In writing this article, I am acutely aware that pastors and by extension the church brooks no criticisms but the truth must be told at one stage. This is therefore not to dish the dirt on randy or philandering pastors but a personal view arising from Creflo Dollar’s quest to buy a $60m brand new jet from the sweat of his congregants and church-goers. An acquaintance in the US tells me that it is none of my business since the parishioners are not complaining. I disagree with this Fabian policy because Mother Theresa did more and yet had no jets. My point is that you should be able to afford your immediate need and therefore a pastor that desires a jet should be able to afford it without tasking his flock. And besides, it might be impossible for my US acquaintance to know all the members of Creflo’s church and as a result cannot sift from the deluge of outrage and condemnation who is a member of Dollar’s congregation and who is not. Pretension of this will be living in denial.
You cannot discuss pastors without mentioning the flock and this explain the interjection of church in this article. You cannot insult the whole village and exonerate the king. We will not stop talking about pastors unless they behave well because hope without effort is vanity. If the pastor is not buying the latest automobile, he is renovating an old building, if he is not organizing fund raising for a new school; he is soliciting funds for a brand new jet while the flock wallows in poverty. We know for a fact the church is always building or renovating and it is endless. You may think that completion of such projects will steer the financial pressure off the congregants, but reverse is the case. The maxim that God loves a cheerful giver has been abused by these yam-heads because the givers are no longer cheerful but coerced. The clergy is behaving like brain slowly running out of air, all talk and show business.
The Holy Book is clear on giving. While warning us about obsession to wealth, it reminds us that it is more blessed to give than to receive and this is what pastors have turned to their advantage because the poorer a society is, the easier it can be hoodwinked by pastor. The church has become so creative that some churches have now set up phone payment systems.
The full embrace of materialism at the expense of evangelism, the privatization of religion both combine to complete the desecration of the pulpit. Pastors no longer speak in parables or metaphors all because the church has been monetized. We are under the choke hold of sowing seed for bountiful harvest. Modern day pastors embrace prosperity preaching, a school that believes that the church makes individual rich, overly successful and prosperous over night.
I do not feel that my spiritual realm is any richer even with my global outreach and privilege the more I listen to some of these pastors. We have been turned into a nation of heretics, Sunday bench warmers and church-goers. I dare say that pastors are up in arm with one another to outdo each other and over the moon with excitements in singing platitudes to the givers.
Faith worship is at all time low just because it has been denominated in money and other material things. The placement of undue premium on materialism by pastors is as alarming as it is disappointing. The pastors and church are deviating from its core function of winning souls and tilting towards worldly acquisition. The church has forayed into hitherto forbidden terrains and is now in hospitality industry, education and transportation business even without declaring profit or paying taxes to revenue authorities. This is a burning issue in Kenya these days.
The world would actually be bored without pastors because they never cease to amaze us. Recently, one pastor in South Africa ordered his flock to eat grasses while another said that he impregnated a mother and child because he got a divine direction to do that. One pastor who was arrested recently in Nigeria for armed robbery said that the loot was meant to develop his church. Do you still remember Jim Jones of Guyana (bring-the-children-first syndrome) and David Koresh? The church used to be simple but now populated with those whose agenda is to use Jesus to advance their own ends. Churches exist for the betterment of pastors and not for winning souls. And this is coming decades and centuries after the death of Jesus the Nazarene died for all of us.
Pastors tend to prescribe and control peoples’ behavior rather than looking inwards to reform the church. If there is dearth of issues to investigate, the clergy should look into the unresolved cases of rape and sexual abuse of minors by pastors and save The Vatican the burden of financial overhead arising from compensation and all that.
All the modern day pastors like Creflo Dollars do is to play God, hijack Jesus and prey on the poverty of the congregants who are already on breadline. Their obsession to jets is incurable. Faith has clashed with materialism and the state is no longer secular, something that would annoy Jesus if he was to be informed today. Even the Catholic Pontiff himself and other senior clergy men are helpless because there is no umbrella body of all Christians.
Pastors promote a way of life that offends normal rational and scientific thinking. There is overt embellishment of things that cannot be easily explained away. If the earth is 6000 years as they claim, how come the discovery of monuments, tombs, relics, fossils, stones and artifacts some dating 200 million years way back? What has the church done to solve the riddle – Is there life after death and if yes, how? If God created man in his own image, how come that we are not homogeneous, why do we have Blacks, Whites, Coloreds, and Hispanics among others? Where in this world does an ordinary Chinese migrant worker in Africa resemble a typical Dinka man from South Sudan? If according to them cleanliness is next to Godliness, what faith awaits millions and millions of souls living off in woodlands and different ganglands across the globe?
Capitalism has crept into the church and the clergies are purveyors. And this is so because ours is a society where money and materialism are determinants of success. Those with an eye for comfort and cozy things of life dot the churches and occupy the front pews during Sunday service. The chokehold doctrine of sowing seed is firmly immersed in us. Pastors immersed in greed, materialism and get rich quick mania have all combined to steal the shine off the church. All of which will baffle and piss off Jesus Christ of Nazareth if he was alive today. But forget the pastors and follow Jesus.
Hobbes’s knee-jerk view is worth mentioning here – Churches exist in order to scare and frighten people. Instilling fear into people so that government will run smoothly is a way of flogging people into line. This makes governance a walk in the park because a frightened population cannot revolt or organize any kind of resentment. A frightened population with tail in between the legs cannot raise a finger let alone daring the state. Pastors know how many beans that make five.
But let me cast pearls before the swine here. Pastors have to get back to the grindstone and reposition the church. Pastors are not cheek by jowl with the parishioners, congregants, the faithful and even the church-goers. To keep their nose clean, parishioners since they always arrive at the right ballpark should demand for accountability. Will the clergy and parishioners ever reach an acceptable compromise? Your guess is as good as mine. If it seems wrong, is probably is.