When Reverend Divorces Reverend

“It is a mighty stroke at any vice to make it the laughing stock of everybody; for men will easily suffer reproof; but they can by no means endure mockery. They will consent to be wicked but not ridiculous.” (Jean Baptiste Poquelinde Moliere, 1622 to 1675).

Moliere, a French playwright, is rated by most critics as the greatest comic dramatist of all time, and usually considered the intellectual equal of literary greats such as William Shakespeare and Sophocles. In Tartuffe, probably Moliere's most important play, the dramatist uses the genius in hypocrisy as a plot device to paint an unmistakable picture of the mind and thinking of a man of honour who wears his integrity on his sleeves. When a man of God proclaims that “To sin in secret is no sin at all”, an epidemic of dishonesty and mistrust is looming, and society must sit up.

As the son of a reverend minister, I am careful whenever I have the most unrewarding duty of writing about a church or the lives of pastors and their wives. I am confronted daily by the sheer humanity of men of God and their very human ways of going about their evangelical and private lives. I have seen my father counsel big pastors and their children out of some very serious domestic affairs. To return the favour, various men of God have intervened in the problems of my father's house, often offering many useful pieces of advice, which still guide and guard my life today.

By now, I should know that men of God and their wives are just as human and vulnerable as the average freethinking couple next door. We may have different horizons but we all live under the same sky, susceptible to the temptations and allures of our world, including divorce. The unpalatable stories we read about our pastors and their families may be sensational, but most of them are also true and sometimes truer than we estimated. Aye, there are men and women of God who fall to the demands of the flesh and commit adultery. Some powerful evangelical preachers have greedily maintained expensive lifestyles at the expense of their usually poor congregation.

Like me, members of Christ Embassy (Believer's Loveworld Inc.), the very progressive charismatic movement with several branches worldwide, would be putting together their most effective PR ammunitions to manage the unfortunate news of the divorce of their founder, Chris Oyakhilome, affectionately called Pastor Chris. For months, the church and the Christian community had lived with rumoursof difficulties in the marriage of the beautiful evangelical couple. The reasons had ranged from one extreme to the other, with sections alleging power play between the couple while others created their own versions of the sensation, accusing the man of God of adultery.

An influential Nigerian newspaper had earlier in the month reported that Pastor Chris's wife, Anita, had served a decree nissi (warning of impending divorce) on the husband, which she had followed with a decree absolute (divorce proper) thereafter, to permanently end their 20 year marriage. Reports have it that the divorce was filed on April 09, 2014 at Divorce Section A, Central Family Court, First Avenue House, High Holborn, London, UK. The couple, it was reported, had been living apart for some time because Mrs. Oyakhilomepastored the London branch while Pastor Chris travelled around the world, preaching the gospel to save souls and inspire a broken generation.

Nobody has the right to pronounce a moral judgment on Pastor Chris and his wife. Tartuffe tells us that “Although I am a pious man, I am not the less a man.” Pastor Chris has reportedly broken his silence on the matter, issuing his own religious dictum: “If you are married to a man of God, it doesn't make you automatically mature. You can make mistakes; you can do something that is wrong. But some people expect the wife of a minister to definitely be at the level of that minister and so they may be looked upon and the expectation may be like that, but it's a positional thing.” He also adds, for biblical emphasis: “If you are a man of God, it doesn't automatically mean that the wife of a man of God is therefore a woman of God. That's not the way it is in the Bible.”

On the role of women in the modern church, Pastor Chris asks, rather poignantly: “Who was Peter's wife, did you ever know her name? You never find that out. Who was John's wife? Did you ever read the name? What about all the other Apostles? How many of their wives are written in the Bible. You never find their names. That's why you don't really find the wives of men of God mentioned in the Bible.”

Pastor Chris also offers a penetrating insight into the spiritual personality of a man of God: “A man of God is not just someone who worships God or preaches God. A man of God is handpicked by God, set on course by God. If you study the scriptures, you will not find one man of God go against God, sinning against God.”

Men of God never sin? We thought it was only Jesus Christ who was above sin; the rest of us have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God (Romans 3:23). Men of God are not God of men, and many mature preachers are quick to make that distinction. When my favourite preacher, Jamal Harrison Bryant of the Empowerment Temple in Baltimore committed adultery, he called it sin against God. He won back his church because he was open and honest about his fallibility, even as a man of God. He blamed the sin of adultery on his weakness for the flesh, not on the devil. Tartuffe calls it 'scruples'. When our humanity confronts us while doing God's work,we shouldbe human enough to confront our own scruples and leave divinity to God and his SonYeshua.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
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