By Lanre Ogundipe
There was a time when the Nigerian church had no mega auditorium, no television empire, no private university, no luxury fleet and no sprawling estate that could be mistaken from a distance for a small town.
There were missionaries, converts, teachers, catechists, books, schoolrooms, mission houses, parcels of land and people willing to give what they had. But even then, something important was already happening. The Christian mission was becoming an institution.That distinction matters.
The story of religious money in Nigeria did not begin with the Pentecostal prosperity preacher, the multimillion naira building project or the pastor presented with an expensive automobile. It began much earlier, when the work of evangelisation acquired the machinery necessary to sustain itself.
Money had to be raised. Land had to be secured. Buildings had to be erected. Teachers had to be paid. Books had to be obtained. Missionaries had to be supported. Hospitals had to be established. Records had to be kept.
And once those things existed, another question inevitably arose. Who owned them? The surviving records of the Church Missionary Society show that this institutional machinery was already operating in the nineteenth century.
The CMS archive at the University of Birmingham contains records relating to mission administration, finance, property and education. Among the surviving materials are records of mission buildings and property, financial administration and other aspects of the society’s work.
There is nothing suspicious about that. There is something historically important about it. The church needed money because the work needed institutions. And the institutions required systems. That reality introduces the first spiritual question of this investigation.
When a work begins with a spiritual purpose and subsequently acquires money, land, buildings, personnel and administrative structures, the possession of those things creates a responsibility that is itself part of stewardship.
The existence of resources is not evidence of corruption.
Neither is institutional growth.
A school needs land. A hospital needs equipment. A church needs a building. A publishing operation needs books and machinery. People working in these institutions need to be supported.
The spiritual question begins somewhere else.
Do the resources remain servants of the purpose for which they were acquired? Or can the preservation and expansion of the institution gradually become a purpose in itself?
That question did not begin with the contemporary Pentecostal movement. It is already present in the history of the missionary enterprise.
The first Nigerian Christian institutional economy did not emerge as an accidental by product of religious enthusiasm. It was built deliberately, sometimes painfully, and with contributions that did not come from Europe alone.
That last point deserves particular attention.
The old picture of European missionaries arriving with Christianity, money and institutions while Nigerians merely received what was brought to them is too simple. The development of Christianity in Nigeria involved Africans who gave money, land, labour, leadership and organisational energy to the emerging institutions.
The history of the CMS enterprise contains evidence of indigenous participation in the financing and development of Christian education. The broader historical record also shows that missionary education was sustained through a combination of missionary resources, local contributions and, later, government support.
That changes the question before us. The question is not whether missionaries were secretly running businesses.
It is a much more serious question. How did a religious movement develop an institutional economy?
Who supplied the resources?
Who controlled them?
How were they administered?
And what happened to the assets created by those resources?
Those questions take us to the school. The school was one of the most consequential instruments of the missionary enterprise. IIt taught children to read. It trained teachers. It produced clerks and catechists. It created a literate Christian population. It opened a route into the emerging colonial economy. It also provided the missionary with one of the most effective instruments of evangelisation.
The educational enterprise therefore had several purposes at once.
It was religious.
It was social.
It was intellectual.
And it required money.
The missions had to provide buildings, books, writing materials, teachers and administration. Historical research on Christian development in Nigeria records that the missions carried much of this financial burden in the early years, before government assistance became significant.
By the twentieth century, the scale had become extraordinary.
This was no longer a collection of isolated mission classrooms. Christian missions had become major educational providers across Nigeria.
By the mid 1930s, available historical estimates recorded thousands of Protestant elementary schools and hundreds of Roman Catholic elementary schools, alongside secondary schools and teacher training institutions.
And behind every school was an economic question.
Who paid?
Who owned the land?
Who built the classroom?
Who paid the teacher?
Who supplied the books?
Who maintained the building?
Who decided what happened when the school needed expansion?
These are financial questions, but they also carry a spiritual dimension. Resources given for a purpose create obligations on those entrusted with them.
The issue is not simply how much was gathered. It is whether those entrusted with what was gathered remained faithful to the purpose for which it was entrusted.
That is why the history of missionary finance cannot be separated entirely from the history of Christian stewardship.
Consider the CMS Bookshops.
The surviving archive covers CMS bookshop operations in Nigeria from 1876 to 1982. It contains administrative records, committee minutes, annual reports, staff records, correspondence and financial papers, including audited accounts from 1906 to 1976.
That is a remarkable documentary trail.
A bookshop is an economic operation. Yet this one existed within the missionary institutional ecosystem for more than a century.
What did it sell?
How was it financed?
What did its accounts show?
Was it expected merely to recover its costs, or was it expected to generate surpluses?
Where did those surpluses go?
Did they support other missionary activities?
Who controlled the operation?
What happened when responsibility passed increasingly into Nigerian hands?
The existence of audited accounts makes those questions more than speculation. They are questions that can, at least in principle, be answered from records.
And there is a spiritual lesson here that should not be missed.
There is nothing inherently wrong with an income generating activity serving a religious mission. The issue is what happens when the instrument becomes detached from the purpose.
Money can serve a mission.
Institutions can serve a mission.
Enterprise can serve a mission.
But the servant must not quietly become the master.
The Catholic story brings another dimension to the same historical inquiry. The Catholic Church developed its own institutional network of schools, hospitals, seminaries, religious houses, land holdings and administrative structures.
The Catholic presence in Lagos dates back to the nineteenth century, while the sustained Catholic mission in eastern Nigeria began with the arrival of the Holy Ghost missionaries at Onitsha in 1885. Education quickly became central to the enterprise.
