Group urges church leaders to emphasise salvation message, not prosperity

Religious leaders in the country have been urged to repent and focus more on preaching the good news of salvation and deliverance, rather than the elevation of prosperity message.

A group, Concerned Ministers’ Forum made the called recently at a briefing in Lagos. Addressing journalists, spokesman for the group and president, Abraham Evangelistic Ministries, Bishop Abraham Olaleye who said the brightest revelation of God’s love is embodied in Jesus Christ through the instrumentality of the church, stressed that the severest of warnings must go to it and its leaders in the present scheme of things in the country.

He said the church had woefully failed Nigeria by its careless embrace of purely sensual messaging. According to him, the sickening elevation of prosperity message that has now swallowed up the church in Nigeria is patently ungodly and plays directly into the infernal plans of Satan for the nation, emptying the gospel, along with the church and its leaders, of its real redemptive power, while rousing gullible masses of false worshippers to satanic mental enslavement.

He said: “The church has turned its historic mission upside down, abdicating its sanctifying purpose and sanitising power of its presence, becoming rather the chief accomplice in Nigeria’s unbridled initiation into satanic pursuit of material gains. While an abundant life filled with joy, power and dominion remain happy benefits of a sanctified life, crass emphasis on material pursuits are exactly contrary to the purpose of the gospel.”

He added: “When millions of simple-minded innocents are co-opted en-masse into false and heightened expectation of financial emancipation that is not anchored on inbuilt virtues of hard and honest work, this becomes an evil contagion that raises and nurtures while generations of the lazy and the indolent.”

The cleric who noted that this is not the time for denominational finger pointing but to think soberly, said: “Nigeria is in desperate need of our intercessory prayers, the sanitising power of the true and authentic gospel of Jesus Christ. With prayer and fasting, let us subject our cherished teachings to the penetrating search of the Holy Spirit once again. The greatest priority before God is for the nation to repent and embrace a sound moral value, which is not materialism.”