December 29, 2002
Fundamentalism can feed off the zealous gullibility of the naïve. But if credulity weans into knowledge, realism often questions both philosophy and the blind heed to emotionalism.
The two Eastern Nigerians had their individual plans to strike it big. They were actually con men masquerading as evangelists. A depressing economic circumstance had colluded with a possible flight from justice to found a temple of scam that would burnish Nigeria’s already admirable reputation for integrity.
Mr. Okaonye was a struggling overseas job recruiter in his late forties. He had been at it for over a decade. In addition to a kind, but domineering wife, he had a brother in college and two little kids who posed constant financial burden. They lived in a Manila district, in a decent one-storey house, the monthly rent of which was a constant headache.
The Asian economic flu of the late 1990s had threatened to finally drive him out of business. To top it off, he was neck-high indebted in the tens of thousands of dollars to impatient loan sharks who breathed threats of collateral confiscation down his spine. He desperately needed to bailout out of his economic doldrums. He needed a cash cow.
‘Reverend Dr’. Modebe was a man with a mission. In his fifties, he had left his Onitsha home and the nightmarish ravages of a brutal, devilish dictator. At his departure, dear Nigeria had seen more that a decade of moral and spiritual rot and decay. Under an unscrupulous, plundering military kleptocracy, in an economy so badly devalued one needed a basket to carry a dollar worth of currency, in a society where public and private infrastructure had washed away and with it the confidence of a once proud people, in a system in which public education had collapsed with private schools open to only the obscenely corrupt and wealthy few, life could not have been more desperate and hellish for a struggling man with a foreign wife and three kids of college age.
Coming from a country in which morality had been in steady retreat from the assault of man-made hardship, a culture in which the line had blurred so much between the priest and the predator, a society in which genuine spiritual rebirth was the most crying need of the people, doubt and cynicism had indeed welcomed this self-ordained, ‘miracle-working’ ‘pastor’, the moment he claimed he’d thumped down an ambassadorial appointment by the dictator.
He had declined this juicy, lucrative favour, he further claimed, in obedience to Christ, who had appeared to him and commanded him to travel to far-off lands and preach His message. The Lord had also given him the power to work miracles and cast out demons. Christ’s message had been so unmistakably urgent that the messenger had to travel post haste, leaving behind a supportive wife to sort out the nitty-gritty of his hurried departure. The man with the mission traversed the length and breadth of Asia, shopping for a wealthier base for the ‘call of Christ’. Visa failures in cities like Taipei and Kuala Lumpur finally compelled settlement in Manila.
The banner announcing the arrival of this newest import from Nigeria boasted the four-fold commission of global evangelism, faith, healing and miracles. With the canny subtlety of a Coca-Cola commercial, the packaged special features were an amalgam of a wily faith healer’s cures. They consisted of ‘problems of barrenness and infidelity, healing extravaganza, deliverance and breakthrough, family counselling, salvation, total liberation from the kingdom of darkness and prosperity for all.’ This streamer was trumpeting a money-inspired inauguration on August 17, 1997, the second in two short weeks of this multi-faced ‘church’.
The incorporators of the new church were an eclectic, formless bunch of impious Mormons, Pentecostals, and other persons of undefined religious convictions. The incorporated name, Golden Evangelisation Ministry (GEM), was itself laden with meaning. The name spelled gold and wobbled heavily with suggestion. It was the suggestion of deception burdened. Indeed, it became the dead give away of the less than pious impulses of an encumbered ministry of selfism. Early observers cried Mammon! Yet many of the naïve, new recruits chose to hold judgment in abeyance. Has the Bible not said that if God anoints, He commissions? By their fruits, they correctly invoked the Good Book; you shall know them. They were willing to let God reveal His hand. Not unlike the Scribes and the Pharisees of old, they needed proof to confirm belief. They wanted to see signs. Plenty would confound and leave them speechless!
The savvy and keen eyed, on the other hand, dismissed the arrogant, vulgar braggart as too worldly for the work of a reverend of Christ. Irreligious pride, this group believed, undercut the priesthood. Within this circle, there also was the hushed talk of the holy one abandoning home to escape retribution from a crime nobody could place a finger on. More interestingly this group wondered, could Christ have commanded this man to leave home when Nigeria’s moral and spiritual problems seemed more daunting and more in need of care? With no formal institutional training in theology, no ties to any established church group, this ‘pastor’ had only his glib tongue and scanty biblical quotations to back his ministry of global evangelisation. He appeared too good to be true. And with the stream of shady Nigerian characters flowing into economics-enforced evangelical exile, the scepticism of this bunch seemed well -placed.
In any event, to Okaonye, the pinhead of the irreducible twosome of surreptitious decampees from a Manila Anglican Cathedral, deciding for the new church was easy. Indeed, co-founding it was seen as a merger of dreams. It would provide them access and control which they never held over a church’s unlimited funds. The church was also to be a fanatical religious mine of overseas deployment prospects for a still fledgling recruitment business. Their vision, unbeknownst to them, was headed for bitter collision with their Mammonist pastor’s at the altar of cross-purposes.
