing it to mere money. Denominations such as these diminish the efficacy of the vicarious death of our Savior and they make the payment of tithes and offerings a prerequisite for attainment of eternal life.

The Motivational and the Buying and Selling Churches constitute the rotten religious system in Nigeria. The poor victims of this corrupt system are ordinary God seeking Nigerians. These spiritually hungry souls, earnestly seeking spiritually healthy food, are starved to death by a cruel and oppressive religious system that takes advantage of the ignorance of the vulnerable and preys on the fear of everybody else.

Sadly, the rottenness of Nigeria's religious establishment is not limited to the aforementioned horror houses. There’s yet another category of Churches in Nigeria which is as evil and equally dangerous as these other two. For the purposes of identification, we’ll call this third category of Churches, the Myth and Mystery Churches.

Particularly popular among Nigerian youths, especially those in the Universities and Secondary Schools, the Myth and Mystery Churches are the horror houses of myth, mysticism, and esotericism. Ruling over these Churches are the apostles of realms and portals, spooky spiritual gurus who regale their followers with the vastness of their knowledge of the deep mysteries of dimensions and the intricacies of territories.

What sets the Myth and Mystery Churches of Nigeria apart is an obsession with highfalutin religious titles. The title of “apostle” is especially common among the leaders in this category of horror houses. Very often you’d find in these establishments a wet behind the ears Christian convert, someone who’s a couple of years in the faith, calling himself an apostle.

Much more than the title of apostle, these places are also known for the regularity with which supernatural encounters are said to occur. Here, a typical service is a riotous scene characterized by rapturous offkey singing, ecstatic dancing, groaning and gibberish speaking (aka “speaking in tongues”), and hundreds of hypnotized people shaking, jerking, and writhing on the floor all in the name of a powerful move of the Holy Spirit, supposedly.

By the time the powerful apostle takes the stage to give his prophetic utterance-laden sermon, the spellbound crowd has been psyched and prepped for supposedly extraordinarily spectacular manifestations.

Next time we’ll discuss the frequent-flying intergalactic travelers of the Myth and Mystery Churches of Nigeria.