God is now calling the Nigerian church back to her proper place. Wake up, church. Thank God for our numerical size, gigantic structures, massive estates, global networks, and numerous foreign bank accounts. But if we don’t leverage these capabilities to fulfil the mandate of heaven in walking in love, showing compassion and sympathy to serving pastors, members, and our communities, we would have established a global definition of failure. God does not reward numbers before faithfulness.
Come over to Macedonia and help us. (Acts 16:9)
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When they contacted me that a young engineering student was dying in the hospital, my first question was, “Is your pastor aware?” Then, “Have you reached out to the church you have been serving in very faithfully?” The answer broke me down, “Yes sir, we reached out but were not even allowed to see Papa.” The sycophants around the servant of God blocked the access of the poor widow to seeing the highly revered servant of God. I rallied round to raise funds for the boy. A few days after I sent the first batch of funds, the brilliant boy died.
I broke down. I refused to collect the money back from the mother. She asked for one million naira, but I sent three hundred thousand naira to her, contributed by three of us. My plan was to give her an advance of what the doctors asked for in order to admit him, pending when we raised the balance of the funds. I didn’t know the woman. She had never sent a kobo to me before. I had never received a tithe from her. She spent all her life paying her tithe and offerings to this church in Nigeria. But she was betrayed by a church that was too big for the cries of a poor widow. If I start to mention cases here, I would write a whole book that catalogues the woes of many people whose hopes of support were dashed in their times of pains by the churches they served all their lives.
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Recently, a lady yelled out to the public the following words, “my father served very faithfully as a pastor for this church for more than thirty years. He gave his all, sold his house to support our founder. He basically abandoned us and my mum, scarcely having time for us at home in order to serve the church. But after he lost his business and his health failed, the church abandoned him.” Are those lines familiar? Virtually most of the people I know who made enormous sacrifices in serving at various levels in some of our churches were betrayed very callously by the church in their times of crises and pain. In fact, many of the children of these people have vowed never to be part of anything called church again. We have now become too big to see the tears of the weak and too fat to hear the cries of the weak. Numerical and financial might have blinded us.
A few weeks ago, I received a distress call from a close follower who narrated a sad development in a very famous church to me. According to him, many of the serving pastors in this church have resorted to looting, stealing, and engaging in every available form of corruption in order to make money to fend for their families, having being abandoned by the founder to their own destinies. In his words, “a lot of our pastors are rogues.” Yet, this church brandishes its size and prominence in the land, fending off criticisms and constructive commentaries from concerned public on the apparent misalignment between its dominant values and those of Christ.
To me, the desire for continued numerical and financial growth has blinded our eyes and consciences to the main task of the church – to raise disciples; to shine the light of Christ in a dark world; to walk in love towards one another; and to reveal the kingdom of God and its values to a failing world. In these areas, we have failed woefully.
I have practically lost count of the number of people, serving pastors, regular members, and ministers from various ministries who have cried for help and fallen on my shoulders in their times of painful need. There was no help or succour of any kind from the places they had served so meritoriously and sacrificially, other than for those places to continue brandishing their size and massive wealth. Some of these people have actually lost their faith or are on the brink of bidding the church bye-bye, given the sad reality of life that has now set in for them — “they have wasted their time for years serving in that ministry.” Sadly, these churches care less. In this respect, the church has been consumed by its attraction to size. The church is now too big for the cries of the weak.
“And he cried out, saying, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me'” (Luke 18:38). Verse 40 says, “And Jesus stood still.” That was the son of God, halting His busy itenary to attend to a poor beggar. He stood still for the man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5: 1-5). He stood still for the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5:30). The list is endless. We can’t be busier than the one who carried the whole world’s matter on His head.
Dr David Jeremiah once said, “if the value of a thing should be measured by its eternal impact, then investing in the lives of those who will live forever should be number one on our list.”
I love big things: big houses, big cars, big churches, big businesses, and big hearts. There is nothing essentially and functionally wrong with having or chasing big things, as long as the place of God in our hearts is not dethroned by what we are chasing; what we are chasing is being acquired in righteous ways and would be used for righteous things. But there is something very worrisome and troublesome about the church in my generation. Our size is killing us softly. We are too big for eternal impact. When we were smaller, we were more relevant and impactful. Now that we are big, our size has swallowed up every iota and strain of compassion, moral consciousness, love, empathy, and sympathy – dominant virtues that define Bible-based Christian faith.
To me, the desire for continued numerical and financial growth has blinded our eyes and consciences to the main task of the church – to raise disciples; to shine the light of Christ in a dark world; to walk in love towards one another; and to reveal the kingdom of God and its values to a failing world. In these areas, we have failed woefully.
For the past forty years plus of my glorious membership of the church, I have never seen a more sedated generation of believers like ours. It’s more like an opium is working overtime on the church, blinding her leadership to the cries of the weakest links among us. May it not be said of this generation that we failed because we became too big – too big to feel the hurt and pain of the weak and downtrodden in our churches and across our nations.
It is better to be small for something than to be big for nothing. Don’t forget, I love big things.
A giant in the faith, a father in Nigeria who has remained one of the loudest voices of revival in the church, recently lamented out of frustration, “the future of the Nigerian church is in the past.” Whether he is right or wrong is not the focus of this discourse. But the very thread of reason that underpins this statement is firmly and deeply rooted in the current dashboard of our practices in the church. We have replaced passion for eternal impact with passion for numerical and financial growth. We have exchanged love and compassion for souls – both the souls that are within our churches and those that are still waiting to be reached – with love and compassion for numerical and financial growth.
For the past forty years plus of my glorious membership of the church, I have never seen a more sedated generation of believers like ours. It’s more like an opium is working overtime on the church, blinding her leadership to the cries of the weakest links among us. May it not be said of this generation that we failed because we became too big – too big to feel the hurt and pain of the weak and downtrodden in our churches and across our nations. May our size not kill us eventually.
God is now calling the Nigerian church back to her proper place. Wake up, church. Thank God for our numerical size, gigantic structures, massive estates, global networks, and numerous foreign bank accounts. But if we don’t leverage these capabilities to fulfil the mandate of heaven in walking in love, showing compassion and sympathy to serving pastors, members, and our communities, we would have established a global definition of failure. God does not reward numbers before faithfulness. It’s the other way round, faithfulness first before numbers.
“Each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is.” (1 Corinthians 3:13).
Ayo Akerele is the senior pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through [email protected]
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