YAOUNDÈ, Cameroon – A leading African archbishop has said that an historical tendency to regard Christianity as the “white man’s God,” and the current rise of a “prosperity Gospel” conflating Christianity with material success, both represent obstacles to real evangelization on the continent.
Archbishop Augustine Obiora Akubeze of of Benin City was speaking August 9 during an evangelization conference of the Benin City ecclesiastical province.
The cleric expressed anger that Christianity is still perceived in Africa as “the white man’s God” and complained that there are priests who still turn down baptizing children bearing African names.
“To become Christian, we had to pick Western names that are saints, and our local names were not allowed. It was as if no Nigerian existed in heaven before the missionaries came,” referring to the time when foreign missionaries deployed to Nigeria gave the impression that “no Nigerian existed in heaven before the missionaries came.”
Other clerics have voiced similar concerns. Father Benjamin Achi of Enugu Diocese in Nigeria told Crux that many parents have complained to him that some parish priests have refused to baptize their children because they bear native names .
“As a matter of fact, during our seminary days, one of my classmates was almost expelled from the seminary by his Diocesan bishop because he said the seminarian was known more by his native name than his baptismal name. He was accused of playing down his Christian name,” Achi said.
Akubeze said Africa must leave such mentalities behind.
“We have moved from the time of the foreign missionaries, where there was little or no understanding of our culture and there was a complete repudiation of our way of life,” the archbishop said, as he urged Christians to turn their backs on such slavish adherence to what used to happen in the past.
Akubeze also decried the rise in prosperity of Gospel preachers in Nigeria and across Africa as he reflected on the Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, on the joy of the Gospel.
The so-called “prosperity gospel,” often associated with Pentecostal Christianity, promises a direct path to material well-being in the here and now. Its central claim is that God will grant a believer his or her heart’s desires: wealth, a healthy body, a thriving family, and boundless happiness, if the believer simply asks with sufficient faith.
The Pope’s exhortation released in 2013, proposes that evangelization shouldn’t be about preaching what people want to hear.
Yet with the rise of prosperity Gospel preachers, missionaries now “preach the gospel of prosperity that will bring people to the Church focusing on instant miracles to the people so that the Church would be full,” Akubeze said.
Emeka Umeagbalasi, Director of the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, a a Catholic-inspired Nigerian NGO known as “Intersociety,” told Crux that the rise and spread of prosperity Gospel “has taken over evangelization in Africa.”
“The situation has produced fake Christian leaders and fake disciples of Christ,” he told Crux.
“I can tell you that the greater number of Christian leaders in Nigeria are fake…It is hurting Christianity, it is hurting the defense of faith and it is hurting evangelization because the end game all over the place now is money. Christian leaders no longer care about societal decency, faith decency. No matter how evil-mined somebody is, once you can bring money, you are canonized,” he said.
Emeka traced the rise of prosperity Gospel preaching to the year 2000, when there was a general expectation that there was to be a second physical coming of Christ.
“When that didn’t happen, many Christian leaders introduced fakery into the body of Christ,” he said.
“That was the beginning of the monetization of the Churches as we have them today.”
He said injecting a profit motive is an aberration to Christianity, because it negates everything Christ represents.
“Christ who is the author and finisher of the faith was never monetized. He never compromised. Despite all the attacks, he insisted on delivering his mission. In Nigeria and most of Africa, Christianity is being eliminated at high speed,” Emeka said.
Emeka called for another Vatican Council to address the many shortcomings evident in today’s Christianity, “including monetization of the Church, fakery in evangelization, misinterpretation of the doctrines of the Church, etc.”
For his part, Akubeze called for comprehensive catechesis to deepen evangelization in the West African country.
“Sometimes the greatest challenge that missionaries face on the field is to want to reconstruct the content of the message to suit the disposition of the hearer,” he said.
“We must redefine the parameters of evaluating successful evangelization.”
He underscored the need to build people instead of just structures, noting that Europe is the perfect example of a place where the focus has been on building structures, important as they may be, but has ended up with church buildings that serve as “tourist centers rather than places of worship.”
He said preachers should be taught to understand that they are only called to work on the Lord’s vineyard: they must never conflate Christ’s vineyard with theirs.
“We must never forget that it is not our vineyard. The Church is not our church, and the mission is not our mission, but that of Christ,” he said.
“The first principle to guide us in any missionary work is to know the owner of the vineyard and to have a good relationship with the owner of the Church.”
