Church Crusades

By Farmer Al Akhigbe

There was a time in Africa that holding massive crusade was the order of the day. Any church that is a church must organise outdoor crusades.

Everywhere you go, anywhere you turn, whatever media you tuned to, it was one church crusade after another. Banners were tied to anything that stands, in every corner of the street, road and premises. Posters were pasted on houses, trees and everything that is visible.

Evangelists, Pastors and Prophets came from Europe, USA, Asia, etc, to hold massive crusades to heal people of all manner of diseases and raise the dead. People never doubted, never verified. They just believed.

If there were any iota of doubt, people would have found out that those gods of men have no records of raising the dead or healing the sick in their countries. Africa being Africa, anything goes. The white man can sell his excreta to the black man as icecream. So, they used the same black people to stage-manage healings and raising of the dead. It ushered in an era of church boom. Those foreign missionaries propagated the staging of miracles and the indigenous pastors took it to another level.

Then came the period when technology made serious incursions into Africa. With internet and GSM, people could record, document and disseminate information at a go. The crusaders became threatened. A certain unfavourable wind was blowing feathers off the chicken’s anus. People could snap photographs of those that claimed healing and those  that were raised from the dead. That was dangerous, because such could be used for investigation and verification purposes.

And truly, people started cracking the codes and demystifying the gods of men with pictures and video proofs. They discovered that the “sick” and the “dead” were usually “arrangees” for healings and miracles.

That was how crusades began to cast. The smart crusaders took the show off public spaces and into their controlled church environment or healing school or whatever. Those that weren’t so smart tried to overdo to make their tricks look real. By so doing, some miracle contractors died in the process.

There was a case of one popular Pastor in Abuja that his miracle contractor died of suffocation in a coffin. The wife raised an alarm on hearing the mishap, but the pastorpreneur was a businessman with experience in shenanigans.

That’s why when I hear people challenge Pastors to go to hospitals or isolation centres to heal the sick, I laugh in Esan. They don’t understand the game. Do they really believe those pastors actually healed the sick and raised dead people? I laugh again.

I have seen, first hand, many people died during such crusades. They were the real sick people whose families gullibly believed in the healing powers of the Pastors and went to pull them out from hospital beds to the crusade grounds.

Of course, the cameras will never show that to the sheeple. They will only show what they want the sheeple to see – the ones who were not sick or had little ailments that were staged in wheelchairs for healing. Haven’t you ever thought about it, how every sick Nigerian had wheelchair in those crusades? Do you know how much a wheelchair costs?

Okay, now that almost everyone can make a video, which had made them Pastors panicked and ran away from crusading, where are the people on wheelchairs? Have the Pastors eradicated sickness and diseases in Africa?

Don’t tell me it’s coronavirus that stopped them. They stopped long before coro came. And if you say they have eradicated diseases, let them eradicate coro instead of trying to eradicate 5G network technology.

(c) Al Akhigbe 2021