Dr. Francis Bola Akin-John is the Founder of Int’l Church Growth Ministries, a Christian organ popular for its attack against spiritual and leadership malpractices within the Christendom. Besides, the organisation prides itself as a ministry that is committed to the health and well-being of the body of Christ.


In this interview with Segun Otokiti, Akin-John gives the reasons the Church is falling morally and spiritually in spite of upsurge in number, and why the Christian leadership is failing in bringing solution to the problem, among others. Excerpts:

How will you assess the Church in Nigeria today?
There’s a lot of errors that we noticed in the Church. All the while we agree that the Church did not have a good image, at least, since the last 30 years. Though there has been numerical growth but there is a poor spiritual growth and depth in the Nigerian Church, and from our own obersavation we noticed that it is the quality of the ministers that resulted to that. When christianity was solid in the 60’s, and 70’s and part of the early 80’s, we don’t hear much news about scandals, financial troubles, corruptions in the Church. But when every Dick and Harry starts becoming a pastor, you see a lot of things happening. So now, our own unique way of addressing it is number one; we produce a lot of books, I’ve writing more than 40 books on that and this will address this kind of issue. Number two is that we hold a conference every third week of February called the interdenominational Church renewal conference, then we focused on issue that has to do with the Church. We can pick a subject to bring pastors together and we talk to ourselves very frankly in an open way. Then August, we’ll focus on the leader, those who lead the Church; their life styles, their manners, their visions and all that. So this coming August, that’s what we want to focus on.

How different is this year renewal conference going to be to previous ones?
This year is unique in the sense that we don’t want Churches to die young again in Nigeria. I can mention names but I don’t want to, but you people know them. Then we want to reduce the incidence of all these corruptions, crises, scandals; especially regarding money and women. That is too rampant in the Church. It’s a section on its own that we want to address, we tag it ‘great men and sexual crisis in the ministry’. So we want to address those issues, not from the angle of criticizing and condemning but from the angle of restoration and renewal, and providing a way out so that we can minimize it to the bearest minimum in the Church. We understand too that even in the world there is a problem of people coming to the Church; even in America you see scandals everywhere and it’s happening here. The only difference between here and America is that in America there is freedom of information but here there is an African proverb that says ‘you don’t talk about the things of rich men, you cover it.’ So, our goal here is that we want to keep the Church pure, we want to take the Church back to the Bible and that pastors and preachers should see that this is the way they should run the Church and not to imbibe the modern way Bible interpretation.

Can the Church be transformed or purified in isolation of the society. Don’t you think the Church is the product of the society?
The Church is the one that will change the society and not the one to conform to the society. The basic reason God put the society in the world is for the Church to transform it, but unfortunately today we see the opposite. So the Church can change the society when you can really start from changing the leaders; let the leaders be leaders after God’s heart; let the leaders be leaders that are truly transformed and believe and live by the Bible they are using it in preaching. If they can do that, then gradually and one by one, not by military or any revolution, the Church will be transformed. Now if you are in Nigeria in the 60’s and 70’s, you will see that the Church really transformed the nation. By then companies were come to the Church to recruit workers because of the moral quality Church members were made of. But they can’t do that today because most of the people who profess Christianity and are members of staff of companies, are the ones running the companies down. Today we don’t talk about stealing, we don’t talk about what kind of work members can do or cannot do in the Church. In a nutshell, lives are not being transformed in the Church and you don’t blame the Church per se on that, you blame the leaders of the Church because when the leader is not transformed, members cannot be better off. There is a popular saying that you can’t give what you don’t have. But if the leaders are transformed, definitely it will affect the Church. When Jesus came he didn’t call for military revolution but he picked some few men and make sure they spent time with him. Once those men were transformed, it was those men that bring transformation to the society. So the same thing is what we are following till today.

You just said now that you are going to transform the Church; not through condemnation but by subtle condemnation, is that not covering the sin of the Church or its leaders?
I don’t agree with that because that is not what I meant.

What is wrong in condemning the acts of pastors for purpose of correction since we want to believe that restitution means public renouncement of sins that one has committed? Now what is wrong with the question?
There is nothing wrong in the way you have put it, but when I said not by condemnation, what I meant was that not by being an arm-chair critic or criticizing for criticism sake. What I mean is that we will tell you the act, show you what the bible says and tell you steps to take. Of course if you don’t repent you can never receive mercy, because be believe in the Bible passage ‘he that covereth his sins will not prosper’ that you quoted. For he that confesses and forsakes it shall have mercy, we believe in that. What I mean is that much as we are going to condemn we are not going to bow down to critics that just like to carry rumour when there is nothing, and we are not going to condemn you because of evil you have committed just for talking sake but we want to say ‘this is bad, this is what the Church has been doing, if you repent and forsake it, God can forgive you, revive you, renew you and have mercy on you.’ That’s the balance we want to bring.

