Utumishi Blog

Part 1

Oral Roberts continues:

Let us be honest here. As long as we live on earth, it is a material world. This is not heaven. Here people need to eat three meals a day, change clothes and shoes, get education, a home to live in and means of transport to move around. Whereas those who have gotten all that are the very ones who glorify poverty…it is not hypocrisy? All these things are in the world and for this life on earth. Don’t deceive others. You can only use them here because you only need them here that is why God placed them here. I am a preacher of a different kind because whereas I am not a prosperity preacher but I am realistic and love sound doctrine not biased.

It’s good to love sound doctrine and seek truth. It’s good to recognise where we’re coming from – the privilege I have and all of us reading this have in terms of education and access and time to do anything more than scraping a living. It’s good to be honest and realistic. It’s good to think through what difference the gospel makes to the mother in the informal settlement with six children and no idea where the next meal is coming from. This is tough stuff. Help me guys. But here are a few initial thoughts:

1. Indeed this is not heaven. In fact that is the big problem with prosperity preaching – promising the things of the New Creation now – release from suffering, hunger, tears, injustice. But what about life now? What good is the gospel for the day to day realities of living now as we wait for the return of Christ? Can we promise people three meals a day, education, home, transport? I’m sorry but I don’t think we can. What can we say then? Well three things come to mind: (a) The gospel should compel us to ‘remember the poor’ (Gal. 2:10) and especially fellow brothers and sisters in Christ (1 John 3:11-18 etc.) and especially those who are really vulnerable, incapable of supporting themselves and without family support (e.g. 1 Tim. 5:3-16). It must be thoughtfully and carefully done but it can and should be done and this practical love and community and interdependence is part of the answer. (b) The gospel can transform people from dependency to generosity. I remember a Zimbabwean pastor calling Ephesians 4:28 ‘God’s solution to poverty’. Maybe that’s saying a bit too much but it’s certainly part of the picture. In a Greek culture where working with your hands was despised and everyone wanted a desk job (much like today really) Paul encouraged thieves (yes there were thieves in the church) to do business, hustle, tarmac, work hard and make money so they can not only support themselves but others (and Paul was saying no more than he did himself – Acts 20:33-35). (c) While there are not total promises of total provision every day, there are wonderful passages talking about the character of God and calling on us to trust him (not trust him for… but trust him) every day – calling out for what we need (Matt. 6:11), trusting that he is the good, intimately concerned, listening, giving Father (Matt. 6:25-11), trust that because of the Cross he is with us and for us through all the mess (Rom. 8:28-39) and that he will give sufficient grace to carry us through each day (2 Cor. 12:9). For more on this see the brilliant free workbook When I Am Afraid by Edward T Welch (esp. Week 3).
2. Is it not hypocrisy? To have the stuff and then tell others God doesn’t promise it. Well maybe… but consider the following: (a) most prosperity preaching originates in the hugely wealthy US (see the Piper video below) and arrives in East Africa either directly through cable/satellite TV or via Nigeria where it is Africanised for even more potency (see Conrad Mbewe on this). Since the effect of the prosperity gospel is most often to make the poor poorer and only the pastor richer (see Femi Adeleye’s video below) you could (if you wanted to be a conspiracy theorist) argue that the prosperity gospel is a Western plot to impoverish the rest of the world. (b) The minority of US pastors who are very vocal against the prosperity gospel are by no means the ones who live lavish lifestyles of pampered comfort. John Piper for example drives a $5000 car (KES 435k), earns no royalties from his many books, has been open and public about his financial affairs (detailed here), and is no stranger to suffering having gone through prostate cancer in 2006 (read the brilliant Don’t Waste Your Cancer). (c) Most importantly, an increasing number of Africans are writing strong biblical arguments against the false promises of the prosperity gospel: Conrad Mbewe (Zambia), Ken Mbugua & Michael Otieno (Kenya), Determine Dusabumuremyi (Rwanda), Femi Adeleye (Nigerian based in Ghana), Rodgers Atwebembeire (Uganda), J Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu (Ghana) and many others.
3. Yes God has provided material things for us in this material world. Christianity is in one sense a very materialistic religion – certainly when compared with Eastern philosophy – it has a solid doctrine of Creation, incarnation, the suffering of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the future hope of a physical New Creation. We are not advocating asceticism (1 Tim. 4:1-5) or denying that we need to handle and use and make and be wise with money. In fact it is the prosperity gospel that teaches a super-spiritualism which says that everything is answered with prayer and fasting. It is prosperity gospel that teaches us to live in unreality and to deny the real world of suffering, pain, unanswered desires. Truly biblical religion is about getting real.
4. But does all this talk of prosperity gospel have anything to do with what Oral Roberts is talking about – just encouraging people that God doesn’t want them to be poor, giving people hope that God will give them the basics of food and clothing and a house and education and transport? He’s not talking about a wild prosperity gospel of miracle oil and sowing a seed to get a BMW. This is more motivational speaking and encouragement than full on prosperity gospel. But I fear that this ‘mild’ form of prosperity preaching is simply a bit further up the slippery slope from the ‘strong’ version. Both the mild and the strong offer what are (I’m sorry to say) false promises and both tend to be man-centred. The danger is that the worst excesses of the most crass prosperity gospel mongers play the rest of us onside and a more subtle form of the same thing slips in the backdoor.