Crooked pastors are living it up on your dime
Onumba.com —— These dudes and dudettes roll like celebrities and live in sprawling, plush pads. They walk with a phony divine swagger and jet around the globe in lavish private airplanes. They own fleets of snazzy whips breathtaking enough to make even a petrolhead feel like a relic of the past. Where they live, massive carports offer shelter to museums of luxury cars such as Rolls Royce, Mercedes Brabus G-Wagon, Lambo, Range Rovers and others.
But being on top of their game, they are quite nimble at camouflaging and cloaking their excesses and other shenanigans in sham compassion programs, establishing philanthropic ‘foundations’ to serve as conduits through which food and other humanitarian largess are funneled to their grateful paupers. But that’s a clever decoy. Don’t fall for it. Yeah ——— big deal, I got a bag of beans and a couple of onions, but you are rolling in a Rolls Royce and a G-wagon while residing in a mega mansion with your pampered family. It nicely fits into the broader mirage of distraction to veil their epic thievery and maintain a tight stranglehold on their members who fund their bloated appetite for luxury.
It is profoundly depressing, revolting and nauseating, to me anyway, seeing poor, sick and helpless folks being manipulated, harassed, hoodwinked, intimidated, fleeced by slick talking millionaires and mellifluous billionaires whose basic tool of deception is the word of God from the Holy Bible.
Worse yet, some of these so-called pastors and so-called evangelists have largely become impervious to scandals, criticisms and baby-mama drama, due in large part to their false sacrosanct aura that drowns out reports of their misconducts and perfidy. With that, for the life of me, these boneheaded churchgoers continue to fall for this rank mendacity even though these pastors and evangelists have been repeatedly unveiled as straight up frauds.
Who is to blame? Churchgoers, the deceptive pastors or the indifferent government
This exploitation persists due precisely to equal parts of rank stupidity and innocent naivety of these churchgoers, some of them captured and resigned to the belief that these sham pastors, if that’s what they are, will eventually face the wrath of their creator on the judgment day.
Be that as it may, it is self-inflicted atrocity. But just because a suicidal woman jumped into River Niger drowning does not mean efforts should not be made to come to her rescue. With that, should the government intervene and crack down on these rogue churches in Nigeria? Yes ——– if the cardinal role of the state is truly to protect its citizens, notwithstanding the giving is voluntary.
It is flabbergasting that these brainwashed churchgoers would thrillingly embrace being willing participants in their own exploitation. It has even escalated to the cusp where these scrofulous pastors and evangelists no longer deny enriching themselves. Rather, they defend their abundant wealth, flamboyant indulgences and lavish possessions as being divine blessing from God who loathes poverty. Funny enough, many of these stupid churchgoers, as destitute as they are, would say Amen to that. Go figure!
Meanwhile, that convenient and thirsty assertion that God has a dim view of poverty nicely fits their theology. That is, it lends credence to the doctrinal rationale, moral grounding and ethical backing to preach the virtues of wealth, also known as prosperity or faith gospel, dangling divine abundance as a bait to hook these delusional fools. Thus, preaching about the accumulation of earthly riches has eclipsed spiritual fulfillment as the linchpin of Christian theology.
Nowadays, sermons on living a sinless, good Christian life is rare, and when it does happen, these pastors tiptoe around the volatile subject, walking a tight rope not to offend anyone. Even more, many of them avoid it altogether while others nibble at the edges without taking a big bite. Why not? They cherish and cuddle their money-making numskulls and would stick to preaching sermons not to appear judgmental. While that strategy keeps the flock in hand happy, their community outreach programs are at work bringing in church hopping and faith shopping outsiders into their racket ——— targeting those desperately seeking succor from their financial impoverishment.
Prosperity gospel galore
What’s more, these shady and atrocious pastors love to feed their prosperity-groveling “faithfools” the mind-bending baloney that poverty stems from evil spirit to be eradicated with prayer, fasting , anointed oil and holy water ——– for a fee, of course, but always open to non monetary alternatives such as goats, cows, land and bags of rice and beans. Refrigerators and cars, too. It’s all about the bag.
More broadly, prosperity gospel posits that when you give generously to the church, you are essentially sowing a seed that would sooner rather than later bloom into abundant wealth for the giver. That’s a big, fat lie. Yet somehow, super star Bishop T.D. Jakes built his vast Porter’s House empire on that cap. “The more you give to me, the more I give back to you,” he recently preached.
Not to be outdone, prosperity gospel heavyweight Creflo Dollar —— with a name that literally means money —— personifies one of the darkest energies of prosperity gospel. This dude is hands down full of it. “Giving to the church is giving directly to God,” he said, adding, Sow a seed and expect abundance” because “God wants believers to be wealthy.” This is vapid nonsense ——— straight-up bullshit. Luke Chapter 8 verse 11 tells us clearly that ‘seed’ is the word of God, not money. Mind you, this is the same shameless rascal who tried to bamboozle members of his Mega World Changers Church International in the Atlanta area to purchase him a $65 million Gulfstream G650 airplane. He said it would help him win more souls.
