“By Faith, this is the last rent I am paying as a single lady. If you support me to pay this rent, by the grace of God, this time next year, I will be in my husband’s house.” is back begging for support to pay another rent. Not because God didn’t bring eligible suitors her way, but because her PASTOR has replaced the Holy Spirit in her life. Pastors ruin a lot of destinies when they insist on playing God instead of their primary role as destiny guides. Many members have submitted their free will to their pastors, giving their pastors the power that God himself didn’t take from us from the dawn of creation. When you take the ability of the individual to act as a free agent in the name of religion, you reduce him or her to a puppet and yourself to a puppeteer. You want to pull the strings of the lives of thousands of born-again Christians at the same time while rendering them useless to follow their paths in Christ and grow into mature sons.

I was at a Church in Anthony village about three years ago to minister, and I met this young man who was schooled at a very prestigious university in the USA. He was the in-house IT consultant of the church, and the pastor placed him on a monthly stipend while he was working for God. It was the Pastor who introduced the young man to me while boasting that God had given him the most capable hands to help him in ministry. I asked him if he had any Python, Java, cloud engineering, data management, digital marketing, coding, or similar tasks available for the young man in the church. He said no. I said, “You are giving this young man the job that any young school leaver who is proficient in computer appreciation can do, and you don’t see it as limiting his capabilities and rendering his skills obsolete?” You would rather boast that you are ruining a destiny to build up your own profile rather than set this young man on the path of excellence? Did God call him into ministry as a preacher? Is he understudying you in preparation for his own ministry? The pastor said, “No, I plan that as the church expands, he will head our digital infrastructure and position us for the future.” I said, “He can do that as a consultant or even as a member, he shouldn’t be doing that while you are paying him 100,000 Naira a month. He should be out there, flying with his peers and earning in dollars! The only exception is if the Lord has called him to be a preacher and he is understudying you as your personal assistant, as led by the Lord as part of his season of preparation. Anything other than that is injurious to his destiny!” The pastor had never seen it that way.

When I was done ministering in the church, the young man hugged me and thanked me profusely. He said his mother sent him to the pastor when he returned from the USA and the pastor immediately told him that God had need of him in the ministry or he would die without fulfilling his purpose. Why do pastors do this?

I have another case from the Northern part of Nigeria. A young lady reached out to me seeking clarity regarding her future. She said her Apostle told her she has been raised by God to sing in his church choir, but she is a medical doctor by training and desires to further her studies abroad .Every time she raised the issue with the Apostle, he shuts her down and tells her she was struggling with the will of God “Why can’t you just submit to God and serve in the choir and watch as God will take your voice all over the world as this ministry grows?” The young lady said she knows she has a good voice and sings very well as one who is full of the Holy Spirit, but she does not want to be “Sinach”, she wants to fulfil her dream of practising as a Pediatrician. She was wary of incurring the wrath and curse of the Apostle, however, and did not know how to extricate herself from the situation. The apostle did not see anything wrong with his actions because he was a user of people who believed that in order to fulfill his own desire to become a big ministry, others could not thrive and grow in their visions and ministries as ordained by God. This is witchcraft. It is not of God. Jesus didn’t lead his disciples this way.

Insecurity is the undoing of many African so-called Pastors and Spiritual leaders, and they hide behind the illusion of divinity to put others in bondage. I experienced this firsthand as a young graduate, so I understand how a pastor trying to build his ministry could see the potential in a young man or woman and try very hard to turn such a person into servants and house helps in the name of discipling them or training them for kingdom relevance .You graduate from the University and join the labour force, you apply for many jobs, and at a point, you tell yourself it is important to seek supernatural guidance in your quest to fulfil destiny ,somebody somewhere tells you about a church or a ministry, you join, and you are convinced the church is good. You also tell your friends, and they join. But you are all fresh graduates who are heading into the future one way or the other, but this pastor wants you to be his flock. To him, his church of ten members had suddenly become a church of 30 members because of you guys, and he wants to keep the numbers growing, so he begins to give you prophesies that were not of God but with the aim of keeping you in the fold for as long as possible. He told young graduates who ought to go for NYSC that God is telling him they should give it up for service to God in the vineyard. The mother of two of the ladies in the fellowship, whose daughters told that the pastor told them not to go for NYSC, quickly removed them from the fellowship before the seed of corruption being planted by this pastor would bear fruit. The others also left as soon as they could gather their wit.

