My stand with today’s Church

I contemplated for a long while before I decided to write this article. I know that for some family and friends who will read this, it might seem embarrassing, coming from a noble Knight of the Church, who has been in the forefront of the fight to protect Christian values and one whose wife is a priest at the Church of England.

What I am exactly doing here is what I had always wanted to do: protecting Christian values. And to that extent, it might be important to explain from the start, that I pondered over the prompting to write this for quite a long period and each time, my instinct told me not to keep the idea to myself but to let it out. If in my attempt, leaders of the Church have a re-think about what is going on currently in the Christian world, and if that re-think results in a different and more genuine way of understanding and appreciating Christian values in our contemporary society, then we would have achieved something positive, as Christians.

Part of the reason I am writing this is because I observe that, possibly due to the global economic condition and the desire of global citizens to stay afloat, Satanic forces have done their best to infiltrate into and challenge the Church at all levels. Satan is the only one that does not like God’s supremacy over the affairs of humanity. He abhors the leadership of God in the affairs of men and nations. And so, he is always fighting to displace God and take over His position. He is virtually all over the place, tempting, distracting, and scheming against believers who want to genuinely understand the meaning of their relationship with God. And judging from the look of things in recent times, he appears to be succeeding by the day.

Today, even pastors who would normally be looked upon as the custodians of the nation’s conscience are known to be ritualists who murder their Church members for money rituals. Some sleep with their female Church members who are not their wives. A few years back, an Anglican bishop was suspended from office instead of being de-robed and sacked outright after he confessed to turning the wife of a priest in his diocese into his side chick. The Archbishop suspended him for one year and merely asked the Church to pray for him. After one year, he went back to his bishopric and to his job.

The argument was that first, he was human and subject to human frailty and second, that any man could fall into temptation. The Archbishop was not bothered by the fact that this bishop was sleeping with another man’s wife and more so, the wife of a clergyman under his charge. For him, that appeared inconsequential.

Even the Catholic Church itself is replete with similar stories, like priests raping teenage boys under their care. So, to a great extent, the moral standards of the Church today have been clearly compromised, and it is becoming more and more difficult to trust Church leaders judging from the way evil practices in the Body of Christ are unfolding by the day. Put in a nutshell, the Church seems to have completely lost its moral conscience in almost every conceivable way, and the question is whether it can ever again retrieve its steps and once more become the custodian of the nation’s conscience and one that can be trusted by the people?

Today, there is no form of evil practice that is not happening in the Church. The Church has been turned into a business centre where gullible members of the congregation are cleverly ripped off their meager resources by Church leaders, and they are delighted to see their General Overseers own a fleet of private airplanes while they walk or cycle to Church services every week and pay heavy tithes as obligation to the Church and its ministers.

Even when these priests appear to confront politicians, most of them do so only to curry favour and earn some extra money through their contacts, not that they really care about the welfare of their ‘flock’ much the same way as the politicians don’t care about the welfare of their constituents. And it was at this point that I started to doubt the sincerity of the Church and tried to understand what I was supposed to be doing with myself, staying in an organisation that had clearly lost its bearing and one that had become so fraught with insincerity and a lack of vision and focus.

Many of us who profess religion have a common denominator: we were born into it. We never had an opportunity to study comparative religion to be able to make an informed opinion about what we can possibly believe in or not believe in. And both Christians and Muslims are victims of this predicament. While we were yet children, most of us were indoctrinated by our parents into the religion we practise. We never had a choice.

But today, I have reasons to question some of the doctrines of the religion I practise, because they don’t seem to make sense to me anymore. You take the doctrine of heaven and hell, for instance. Recently, a young woman who spoke so eloquently in a video clip that is still making rounds in the social media, argued that morality, living the good life, loving your neighbour as yourself and all of that cannot get believers into heaven: only the belief that Jesus Christ is the Lord and personal Saviour can lead believers to heaven. And that started me thinking, first about the concept of heaven and hell, and second, about Jesus and his modern followers.

If you ask an educated Christian where heaven is situated in all the known planets of the universe, he will definitely not be able to give you a straightforward answer. Heaven is something conceived in the mind through indoctrination, depicting an abode of painless pleasure where the dead in Christ have repose. And hell, on the other hand, is the opposite side of heaven where trouble makers on earth are sent to burn in an unquenchable furnace, in torture and pain. At least, that is the average understanding of most Christians.

