Oyewole O. Sarumi, PhD
A Conversation That Exposes a Deeper Crisis
Not long ago, a discussion took place in Nigeria that deserves far more attention than it has received in the corridors of church leadership.
Pastor Charles Osazuwa convened a panel of respected voices, former Vice President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Pastor Olumide Emmanuel, and Pastor Korede Komaiya, to wrestle publicly with a question that should never have become controversial: What is the message of the Church, and what does the Church owe to the poor?
That such a question can produce deep disagreement among respected Christian leaders tells you something important. It tells you that the Nigerian church, indeed, the African church broadly, has arrived at a fork in a road it did not know it was walking. And the direction taken from here will define not just the shape of Christianity on this continent for the next generation, but the credibility of the gospel of Jesus Christ before a watching world.
I
have been teaching and preaching for more than four decades. I have watched movements rise and fall. I have sat with men and women who sacrificed everything for the gospel, and I have also watched the pulpit become a platform for commerce.
What I witnessed in that panel discussion, and what I want to address in this article, is not a new problem. But it is an urgent one. And leaders of the church, whether you pastor a congregation of fifty or supervise a network of five thousand, need to hear what is at stake.
The church does not exist to serve the ambitions of its leaders. It exists to serve the purposes of Jesus Christ. Those purposes can be summarised in one word: the gospel.
Two Messages, One Pulpit — and the Choice That Defines a Generation
The panel conversation revealed what many of us have quietly known for years: there are essentially two messages competing for the soul of the African church. One message builds the Kingdom of God. The other builds religious excitement.
One produces disciples who are formed in the character of Christ, rooted in Scripture, engaged with the suffering of the world, and prepared for a life of service and sacrifice. The other produces spectators, people who attend, cheer, contribute financially, and return home largely unchanged.
Charles Spurgeon, that great prince of the Victorian pulpit whose voice still echoes in every serious seminary worth its salt, made a declaration that ought to be pinned above the door of every preacher’s study: ‘Of all I would wish to say, this is the sum: My brethren, preach Christ, always and evermore! He is the whole gospel. His person, offices, and work must be our one great, all-comprehending theme.’
That sentence does not leave room for alternatives. It does not allow for the prosperity gospel or any other supplementary gospel. It insists on one theme, one subject, one inexhaustible well from which every sermon must draw.
The question before the Nigerian church today is whether it still believes that.
DATA INSIGHT
A 2006 Pew Research survey found that 95% of Nigerian Pentecostals believed God would grant material prosperity to all believers with sufficient faith — the highest figure of any African country surveyed.
Yet Nigeria’s poverty rate, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, stands at over 42%, with more than 133 million Nigerians classified as multidimensionally poor as of 2024. The prosperity gospel has been preached in Nigeria for over four decades. The numbers do not lie.
The Poor Are the Business of the Church — But Not Only the Church
When Pastor Osazuwa opened the conversation by asking who bears responsibility for feeding the poor, the church or the government, he was raising a question that Scripture had already answered, though perhaps not in the tidy, politically convenient way that modern church culture might prefer.
Jesus was unambiguous. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, He describes the final reckoning of the nations with imagery that should disturb the comfort of every comfortable believer. The hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, these are the people through whom Jesus identifies Himself.
‘What you did for the least of these,’ He declares, ‘you did for me.’ And notice, as the writer Yemi Success rightly pointed out in the text that prompted this reflection, Jesus did not direct that question at governments. He directed it at believers. He directed it at us.
The early church understood this immediately and without ambiguity. In the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit-filled community of believers in Jerusalem lived out an economics of radical compassion. Resources were shared so freely, so joyfully, and so thoroughly that the result was unprecedented: there was not a single person among them who lacked. Not one widow forgotten. Not one orphan was ignored. Not one family abandoned.
The Kingdom of God was not an abstract theological concept to those early believers. It was a social reality that transformed their community from the inside out.
The church must never surrender this responsibility. It is not optional. It is not peripheral. The care of the poor is woven into the fabric of the gospel from Genesis to Revelation, and any version of Christianity that excises it has removed something essential from the body of Christ.
The early church did not ask for government permission to feed the poor, they simply served and the world looked on I’m astonishment
From Soup Kitchen to National Policy: The Osinbajo Lesson in Kingdom Influence
But here is where the conversation in that panel reaches a depth that many might have missed. Prof. Yemi Osinbajo shared a personal story that I believe deserves extended reflection in every leadership development programme across this continent.
