Get up for 100,000 Naira blessing

A window on Nigeria

A few friends have just returned from Nigeria and you can imagine I am all ears to lap up every detail of their experiences in God’s Own Country.

This is quite important because in preparing to visit the country in the not too distant future – readers better not get too excited at the use of a relative measurement of time.

They all had stories of places they had been to and what they had seen, however, this one episode stuck with me.

My friends had gone to worship in a church where the harvest was taking place – you tell me how many people are really farmers able to bring in a genuine harvest to the church – anyway, it is a calendar event in the church and time for show (Display of wealth, might and influence.).

It transpired that after the offerings and gifts were made, the priest asked for those who had made a NGN 100,000 contribution to get up for a blessing of the equivalent sum.

I did not ask if this segmented blessing exercise went down to the widow’s mite, but much as it would have filled the moneyed with pride, it would have also filled the less so affluent with shame leading to vacuous prayers like asking to be able to do better than the other.

This unfortunately represents another area where the quest for filthy lucre and the love of money has brought evil into the church, blessings cannot flow from such exercises and like Jesus said – They already have their reward.