But if you ask me, I would tell you that heaven and hell are in this our world, in this our life. In other words, there is a condition a man would find himself in, surrounded by a good wife, an amiable family, cherished friends, a bubbling business and above all, peace of mind and he feels it, that he is in heaven. And there is a condition a man would find himself in, and no one needs to tell him that he is in hell. So, I choose to be good. I choose to be nice to people. I choose to experience my heaven in this life. I see no reason to believe in the concept of heaven and hell after death. On the contrary, I am minded to believe with some Christian sects that death is like a deep sleep, where the dead can no longer feel anything happening around them. Death is a state of perpetual unconsciousness. And I don’t see how anyone can be judged in that state of “existence”.

Another doctrine that has puzzled me is the concept of Jesus dying for mankind. Like many contemporary religious and political leaders, Jesus obviously had cult followers across the globe. And we know that such followers in many cases would gladly lay down their lives for their principals, if any such need arose. There was the recent case of Leah Sharibu, a teenage Nigerian girl who was abducted along with hundreds of other fellow students from their school in Dapchi in Northern Nigeria. Her Boko Haram captors asked her to renounce her Christianity and declare for Islam for her to be freed from captivity. She refused. It is over three years now, and she still remains in captivity.

In Nigeria, political leaders like Dr. Jonathan, General Buhari, Asiwaju Tinubu and Peter Obi have cult followers who would be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their bosses. Jesus had such followers too. But while these other leaders are not likely to want to die for their followers, Jesus proved differently. He preferred to die for his followers. And that should have marked the difference, especially since he resurrected from death and thereby showed his superiority over death. But while Jesus died for humanity and resurrected, these other political and religious leaders are unwilling to die for their own because they know they won’t be able to resurrect like Jesus. And again, that would have made the difference. That would have distinguished Jesus.

My contention is that if Jesus died in order to reconcile man with God after Adam failed God, according to Bible narratives, why should the Christian doctrine also suggest for adherents to die for Christ? Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?”

If Jesus died for us and if we also die for Jesus, then where lays his superiority and claim of dying to save the world? Would those who died for him not be able to claim that they died in an attempt to ‘save’ his ministry? And beyond that, if Jesus, being one with God, could foresee the future and the plan of God in his life, why would he utter that cry of desperation on the cross, “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”? Someone needs to explain all this.

On a more sober reflection, I have no doubt in my mind that Jesus was a great man. But I tend more to see him as a child prodigy. The history of the world is dotted with narratives of child prodigies who achieved extraordinarily remarkable feats at tender ages. Akrit Jaiswal, an Indian citizen, performed his first surgery when he was just seven. At age 12, he was the youngest student to be admitted into an Indian medical school.

Soborno Isaac Bari was the youngest professor and scientist at nine years of age. In 2018, when he was just 6 years old, he was recognised as a professor by Harvard University. After he won the Child Prodigy Award as a scientist, Mumbai University appointed him as a visiting professor of Physics. He is currently 11 years old, and is of Bengali-American descent.

Born in 1903, in Hungary, John Von Neumann was a polymath, physicist and applied mathematician. He had an exceptional memory. At the age of 6, he could divide eight numbers mentally. At the age of 8, he had mastered the calculus theory. He made immense contributions to quantum theory, game theory, functional analysis, economics, geometry, computers, hydrodynamics, statistics and to many other fields. He authored more than 150 published papers. He died in 1957, at the age of 53.

Shirley Temple was a famous singing and acting prodigy. Born in 1928 in California, she began her film career at the tender age of three. She exhibited exceptional talent in tap dancing and acting when she was five. She received a special Academy Award at the age of seven. She continued her stint further in her life, and reigned as a box-office queen for four consecutive years. Ultimately, she quit movies and joined politics. She died in 2014 at the age of 86.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Kim Ung-Yong, had the highest IQ. Born in 1963, he is a Korean citizen and a linguistic genius. He exhibited fluency in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, English, German, Spanish and Vietnamese at the age of 4. He effortlessly solved complicated calculus problems at the age of 5. His IQ was estimated to be around 210. He secured a Ph.D. in Physics from the Colorado State University before he turned 15 years. He currently works at the Chungbuk National University, South Korea.