Years before he ascended to the nation’s second-highest office, Osinbajo was a faithful churchman running a modest outreach from his local church. That outreach fed approximately five hundred people through a soup kitchen.
Five hundred people received a meal because a Christian man and his community chose to translate their faith into action. That is charity. That is compassion. And it is nothing.
But then something extraordinary happened. His Christian convictions did not remain confined to the boundaries of church ministry. When he joined a policy team drafting a political party manifesto, he insisted, based on his faith, that the document include a national social investment programme and a school feeding plan. When he became the Vice President of Nigeria, he was given the authority to implement it. The result? Nearly ten million children across thirty states received meals every single day.
Pause and sit with that arithmetic for a moment. Five hundred to ten million. That is not a multiplication of effort. That is a multiplication of influence. And it is precisely the kind of influence that the Kingdom of God is designed to produce when its people understand their vocation in the world.
The church that limits itself only to direct service will always serve hundreds. The church that trains and releases kingdom-minded leaders into every domain of society, government, law, education, business, medicine, and technology will serve millions. Both are necessary. But the second is the harder calling, and it is the one most neglected by a church culture that has confused activity within the four walls of a building with the full meaning of mission.
John Owen, arguably the greatest theological mind England ever produced, wrote that ‘a man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul.’ What Osinbajo demonstrated was something similar, a faith that first preached itself in his own convictions, and then expressed itself in policy that changed millions of lives. That is what it looks like when the gospel of the Kingdom gets into the bones of a leader.
The Prosperity Gospel: A Four-Decade Experiment That Has Failed Africa
I want to be carefully here, because I know that many of my brothers and sisters in ministry hold prosperity theology sincerely. I do not doubt their sincerity. But sincerity and accuracy are not the same thing. And after forty years of watching this particular theological stream flow through the African church, I believe we owe it to the people of God to look honestly at the evidence.
Pastor Komaiya argued passionately in the panel discussion for the centrality of prosperity in the church’s message, prosperity activated through giving, wealth released through financial covenants, and blessing unlocked through seed offerings. The audience cheered. And that moment, that loud and enthusiastic applause, deserves theological interrogation rather than celebration.
Because crowds do not validate truth. They never have. In the era of the Hebrew prophets, false teachers were the ones who drew the largest crowds, because they told people what they wanted to hear. Jeremiah, who told the truth, was thrown into a cistern. The false prophets who declared peace where there was no peace were welcomed in the courts of kings. The applause of a crowd in a church building is not theological confirmation. It is sociological data.
DATA INSIGHT
Research published in 2024 (Ijaola, Palgrave Macmillan) confirms what many observers have long suspected: notwithstanding the prevalence of the prosperity gospel across Africa, the number of people living in poverty on the continent has continued to increase. The promise of prosperity gospel, the study concludes, ‘is yet to be fulfilled in Africa.’
Meanwhile, a doctoral thesis from the University of Central Lancashire (Omavuebe, 2024) documents that Nigeria’s unemployment stands at 18.7%, poverty at 42.4%, even as prosperity preaching fills television screens and stadium-sized church gatherings across the country.
These numbers do not emerge from a hostile secular academy. They emerge from scholars, many of them believers, who are wrestling honestly with a painful contradiction. If prosperity preaching automatically produces prosperity, why do entire communities remain economically stagnant after forty years of sustained exposure to that message? Why do the pastors grow wealthy while the congregants remain poor, consoling themselves with the phrase, ‘it is working for me’?
The answer is theological and economic simultaneously. You cannot build an economy on offerings. Economies are built on value creation, productivity, skill development, honest governance, and institutional integrity. The Bible has never taught economic magic. It has consistently taught economic wisdom.
What the Bible Actually Says About Prosperity
Consider Joseph, whose story spans thirteen chapters of Genesis and remains one of the most detailed economic and leadership narratives in all of Scripture.
Joseph did not rise to become the second most powerful man in the ancient world because he sowed a financial seed in a special offering. He rose because he understood strategy, agricultural science, supply chain management, and administrative leadership.
