Render unto Caesar...!

“And typical Apostle General (for l am familiar with his flamboyant disposition) came out fighting for his reputation upon being reminded by the tax people of their share in the 1 million dollars ─ monies that you and I can only hear being bandied about in a staggering manner, but may never see or even dream about in our lifetime!”

So the Pastor's daughter gripped the headlines with her ostentatious wedding a couple of weeks ago.

What was designed to be a celebration of holy matrimony was rather successful in attracting gossipy condemnation by the rank and file of society of the church’s ostentation and insane financial exaggerations.

Would you consider a pastor’s corpulent parting gift of 1 million dollars to his daughter a manifestation of parental love or an abuse of it, in plain terms? Break the money down in local Ghanaian currency and you would understand that the opulence may not be in the interest of the young couple after all.

Why announce such a hefty cash donation to the world? Won’t this overhyped declaration attract unnecessary attention to the young couple by good and bad people alike? Young couples need quietness and serenity and to begin their marital experimentation. I say all these public declaration and boasting and opulence is pure negativity for the young couple.

For those of us who only admire dollars from afar, and Euros from our desert places, this 1 million dummy dash is an incredible wonder. We know God is rich, but not even David in all his pomp and pageantry credited the accounts of Bathsheba with such a bewilderment!

So as the news gripped the headlines, many Christians, embarrassed by such unbridled bragging, resorted to discussing the disaster resignedly in their bedrooms ─ questioning the level of financial intoxication (the Spirit of mammon) that has gripped the Holy Church of Christ!

But the most embarrassing disbelief was the rapid justification of the gift by the head pastor. And typical Apostle General (for l am familiar with his flamboyant disposition) came out fighting for his reputation upon being reminded by the tax people of their share in the 1 million dollars ─ monies that you and I can only hear being bandied about in a staggering manner, but may never see or even dream about in our lifetime!”

He said the check was only a dummy, the cash was not real, it was not fake either, a mere act of faith, in anticipation of 1 million dollar bumper harvest in future! Too good to be true, for what is bent cannot be straightened. Let’s call spade a spade. The Pastor's intervention was a public relations disaster.

Is it by coincidence that the 1 million dollars insurance package commenced with the wedding of the Pastor's daughter? Is the reverend minister saying that those who tied the knot in his church before his daughter's grandiose wedding did not qualify for the beautiful investment?

It is also strange the pastor failed to disclose to the congregation at the wedding that the check was only a dummy, an act of faith waiting to happen in future until the intervention of the Zacchaeus tax syndicate. Was he justified to keep such an important information from the wedding guests?

And yet, the name on the cheque is the newly wedded couple. Was he being false to this young innocent couple on their most memorable day? Anyway, granted that we believe the Apostle General’s dummy-money-faith-story, why did he not write a dummy cheque (also by faith) the same faith by which he wrote the first dummy to the revenue people?

That would have been the perfect, holy treatment of the matter. But to come out fighting for his name while keeping the old cheque in its old name, and refusing the revenue people their fair share of the dummy cheque is, to my mind is illegitimate.

“Give unto God, what is God’s, and unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar.” The Apostle General must answer to Caeser!