No sooner had the congregation assembled than the admonition of Christ to true believers in Matthew 6:24, presented a dilemma of sorts to parts of this misshapen body. ‘You cannot serve God and mammon’ became the silent mantra of a horde, burdened by the unceasing browbeating of a pastor bent on raising his fortune from indigent folks to whom he had promised prosperity from their giving to the church. The laity or what passed for one grew poorer as the pastor ballooned, both literally and figuratively, in opulence. Handwriting appeared on the wall. The scribble was unambiguously divine. It contained heavenly reminders. But Christ’s injunctions against prostrating to Baal wouldn’t derail a pastor’s train bound for mammon land. Acquisition of earthen pieces of silver was the over-riding obsession! Money was god! The entire place not only dripped the idolatry of Sodom, it also reeked the perversion of Gomorrah.
With numerically thin but financially dedicated membership, the church soon bulked up flexible muscle. So taken in by the promise of prosperity was the pastor’s landlord, that he donated a piece of his land for use in building the church’s temple. Offerings and tithes also poured in. Added to proceeds from unbiblical sales of strange evangelical ranks, the intake boosted the financial ego of the now chubby and ebullient shepherd. True to both conception and construction, the vicar alone held jealous sway over the coffers. Only he knew how much the church was worth. Nobody, including his co-incorporators was to restrain his authority with prying questions.
Then with almighty abandon, he commenced on a destructive orgy of squander mania. With impunity, he started to dip unholy hands into the kitty of his visibly buoyant money machine. He bought and resold real estate, at hefty margin, in Manila’s suburbia. He next rolled out units of Daewoo Racer and ran them as taxicabs. To bolster his self-perception of increased prestige, he employed deception in recruiting as assistant pastor, a young man from Nsukka, on the false promises of status and two hundred fifty dollars in monthly salary. Upon touchdown in Manila, however, the hapless recruit would be told he would be paid only one hundred.
Surprisingly for the over-confident miracle worker, no positive miracles were recorded in the lives of his followers. The only perceptible miracle in his church was a disturbing hike in his indulgent consumption of foreign-brewed wine.
Even at the height of its influence and affluence, the church never held any outreach missions to any depressed communities or needy institutions. No church-subsidized medical missions were undertaken. No life-lifting visits to orphanages, leprosaria or prisons were made. No healing sessions for the sick were held. The pastor was instead miraculously healing the financial woes of his own family! Nothing, absolutely nothing of the kind advertised at its inauguration ever took place!
The good shepherd was so selfish that during the two anniversaries marked by the church, not even snacks were offered to guests who had made generous donations and sat through lengthy services and pastoral monologues. He regularly would task members with specific materials to buy for the church as part of their tithing obligation. It was weird and scary. The whole enterprise, as conceptualised, hardened into a weekly routine of assembling inside a cramped downtown Manila hotel room, and collecting money from a people seeking salvation and other elusive spiritual nourishment from an absent God.
The grumbling of the disenchanted inevitably grew into murmurs. Some, who at the outset had held judgment at bay, still wavered to confront the bare facts. It would not be much longer!
Then the devil himself openly attacked the pastor’s soul!
An out-witted and disgruntled charter member, the other half of the Okaonye twosome, publicly accused the reverend of embezzling church funds. With the pastor assiduously balking at veiled suggestions for more transparency in the management of church business, he drove this follower over the edge. This open allegation of malfeasance spread like brush fire through the spiritually bankrupt church. It effectively became the final ‘miracle’ that sundered the disparate group.
The Scribes and Pharisees finally had their sign. The specks in their eyes had finally fallen off. They suddenly realised they’d been riding the shell for an economically challenged fraudster pretending to a ‘call’ that had never been divine. It had taken them twenty-four costly months to read the signs right. Like a heart pierced open with poisoned arrow, the haemorrhage started. One by one, in almost the same quiet order they had enlisted, the members commenced their final exit. In Management Accounting jargon, the order of departure was closest to LIFO (last in, first out).
On a Sunday, for instance, a member would without notice fail to show up for service. The next week, a man and his family would not attend. The landlord, now schooled in this get-rich-quick rip-off, left to found his own church, and with him the donated piece of property! The pastor soon began to come to church wondering who would be abandoning ship next. He would wipe his teary eyes with his ready handkerchief in front of a congregation in steady decline. It continued over several weeks. Even his deceived, underpaid and disappointed assistant vamoosed without warning. He simply returned back to his native Nsukka on an 8:00 a.m., October 16, 1999 rebated Egypt Air flight, his superior non-the wiser about his departure.
The remnant bottom finally dropped on October 24, 1999 when Okaonye, the vestige part of the decampees, himself a charter member, quietly decamped yet again. With the pastor in jealous, unyielding control of mammon, there was no more money to be made, the church having also failed as a recruiting ground for overseas job prospects.
The miracle worker who had scorned a fictitious ambassadorial appointment for the ‘call of Christ’ had come full circle. With the retreat of the Pharisees, the implosion of motives at cross-purposes, and a threat of legal prosecution for religious swindle, Mammon had finally delivered on his rich promise of shattered dreams. At its inglorious shut down, his shop had consisted only of five members - himself, a dejected wife, a daughter and two sons. The ‘call of Christ’ had indeed been a rush! It had been a dash for Mammon!
The machine crumbled as swiftly as it had risen! And under its heap, a sightless apostleship to Mammon still lies buried.
The humiliated messenger blamed everybody else for his crash, but not his greedy violation of the Creed. If only he had heeded that divine scribble on the wall. That writing still says ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will be loyal to the one, and despise the other.’ This is Christ’s life-saving injunction, which true believers live by heart.
True believers know that where Christ is not the Centre, things fall apart!
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