When Pharaoh faced a crisis of existential proportions, seven years of famine threatening the entire region, it was Joseph’s competence, wisdom, and integrity that made him indispensable. God’s favour was upon him, yes. But God’s favour expressed itself through Joseph’s developed gifts and hard-won expertise.
Consider Daniel, who advised emperors across multiple kingdoms and empires. His influence did not derive from miracle-money campaigns. It derived from a discipline of prayer, a commitment to intellectual excellence, and a moral integrity that even his enemies could not successfully challenge.
He was, by any measure, one of the most consequential figures in the ancient Near East, and his influence was built entirely on the foundation of competence, character, and covenant faithfulness.
Consider Esther, whose courage and strategic intelligence preserved an entire nation from genocide. She did not pray for a miraculous financial breakthrough. She prepared, she planned, she acted at great personal risk, and she trusted God with the outcome. That is the Kingdom pattern across the Old Testament.
And in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes with the kind of blunt pastoral honesty that is rarely heard in modern pulpits: ‘If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.’ Notice the precision of his language. He does not say ‘cannot work.’ He says, ‘will not work.’
The apostle is addressing not disability but deliberate idleness, the expectation of reward without contribution. The Kingdom of God, Paul insists, does not operate on that basis. God blesses diligence. He does not reward passivity dressed up as faith.
Faith does not remove the need for effort. Faith strengthens effort, deepens commitment, and sustains the worker through seasons when effort appears unrewarded.
When the Church Creates Spectators Instead of Disciples
One of the most damaging side effects of forty years of prosperity-centred preaching is the mentality it has constructed in large segments of the African church. When people are consistently taught that miracles are available as substitutes for mastery, the results are predictable and devastating.
Prayer begins to replace preparation. Expectation displaces education. Believers begin to imagine they can receive through spiritual transactions what others must invest years of disciplined study and practice to achieve.
Pastor Olumide Emmanuel made a point in that panel discussion that I want to underscore with the full weight of forty years of pastoral observation: you cannot be anointed into the cockpit of a commercial aircraft without passing through aviation school.
You cannot be prophesied into the operating theatre without completing medical training. The grace of God does not function as a bypass around the normal human processes of learning, formation, and preparation. Grace empowers effort. It does not replace effort. And any theology that teaches otherwise is not equipping the church; it is disabling it.
The church that produces spectators produces people who watch the game of life from the stands, waiting for a supernatural intervention that will place them, untrained and unprepared, into roles that require deep competence. The church that produces disciples produces people who understand that their gifts are given to be developed, their calling is given to be pursued through years of sometimes unrewarded faithfulness, and their faith is the fuel that keeps them working even when the results are not yet visible.
DATA INSIGHT
A 2023 study from the University of South Africa found that Nigeria’s insufficient investment in education has produced a severe shortage of qualified experts across critical sectors — a shortage directly linked to hindered national development. When the church replaces the ethic of educational excellence with the promise of miraculous credentialing, it compounds this national crisis rather than addressing it.
Money Is a Tool, Not a Theology
Let me be unambiguous on a point that some may misread. I am not arguing for a poverty gospel. I am not suggesting that material provision is outside the scope of God’s concern for His people. Scripture is emphatic that God cares about the whole person, body, soul, and spirit, and the entire narrative of Scripture from the Exodus to the New Jerusalem is a story of a God who provides, restores, and renews.
Money matters. The Kingdom requires resources. Hospitals must be built and staffed. Schools must be funded and sustained. The hungry must be fed not just with bread but with dignity. None of this happens without financial investment, generosity, and the wise stewardship of material resources. I have built institutions. I know what it costs to build, to sustain, to grow. Money is not the enemy of the gospel.
But money is a tool, not a theology. It is a means, not the message. Jesus Christ, whose public ministry lasted approximately three years and whose impact has outlasted every empire, every dynasty, and every ideology that has arisen since His resurrection, never organised His ministry around financial promises. He organised it around discipleship, the patient, costly, demanding work of forming human beings into bearers of the Kingdom of God in the world.
Discipleship is harder than prosperity preaching. Discipleship requires that the preacher himself be a disciple, formed, humbled, submitted to the text of Scripture and to the community of faith. It requires patience with people who grow slowly. It demands that the preacher tells the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable, even when it does not generate applause, even when it empties a room rather than fills one.