Taylor Ramon Wilson, another brilliant genius was born in 1994 in Arkansas, USA. A nuclear physicist, he designed an outstanding nuclear reactor that would need to be refueled only after 3 decades, and that would generate 50 megawatts of power. He is the youngest person in the world to build a working fusor. He has won several awards for his project in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair conducted in San Jose, California, in 2010. At the TED conference of 2013, he shared his ideas regarding underground nuclear fission reactors.

Jacob Barnett was born in 1998, in Indiana, USA. Barnett was diagnosed with autism when he was two. Medical experts said he would never be able to walk or talk normally. He underwent homeschooling and proved his doctors wrong. He became the youngest student to be accepted into the Perimeter Institute, Ontario, for a one-year master’s degree program. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Quantum Physics.

Aelita Andre can be considered as one of the leading child prodigies in the Art world. An Australian citizen, she was born in 2007, and was just two years old when she began painting. Her paintings had a touch of surrealism, and she stunned everyone with her abstract works. The list could go on and on.

Jesus, to my thinking must have belonged to this class of special human beings. He was able to do the things he did because he had the same unction other child prodigies were endowed with in their various degrees. But Jesus was obviously greater than all these other geniuses. And that is why, despite the fact that he was more or less imposed on me by my parents who were unrepentant Christians, I still have clung to him and find his presence in my life very illuminating and inspirational.

I relate to the fact that he is the only one in the entire universe who has three bank holidays to his name. About that one: I know that so many of us cannot achieve even an hour holiday in our names throughout our lives. Many great men and heads of state have not been able to achieve just one day in the year as bank holiday in their names. And if universally achieving three days – Good Friday, Easter and Christmas – does not mean anything to some of us, it may be because they have not learned to look up to successful people as mentors.

The world calendar was changed when Jesus was born, which is why we now have ‘before Christ’ (BC) and ‘After Christ’ (AD). A man whose birth ushered into society a new world calendar must indeed be an important and inspiring man. We look at the songs rendered in his name. So many millions of songs have been renditioned in the name of Jesus, which only compares with those of God. We are left in no doubt about his importance. In the Eastern parts of the world, songs are waxed in the names of extraordinary people who did great exploits. They are remembered and eulogized in songs. But no one has matched, and no one can match, the number of songs that has been renditioned with the name of Jesus.

It is generally said that Jesus never wrote a book but millions of books have been written about him so much so that it is difficult to think of anyone else whose name has been used in writing as many books. Hundreds of universities have been established in his name.

As a writer and a journalist, all these qualities understandably attract me to Jesus. And I think that if the Church will begin to see Christianity more as an agent or tool for social mobilization and engineering, Christians might be more interested in identifying with God, and with Jesus as their Lord and personal Saviour. Jesus would be more real to them, more accessible and better understood.

Truth is that Christianity, more than any other religion has created so many millions of jobs for citizens. From archbishops, to bishops, archdeacons, deacons, pastors and other categories of workers, the Church has been there to help government solve some of its employment challenges. Many thousands or even millions of people have been gainfully employed as song writers and gospel singers and they are making good money, thanks to Christianity.

The Church has also anchored education and technology in the contemporary society. So many Christian educational institutions are known to be doing extremely well academically and in extracurricular activities. In terms of administration in workplaces and social organizations, the Church remains a classical example and one that can, and should, offer ample mentorship to business organizations across the globe.

It has, therefore, become imperative for Church leaders to take a break from their unending campaign for funds. They should begin to reconsider the need to restore their ailing Church. There is a dire need to redirect the focus and the current vision of the Church and its people to a more meaningful, more understanding relationship with God. God will then become more realistic to His worshippers. We cannot fold our hands and watch what is going on as it continues in the Church today. If we do nothing to halt the drift, no one should feign surprise when huge numbers of Christians wake up from their slumber and begin to avoid going to Church because it has nothing genuine to offer them. As a matter of fact, it is already happening.

* Asinugo is a journalist, author and publisher