By Onyeka Chiemelie
If the subject on religion, communion, worship, faith,service and the afterlife is touchy with your person and with what you represent, I will sincerely crave your indulgence by advising you to discontinue reading this article.
Don’t read it.
It will break your heart.
I promise you.
It will also cause you to think deeply of the nonsense you are doing right now.
The sole intention of penning down this painstaking, didactic, exposition on this illuminating piece which is solely hinged on personal, experiential knowledge is to puncture and tear down the existing hegemony and the bottleneck grip of Ndị #Pentecostalmovement in Nigeria using Deeperlife Bible Church as a case study.
The intent is far from a “campaign of calumny” neither is it to damage or disparage the impressive CV they have built for themselves in Nigeria. However, since they treated the memory of the most important possession in my life with levity. I have promised my life to always use all opportunity possible to tear down the sanctimonious but hypocritical veil on which that structure is formed.
My parents gave birth to me within the loins of this obnoxious contraption.
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A very avoidable error but it was not to be.
It was a case of the “herd mentality”, “the bandwagon effect” the “holier than thou symphony”…where a momentary sedating effect rose like a whirlwind of the 90’s sweeping and consuming willing, pliant people especially those that yearned and saw the elixir of instantaneous miracles which was the icing on the cake for most of this “movement”
If you notice carefully, I refrained from calling it a church in the paragraph above. A church as I have come to understand it, is a place where people come together in vested interest, catering for their needs in togetherness, braking bread and generally lifting the downtrodden amongst them.
This is not the case with this establishment. A thick tribalism hold sway in its fold like being strangled. It enforces most decision.
I followed closely of a case of a coordinator in their fold who had similar “God-calling” and made to use it for the betterment of the Ndị Ịgbọ. He held crusades at the open field in Suzan Martins comprehensive high school which was a school I attended in part before going over to the military school in Command, Oshodi where I got my leaving certificate.
The man was reported to the central church – Kumuyi holds that power and strategic coordinators report happenings about the districts and group of districts to him usually atthe Tuesday meetings.
They made the man to suspend his own “calling” – I’m trying hard to show the Igbo-Yoruba altercation here right inside the household of faith.
Eventually, he left the church to form his own “company” elsewhere. Somewhere in Berlet, Ilasa. I followed that case amongst others and saw how church business in Nigeria operate. There is always a inner caucus like what’s obtainable in Government. They decide who gets what, when and how.
…to be continued.