Spurgeon again, speaking with the characteristic directness that made him the most widely read preacher since the Apostle Paul: ‘If we are to see the church of God really restored to her pristine glory, we must have back this plain, simple, gospel-preaching. I do believe that the hiding of the cross beneath the veil of fine language and learned dissertation is half the cause of the spiritual destitution of our country.’ Substitute ‘Nigeria’ or ‘Africa’ for ‘our country,’ and the diagnosis is unchanged. The cross is being hidden. Not by secularism. By the church itself.
The cross is not one option among many in the church’s menu of messages. It is the only message the church has been authorised to preach.
The Battle Within — Discernment as the First Discipline of Our Season
Many church leaders imagine that the great conflicts of this age will be fought between the church and secular culture, between Christianity and atheism, between the gospel and political ideology. But Scripture has always warned that the most dangerous deceptions do not arrive from outside the community of faith. They arise from within it.
Jesus warned His disciples about false teachers with persistent and specific urgency. Paul, writing to the Galatians with an intensity that remains arresting to this day, declared that even if an angel from heaven were to preach a gospel contrary to the one he had delivered, that angel should be considered accursed. He was not speaking about peripheral matters. He was speaking about the gospel itself, its content, its centrality, and its non-negotiability.
Peter warned about teachers motivated by greed, who, with invented words, would exploit the people of God for personal gain. These warnings are not archaeological curiosities from the first-century church. They are live, relevant, and urgently applicable to the contemporary African church, where, as Nigerian sociologist Asonzeh Ukah has documented in his research on Nigerian megachurches, some ministries have effectively become business empires, with ‘prophets for profit’ employing marketing strategies to mobilise funds rather than to support spiritual formation.
The coming season for the African church is not a season of persecution first. It is a season of discernment first. The voices will multiply. The promises will grow louder. The spectacle will become more elaborate. And in that environment, the leader who has not been formed in the deep things of the gospel, who has not spent long years in the Scripture, in prayer, in honest self-examination, in communion with the suffering Christ, will be carried by currents they cannot even identify.
Ignatius of Antioch, the great martyr and bishop of the apostolic era who was thrown to the lions in Rome around 107 AD, wrote to the churches under his care with a warning that resonates across twenty centuries: ‘Be not deceived, my brethren: those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If, then, those who do this as respects the flesh have suffered death, how much more shall this be the case with anyone who corrupts by wicked doctrine the faith of God.’ Ignatius understood that doctrinal corruption was as lethal as moral corruption. He did not separate them. Neither should we.
A Word Directly to Those Who Lead
I want to speak now with the directness that forty years of pastoral experience compels me to use. If you are a pastor, a bishop, or a church leader of any kind, you carry a weight that is not primarily administrative or managerial. You carry the weight of souls.
You stand before people who are giving you the most precious and irreplaceable commodity in their lives, their trust. They are trusting you to tell them the truth. They are trusting you to point them to Jesus Christ and not to yourself, not to your ministry brand, not to a financial covenant that promises them wealth they will never see.
The question is not whether you are sincere. The question is whether you are accurate. It is entirely possible to be sincerely wrong. It is possible to sincerely harm the people you sincerely love by feeding them a message that feels empowering but leaves them spiritually malnourished, economically passive, and incapable of the kind of disciplined engagement with the world that the Kingdom of God actually requires.
The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter, writing in ‘The Reformed Pastor’ in 1656, issued a charge to the ministers of his generation that I consider mandatory reading for every church leader in Africa today: ‘Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others, and be strangers to the effectual working of that gospel which you preach.’ Baxter’s challenge was not primarily about competence. It was about character. It was about the integrity of the messenger as the carrier of the message.
You will know whether your ministry is about Jesus or about you by asking a simple and devastating question: If the financial giving of your congregation were to stop tomorrow, would your love for them stop? If the answer requires more than a half-second of reflection, you have something serious to bring before God in prayer.
Preach Christ, always and evermore. He is the whole gospel. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Raising the Next Generation of Kingdom Builders
The discussion that Pastor Osazuwa convened is ultimately about the future. It is about what kind of church the next generation of African leaders will inherit, and what kind of Nigeria, what kind of Africa, that church will help to build or fail to build.
The church’s greatest contribution to the economic and social transformation of Africa will not come through offering programmes or seed-sowing campaigns. It will come through the formation of men and women who are thoroughly grounded in the gospel, deeply competent in their professions, fiercely committed to integrity in public life, and motivated by a love for their neighbour that runs deeper than the prospect of personal gain.