People who you ought to guide on their path in sincerity ran as far as they could from you based on how you chose to manipulate rather than nurture them. A married woman whose husband worked abroad was a trained secretary, and while her husband was abroad, catering to the needs of the family, he begged her to stop working so that she could focus on raising the children. She was raising five children all by herself, and combining this with a job seemed a bit too much at the time. One of the vital institutions for raising godly children was the church. This woman attended church regularly with her children and even volunteered to spend any free time she had typing the pastor’s sermons, Sunday School pamphlets, handouts, books, journals, and other church reports and documents. She was not officially employed to do the work; she just saw that she could take some of the secretarial duties on during her downtime, and she did so with all sincerity. The church enjoyed her free services for five years until the pastor forgot completely that she was doing the church a favour .One day, the woman came to church to tell the pastor that her husband would be returning home to visit the family, and she would not be available for a few days because she had to pick her husband up from the airport and ensure that he settled in properly. Unfortunately, that weekend was the weekend of the church’s anniversary, and the pastor had a lot of secretarial work to do. He told the woman God said she should pick one. Heaven or marriage. He said if she goes to pick her husband from the airport, she has chosen the world and forsaken the Lord. The woman wept all the way home, It was not the thank you, thou faithful servant report she had worked day and night for many years to get that she received. She went to pick her husband from the airport and distanced herself from any church founded by any individual after that experience. She said the ambition of church founders requires that they use people to build, even though they lacked the resources to pay or compensate such people, so they resort to blackmail, coercion, lies, fake prophesies, promises, and manipulations to get things done while keeping their followers on a leash.

Followers are also enablers as they refuse to read the Bible for themselves and walk in the light of the word of God. No one should be able to take you captive in the name of God, Jesus, all the angels, or any form of miracle if you know the word of God. The word of God is profitable to make one wise, and therefore, anyone who knows the word of God cannot fall victim to any false doctrine, teaching, spiritual manipulations, or lies. All the false teachings of someone being a covering for someone else came from these manipulative narratives, and believers should be wise to them. I have seen a pastor declare that his church is the only church in Africa that is licensed by God to take people to heaven, and some members believed him. The day he said that, all his members ought to laugh, pick up their Bibles, and leave without looking back. Self-aggrandisement has become the order of the day in some churches, the pastor sells himself as the be-all and end-all of the member’s spiritual enlightenment, and the members sheepishly surrender their eyes of their understanding to him or her. He or she must determine where they work, whom they marry, who they associate with, whose music they must listen to, and whose sermons they must hear. If they want to travel, he must see if the road is clear on their behalf, if they want to build a house, he must approve, if he does not dedicate their baby, the baby is illegitimate. This is not the faith Christ or the Apostles died for. Jesus died that you might be free of religion. Christianity is not a religion, it is the opposite. It is individualistic and determined by the faith and belief system of the one rather than the many. Salvation, therefore, is a personal affair, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit is also a personal affair Religion is the opium of the masses, and Christianity is the salvation of the individual and his or her walk with God. When we fellowship together, we do so not so we can get brainwashed by one “super Christian” but so that we can minister to the Lord and minister to one another in the presence of God. Every believer must hold this truth to be self-evident.

PS: Someone sent me the video of a pastor condemning a song recently released by a fellow believer, which is making a global impact. The Pastor represents an old school of Christians who are unfit to be custodians of the gospel due to their rigidity and limited understanding of the finished work of Christ. Disciples of the Gospel of Works and Performance lack creativity and discernment but are good stewards of rigidity and religious doctrines. In other words, a Pharisee must act like one, and Jesus must act like Jesus. We are all just being true to our nature. “I can never go back o No…No It’s already too late o No…No Where Am I going to… No…No” If you read to this point, when I was in Spain, I asked a very important question about a meal. If you know the answer, I’m inside the comment section.
-GSW-