Archbishop in Nigeria Decries Rise in Prosperity Gospel, Proposes Comprehensive Catechesis to Deepen Evangelization

Archbishop Akubeze said some missionaries do what will bring more people to the Church regardless of the morality behind it. He said the missionaries “preach the gospel of prosperity that will bring people to the Church focusing on instant miracles to the people so that the Church would be full.”

He added during the one-day event that the Evangelization commission of the province organized, “My thrust is comprehensive catechesis of the faithful, priests and lay faithful. We must redefine the parameters of evaluating successful evangelization.”

“As much as we need structures, the most important focus should be on building people,” he said, adding, “Europe is showing us that if you focus too much on building structures, you may end up having churches as tourists’ centers rather than places of worship.”

Archbishop Akubeze said that the preachers should be catechized to understand that praise should only be given to Jesus Christ who is the owner of the vineyard in which they are called to work as missionaries.

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“We must never forget that it is not our vineyard. The Church is not our church, and the mission is not our mission, but that of Christ,” he said, adding, “The first principle to guide us in any missionary work is to know the owner of the vineyard and to have a good relationship with the owner of the Church.”

In his address, the 67-year-old Archbishop who has been at the helm of the Benin City Archdiocese since April 2011 said that Nigeria is also being confronted with syncretism and ethnicity.

He said that what is good in the Nigerian culture is yet to be effectively filtered to merge with the Christian faith.

“We have moved from the time of the foreign missionaries, where there was little or no understanding of our culture and there was a complete repudiation of our way of life,” Archbishop Akubeze said during the one-day event.

He continued, “To become Christian, we had to pick Western names that are saints, and our local names were not allowed. It was as if no Nigerian existed in heaven before the missionaries came.”

The Nigerian Archbishop found it unfortunate that some Priests insist on names with Western roots before baptism adding that they end up refusing names with cultural dimensions or meaning, a situation he said had made some people view Christianity as a foreign religion.

He said Christianity is seen as “the white man’s religion,” adding, “This mentality is not good for evangelization. We must never equate Christianity founded by Christ with any single culture. The incarnation has brought the gospel to every culture.”

The Archbishop said that the belief in traditional lifestyles; like second burial, the ritual for widows, and some other cultural practices in the country need to be reviewed.

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“These are areas that need to be evangelized. To still stick to the ritual of marriage given to us from the Western culture is quite troubling to me after more than two centuries of Christianity in Nigeria,” he said.

Silas Mwale Isenjia is a Kenyan journalist with a great zeal and interest for Catholic Church related communication. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics, Media and Communication from Moi University in Kenya. Silas has vast experience in the Media production industry. He currently works as a Journalist for ACI Africa.