One pastor even claimed that God told him to have each member of his congregation sow a “$10,000 seed in 90 seconds” for a plum harvest of becoming a multimillionaire. First of all, any time a pastor tells you that God told him anything, run faster than ace sprinter Usain Bolt. And as though that wasn’t unhinged enough, this truculent pastor badgered the women in his congregation to donate no less than $200 each to the church or face the castigation of receiving no blessing from God. Can you imagine that? This is happening in modern day Christianity. If this doesn’t bother the heck out of you, it should. “God’s favor, God’s blessing, God’s anointing is not based upon Dollars and Cents,” said Pastor Gino Jennings. “Don’t give these hypocrites nothing.”
But the one that really takes the cake is from Pastor Joyce Meyer ——— the undisputed queen of prosperity gospel.
“When you give, you get a receipt in heaven and when you have a need, you can then go with your receipt and say, you see God, I have got my receipt from my sowing [a seed] and now I have a need and I am cashing in my receipt.” What a jaw-dropping, laughable load of codswallop! Yet, for the life of me, there are folks who happily embrace this mind-numbing rambling nonsense.
Church services have become ‘performance’ and ‘entertainment’
Then there’s the sickening matter of church services typically featuring fierce bombardment of tantalizing bromides, onslaught of attention grabbing histrionics and quixotic assurances ——– to foster collective feel-good aura. It’s all “performance” and “entertainment” noted Minister Louis Farrakhan. Pastor Gino Jennings agreed. “The churches are the biggest entertainment centers in the world,” he said. And it is. That kind of jazzy gospel is regrettable enough, but when tied to a couple of biblical stanzas referencing themes of prosperity and wealth, it reduces Christianity to mere theatrics comparable to comical shindigs.
Often, biblical words and themes are cleverly isolated and their original meaning adjusted, twisted and redirected to fit their warped theological framework. That is, these words are distorted and stretched quicker than you can say rubber band, all to fit their heightened obsession with prosperity gospel. There’s only one goal: to creep into the gullible minds of these stupid churchgoers to suck them dry.
Televangelism juggernaut, pastor Kenneth Copeland, who is no stranger to any of this, recently preached: In the gospel, “giving [to the church] is at the heart of breaking the curse of poverty.” That’s a straight up lie from the pit of hell. For one thing, poverty is neither a curse nor spiritual attack. It’s that kind of deceptive pitch that obliges captured members of his congregation to keep giving and giving and giving and giving believing someday to break the curse of their poverty. The truth is, their chances of finding a four leaf clover are greater than ending their poverty because they donated to the church. Don’t get me wrong, though, giving has its intrinsic rewards. It delights the magnanimous humanity in us, still, banking on giving to the church to alleviate our impoverishment, is arrantly imprudent and startlingly misguided.
Pastor Copeland even went as far as linking the sickness of members of his congregation to the paucity of their monetary donations to the church. In other words, if you fall sick, blame yourself for sowing a teeny-weeny seed.
At the end of the day, people are free to make their own choices
Taken together, modern day Christianity is now in the sullied hands of unrepentant crooks and gluttonous manipulators parading as pious servants of God. They are not ———- far from it. Rather, they are slick, sick exploiters, serving Satan, not God.
Modern day Christianity is dismally lacking Godly ubiquity, truth, obedience, adherence to the bible, humanity, and the kind of spiritual pabulum, modesty and good heartedness that our Lord Jesus Christ grandly embodied. Today, it’s all a farce, it’s all fluff, it’s all entertainment, and fickle ———nurtured by selfish and transactional energies flowing from both the scamming, carnal clergies who control it and the zombie, mumu churchgoers who fund it. It really should stop.
But unfortunately, it is not going to stop. The truth is, matters of faith and spirituality are profoundly personal and could neither be legislated nor policed. Individuals are free to make their own decisions, and regardless of the staggering ignorance and glaring foolishness shaping those decisions, they still reserve the right to make them.
Similarly, these phony pastors also have the right to invade and roam the gullible minds of these desperate churchgoers for plum exploits. The glut, the orgy of thievery and the genteel ruthlessness of that exploitation have helped elevate the monetization of faith ——— the linchpin of Christianity theology ——– to the epitome of disdain, shamelessness and impiety fueled by deception and low-down dirty tricks. Even as the ‘save the souls’ claim rolls off their lying lips, they always embody the uppity lifestyle of the rich and the famous ———- constantly decked out in the glitziest and swankiest getup such that they would give Dapper Dan a run for his money.