Imagine the cumulative impact if every church in Nigeria committed to raising just ten people in every congregation to excellence in their respective fields, ten engineers with unshakeable professional ethics, ten teachers who understand their classroom as a site of Kingdom formation, ten entrepreneurs who build businesses that create wealth and distribute it justly, ten doctors who serve in the public health system with the same dedication they would bring to any private clinic, ten public servants who refuse bribes because their sense of accountability runs upward to God before it runs sideways to earthly authority.
Entire cities would begin to change. Not because the church organised a prayer march, though prayer matters enormously. But because the church organised a formation process, a deliberate, sustained, scripturally grounded process of producing people who are, as Paul described to the Colossians, ‘rooted and built up in Him, and established in the faith.’
This is how the Kingdom has always expanded. Not primarily through miracles, though God is sovereign and He works miraculously as He chooses. But through prepared people, people like Joseph, like Daniel, like Esther, like the first-century community in Jerusalem that turned the Roman Empire upside down, not with political power but with the irresistible force of transformed lives and sacrificial love.
The Responsibility of the Individual Believer
Before I close, I want to turn from the institutional to the personal. The failure of the prosperity gospel is not only the responsibility of the pastors who preach it. It is also the responsibility of the believers who applaud it, fund it, and allow it to shape their understanding of what God requires of them.
You cannot leave the weight of discernment entirely to your pastor. You are responsible for your own soul before God. You are responsible for what you receive and what you reject from the pulpit. The Berean believers in Acts 17 are praised in Scripture not for their deference to apostolic authority, but for their diligence in examining the Scriptures daily to see whether what they were being taught was true. That is the model. That is the standard. And it applies with equal force to the contemporary church.
Will you develop the gifts God has placed within you, investing the years of discipline and preparation that genuine competence requires? Or will you continue waiting for a miraculous shortcut that will never arrive because it was never promised?
Will you engage with the broken systems of your society, the broken education system, the broken health infrastructure, the broken governance structures, with the patience and skill of a Kingdom builder? Or will you remain a spectator, singing and clapping while the world around you continues to deteriorate?
The Kingdom of God has never advanced through spectators. It advances through prepared people who have been formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, his death, his resurrection, and his lordship, and who carry that formation into every domain of human life with courage, competence, and compassion.
Conclusion: There Is Only One Message Strong Enough
The debate that Pastor Charles Osazuwa convened between Pastor Komaiya, Pastor Olumide Emmanuel, and Prof. Yemi Osinbajo is a microcosm of a larger contest that is playing out in every church, every denomination, and every theological tradition across Africa. It is a contest between two fundamentally different understandings of what the church exists to do.
One understanding says the church exists to make people comfortable, prosperous, and emotionally elevated. The other says the church exists to make people like Jesus, and to release them into the world as agents of His Kingdom. One understanding produces crowds. The other produces transformation. And they are not the same thing, however much they may look alike on the surface.
The truth, the gospel of Jesus Christ, His cross, His resurrection, His lordship over all creation, does not always receive the loudest applause. It did not when He preached it in Galilee. It did not when Paul preached it in Athens. It did not when Spurgeon preached it in Victorian London, and it will not always receive it in the megachurches of Lagos, Abuja, or Nairobi today.
But truth is the only message with enough power to do what the church is called to do. It is the only message that truly sets people free. It is the only message that addresses the root condition of the human heart, which is not poverty but sin, not material lack but spiritual alienation from the living God. And when that root condition is addressed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, the fruit, including material transformation, community renewal, and national restoration, follows in its proper time and in its proper order.
I close with the words of Spurgeon one final time, because in forty years of ministry, I have never found a better summary of what the preacher’s sacred obligation amounts to: ‘God forbid that we should glory save in the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord! God forbid that we should know anything among men save Jesus Christ, and him crucified!’
That is the commission. That is the mandate. That is the only message the church has been given to preach. Everything else is noise. Preach the gospel of Jesus, and nothing else. It is enough. It has always been enough. And it always will be.
About the Author
Prof. Sarumi, a digital transformation architect and leadership strategist with over 40 years of cross-sector experience across Nigeria and the African continent, writes from Lagos.