He had been introduced as Evangelist I. U. Godfrey and he was guest speaker at a meeting that held at the Government Technical College Malali Kaduna under the auspices of the Fellowship of Christian Students. I attended the meeting in the company of other students of Federal Government College Kaduna located less than two kilometres away from the venue. The year must have been 1979.
He had been introduced as Evangelist I. U. Godfrey and he was guest speaker at a meeting that held at the Government Technical College Malali Kaduna under the auspices of the Fellowship of Christian Students. I attended the meeting in the company of other students of Federal Government College Kaduna located less than two kilometres away from the venue. The year must have been 1979.
It is well over thirty years now but I can still recall Godfrey’s powerful message as though it was delivered yesterday. His message though brief was well-structured to emphasize the canon of sound Christian doctrine: the love and grace of God, the efficacy of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, the emergency of the depravity of the human condition, the certainty and imminence of judgment and the urgent necessity of a response.
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It was my clear understanding of that message and my robust response that began to define for me, the true essence of power – spiritual power. That sort of power has little to do with observable physical responses or kinetic manifestations. Powerful messages were messages that caused positive changes in people’s lives: breaking harmful habits and instituting high personal morality. Thieves quit stealing and fornicators ceased from gallivanting.
Back then, a good Christian almost always wound up as an exemplary citizen.
But there was a little more to the exercise of power in those good old days. In doing their duties, Christian ministers called very little attention to themselves. Messages were focused on God, underscoring a deep-seated desire to get the people to know God personally. Even the titles they brandished had everything to do with their ministerial responsibilities. Evangelists truly evangelized and prophets accurately prophesied. The names they chose to be called were patently nondescript: a classical symptom of complete cure from megalomania. I. U. Godfrey could be anybody from anywhere; like Lagbaja.
About fifteen years ago, my path and Godwin’s crossed again in one of the satellite settlements in Abuja. I was there as guest music minister and the ‘great’ man of God being awaited turned out to be one Bishop Godfrey. As he was majestically stepping out of the under-sized car, I was already in overdrive and within seconds, I concluded it must be the selfsame Godfrey. Thank God he elected to retain the name because that’s where correspondence began and ended.
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He was now older, pudgy and attired in gaudy vestment probably befitting of his bishopric. That wasn’t the worst of it. His message and its delivery were, for me, the nadir. Not only was the message a disaster in terms of apologetics, the very personalized mode of its delivery made it seem like the noble art of homiletics was in clear danger of extinction. He kept rambling on and on about the great things God was accomplishing through his agency and how such would be replicated in the lives of those who dared to believe him as God’s prophet.
I left the meeting that day very downcast. The bishop wasn’t the evangelist who had left an indelible imprint on my life. Correspondingly, the current Church crawling with bishops and prophets is as self-centred as the one of yester-years composed of genuine pastors and evangelists was Christ-centred. In the Nigeria of those days, Christians were the moral exemplars but nowadays, that distinction has all but disappeared.
The exercise of spiritual power in the Church has become so personalized to the point where church and Christian ministry are no more than private commercial concerns. Prophets and pastors literarily own members whose grip on them resembles the occult. The direct consequence of this anomaly is that people express allegiance more to their spiritual leaders than to God. And because in many cases these leaders are merely out to live out their private ambitions, their multitude of followers, though steeped in visible religiosity, are actually ignorant, self-seeking spiritual tots.
Sadly, this scenario feeds into the affairs of a morally-challenged nation like ours in dire need of stellar examples. Because the Church leads the way in the personalization of power, the nation, as epitomized in her leadership merely mimics the Church as is manifest in the worsening practices of corruption and impunity. As the Church goes, so the nation.
So long as the Church persists in peddling this strange gospel of personal pleasure, Nigeria will continue to sink deeper in moral quagmire.
I recognize the place of constitutionalism and the rule of law in fashioning national greatness. I also affirm that tinkering with political structure could hasten our redemption. But if all these happen without genuine moral recrudescence, we will merely be going round in circles.
If the Church in Nigeria does not repent and resume her place as the nation’s moral forerunner, I’m afraid that Nigeria’s future is - at best - bleak.
OLUGU OLUGU ORJI mnia
[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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