The Catholic story also reveals the importance of local communities. Mission property did not always arise through a simple commercial transaction in which a church bought a piece of land for cash. Land could be donated, granted or made available through community arrangements and other forms of tenure.
That distinction matters because the later history of mission property would become inseparable from the question of legal title. A piece of land on which a church school stood could have a history quite different from the land on which another school stood.
Some land was bought. Some was donated. Some was granted. Some was held under arrangements that did not necessarily correspond neatly with modern concepts of registered title.
The property history of Nigerian religious institutions therefore cannot be reconstructed simply by counting buildings.
The title matters.
The trustees matter.
The transfers matter.
The records matter.
And the money matters.
The Catholic experience also demonstrates how closely education and evangelisation were intertwined.
The missionaries did not establish schools merely as commercial enterprises. Education was part of the missionary project itself.
Hospitals and other social institutions likewise became part of the wider religious presence. Again, there is no basis for treating institutional expansion itself as evidence of wrongdoing.
Indeed, much of it was profoundly beneficial.
The missionary institutions educated generations of Nigerians. They trained teachers, doctors, clergy and civil servants. Their hospitals provided medical care. Their schools contributed to the formation of an educated population that would eventually participate in the struggle for political independence.
Research has also found enduring effects of early missionary educational infrastructure on educational outcomes in Nigeria. That is an important part of the story.
It would be intellectually dishonest to investigate religious wealth while pretending that religious institutions created nothing of lasting public value.
They did. And that fact creates another spiritual obligation.
Where an institution has genuinely served society, criticism must not become contempt.
Where people have sacrificed, criticism must not erase their sacrifice. Where generations have benefited, investigation must not become historical ingratitude. Truth does not require us to deny the good in order to examine the weaknesses. It requires us to acknowledge both.
By the twentieth century, the missions were no longer marginal players in education. They were operating extensive networks of schools. Government became increasingly involved through grants, regulation and policy. The relationship between church and state consequently evolved from missionary independence through partnership and eventually into conflict.
Then came the 1970s. The Nigerian government took over ownership and administration of many mission schools, fundamentally altering the institutional landscape.
But the word “takeover” opens another documentary question.
What exactly was taken?
The buildings?
The land?
The equipment?
The school administration?
The institutional rights of the proprietors?
And what happened to the investments made over decades?
These questions cannot be answered by assuming that every mission school stood on land legally owned by the mission.
The documentary record is more complicated.
Questions of title and compensation were contested in subsequent legal proceedings.
In some cases, government argued that proprietors could not establish legal title to land because land had been donated or obtained through community arrangements without formal transfer of title. In other cases, proprietors pursued compensation for schools taken over by government.
The evidence therefore demands caution. We cannot simply say that all mission property was confiscated without compensation. Nor can we assume that every proprietor was fully compensated.
The answer has to be established from the relevant laws, acquisition records, court cases, government papers and property documents.
That is precisely why the subject deserves investigation.
The takeover was not merely an administrative event.
It changed the relationship between religious institutions, property, education and the Nigerian state. IIt also changed the institutional landscape into which later religious organisations would emerge.
Long before the contemporary Pentecostal movement began acquiring enormous auditoriums, universities, media platforms and other assets, Christian organisations in Nigeria had already developed systems for raising money, acquiring property, building institutions, employing people, managing assets and maintaining records.
The Pentecostal era would later alter the scale and character of religious institutional activity. But the institutional principle was older. The historical record therefore leaves us with a question that is both institutional and spiritual. When resources accumulate around a spiritual work, who is ultimately being served?
The question is not whether churches should have money.
It is not whether religious organisations should own property.
It is not whether schools, hospitals, publishing houses or other enterprises can legitimately operate within a religious ecosystem.
They can. The question is whether the material machinery remains accountable to the purpose that justified its existence. That is a question of stewardship. It is also a question of the heart.
For an institution, like an individual, can gradually become attached to the things it was originally entrusted to use.
A building can become a symbol of status.
An institution can become protective of its own power.
An enterprise can become more important than the service it was created to provide. An asset can become something to preserve rather than something to deploy. None of these things should be presumed from the mere existence of wealth.
But neither should they be beyond examination simply because the wealth exists within a religious institution.
The missions needed resources to fulfil their calling.
They raised money. They acquired land. They built schools. They established hospitals. They produced books. They employed teachers. They maintained buildings. They created administrative structures to keep the work moving.
None of these things was inherently contrary to the purpose of the mission.
But every resource entrusted to a spiritual work carries a question with it. What is it serving? The question becomes more searching as the institution grows.
For money can serve the mission, but the mission can also become an instrument for acquiring money. Property can serve the work, but the preservation of property can eventually become a work in itself.
An institution can protect a calling, but the institution can also become something that the calling is made to protect.
This is not an accusation against the missions.
It is the first spiritual lesson emerging from their history.
Growth is not proof of faithfulness. Neither is wealth proof of corruption.
The test lies deeper.
It lies in stewardship.
It lies in purpose.
It lies in accountability.
And ultimately, it lies in the question of whether the things gathered in the name of God continue to serve the purposes for which they were gathered.
The little foxes do not always announce themselves.
Sometimes they enter quietly, when the means begin to acquire the importance of the end.
Sometimes they appear when stewardship gives way to possession. Sometimes they emerge when an institution built to serve a spiritual purpose begins, imperceptibly, to demand that the spiritual purpose serve the institution.
That is why the history matters.
Not merely because it tells us what religious institutions possessed. But because it asks us what possession does to institutions entrusted with the things of God.
Ogundipe, Public Affairs Analyst, former President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists and African Union of Journalists, and itinerant Bible teacher, writes from Abuja.