I want to reluctantly chook my mouth inside this RCCG City of David brouhaha. Herbert Wigwe, a prominent billionaire member of the Church dies along with his wife and first son in a helicopter crash. Their bodies are still in the morgue, and their spiritual mother, Pastor Siju Iluyomade, decides to go ahead with her lavish 60th birthday celebration where guests were treated to good music by bare chested crooner, Flavor. And many people are criticizing our mummy in the Lord, saying she should have cancelled or postponed the diamond jubilee gala.
I have two observations to make. First is that, birthdays may have become associated with churches now, but they are neither biblical nor part of noble christian practices. There are five mentions of the word ‘birthday’ in the Christian Bible and nothing good was associated with any of them. In fact, all the five mentions were rather associated with disasters.
A heathen King Pharaoh was the first to celebrate his birthday in the Bible account in Genesis 40:20. That was the day he made a big feast and also beheaded his chief butler, hung his body on a tree so his flesh would be eaten by birds.
King Herod’s birthday was the second mentioned in the Bible in Matthew 14:6 and Mark 6:21. Remember Herod was the King who, in his bid to kill Jesus, ordered that all children under two years who lived near Bethlehem, should be killed? It was on his birthday feast that he also beheaded John the Baptist and handed his head to his daughter on a platter.
The third mention of birthday in the Bible is in Job 1:4 (NIV). Job’s children were celebrating their birthday with lots of fun, “eating and drinking wine” in their elder brother’s house, when someone ran to their father to inform him that a whirl wind came to destroy everything and killed all their animals including Job’s children, and he was the only one who escaped to bring the bad news to Job.
The fourth mention of birthday in the Bible is in Job 3:1-11, where Job cursed the day he was born. While the fifth and final mention is in Jeremiah 20:14-15, where Prophet Jeremiah also cursed the day he was born.
So birthdays are not solemn or Biblical assemblies and do not represent the practices that should be deemed Christian. This is not to say that the celebration of birthdays is a bad thing. I am simply saying, it has no place in recommended Bible practices. So try and remove the Pastor and Spiritual Mummy toga from Siju, and see her as a normal human being who invited her favorite musician to come and serenade her affluent guests.
My second observation is that, up till now, we are still finding it intolerable to accept the self evident truth that, CHURCH is a business and members are clients and investors. Majority of the people who attend Church are still living under the illusion that those bricks and mortar venues are places of worship. Even the Bible itself says in the Acts of Apostles 7:48 that: “Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet.”
That’s probably why the symbolic images of the crucifix have all been replaced with the large format posters and bill boards of the owners of those business centers. The branch pastors are franchisees and they remit agreed returns to their head offices. They access bank loans in billions now to invest in the Kingdom Business with a view to making profits and repaying the commercial loans. So that person you are calling your spiritual father or mother, may just be seeing you as a client or an investor and that’s where it ends.
If you are still around and business is good with you, you can be pampered and called anything that sounds good in your ears. Ask even the banks how they pamper their high end investors. But once you are absent from the picture for a moment, just like Access Bank, quickly accessed a new captain for their ship, your partners in the Kingdom Business are not different.
So stop blaming Pastor Siju and be jolted to reality. If you know how quickly the world forgets, you will reevaluate your relationships.