Is there a particular standard for measuring which Church is doing what’s biblical or having a right doctrine?
Unfortunately there is none. It’s a case of every man to his own interpretation, which is one of the major minus of the Church here. I believe a time will come that sincere, genuine and godly Church leaders will come together to decide a general standard. Unfortunately that’s what PFN suppose to be doing, that’s what CAN suppose to be doing, but they are found wanting. Today anybody can rise up and say I’m a pastor and start preaching arrant nonsense, and in the name of maturity we all keep quiet. Nobody wants to say anything or comment and the name of Christ is being drag in the mud and the image of the Church is being destroyed. So I believe a time will come that some certain men of God will come up to decide a Bible standard which Church leaders should operate under.

You are often accused of being too critical of fellow men of God. Some of them feel that some of the problems of the Church you expose should have been addressed in-house and that by talking so much on them, you are exposing some of the Churches to attack. What is your reaction to this. Are there really problems in the Church, why is it you don’t as much talk about the good side of the Church as the negative side?
I’m not reacting but I want to answer. Most of these problems are public knowledge. For example, pastor who slept with a member, pastor who embezzled Church’s money, pastor who is involved in occultism, are of public knowledge. So, if I come up and say call a spade a spade, address the issue squarely that the Church is doing wrong, what is bad in that?, For God sake this is not what God says the Church should be doing. To me, I don’t think I’m arming the public against the Church, I believe I’m speaking the truth and the Church should see that at least somebody is speaking out, somebody is crying. I believe my ministry is the ministry of Isaiah 58, verse 1-2; ‘Cry aloud and spare not, ’ What about a pastor who went on air and start saying a lot of nasty things that are in public domain about all of us for the media to feed on. For God sake we can use the media to correct. Most of my writings, I do to inform the public. For example, some couple of days back, the British Prime Minister came to Nigeria and said that the Nigeria populace should hold their government responsible and accountable. I believe the public also should hold the Church responsible and accountable. To me I am convinced that Nigerian Christians are the most gullible Christian faithful in the whole world. They believe anything, and once the pastor say that the Lord said this, they believed; they don’t question, they don’t look at the Bible, they don’t want those pastors to be accountable to the Bible they profess to be using. Therefore, one of my goals is to arm the Christians; that they shouldn’t believe everything the pastor preaches, because the Bible says so. If you read Acts 17, it says those Christians, once they hear the words, should as well go back and search the scripture whether those things are true. Until the Nigerian Church and Christians understand that they should go to that level, we would all be falling prey of all the antics of those preachers. Imagine a prophet that comes up and said to a woman that the Lord said I should deliver your private part, that there’s a demon there, and a married woman subjecting herself to such prophesy and the so-called prophet impregnated her. Even if there’s a demon there, can’t the so-called man of God lay hands on her and be well? Must he sleep with her by force, just by telling her ‘that the Lord said’. That is the truth of what’s happening in the country. So I believe we should speak up on these things, we should not hide them. And if you check your Bible very well, God did not hide the truth from us. When Noah was doing good, the Bible recorded it, when he fell into sin, the Bible recorded it. When Abraham was doing good, the Bible recorded it and when he told a lie, the Bible did not keep silent. The same thing with Job, Moses, Samson and David; and throughout the scriptures, leaders are very crucial to God and their sins have impact on others. So, if they are doing it publicly, they should be exposed. The next thing is that they should repent. Of course we say good things about them and what the Church is doing, we appreciate and acknowledge it. It has not all been a bad or negative story.

These days, one of the measure of success of the Church seems to be the creation of universities, and a number of Churches have them, what do you think about this?
Yale University, Harvard University started as private schools, but gradually they digressed. What I’m saying is this, Churches that start universities should have come out from the onset that it is a pure business venture. They shouldn’t be deceiving the public that it is a mission school, because by saying it is a mission school, the idea is that the fees will be lower and it is going to be social responsibility institution. But all of us have seen that that is not the thing. For God sake, it is the money collected from the poor of the Church that were used to start these universities. There was a time the House of Representatives during Obasanjo’s tenure was trying to say the Church should pay tax, because one of the popular Church leaders granted an interview and said that all the money they used in starting the private universities were from the Church. The Reps picked on that and said the Church has a lot of money and they should pay tax. Now the money was taken from the Church and the children of those who gave the money cannot go to the universities and we say the Church is here to transform the world. The Church can of course go into education, my contention is that if the Church is going to get involved in it it should be as a social responsibilty. If not so, there is always this tendency of deviation. It’s a capital intensive venture and it operates in a social and secular world, and especially in a Nigeria setting, where you can,t say it is a Christian university since they don’t teach the Bible; Nigeria University Commission (NUC) will never allow that. If you are going to teach Bible, you will teach Islam, you will teach African Traditional religion, and they don’t want that and they banished the Bible out of it. Imagine God’s money not being use to teach God’s word. Go and ask all those Pentecostal and charismatic Churches that have universities of how much of the gospel they have preached in the last five to seven years? Most of the money that is meant to take care of the widows, orphans, the down-trodden through the gospel have been diverted to make that university world-class. To me, it is the gospel that will suffer and the gospel is suffering. There are many young pastors who God has called to mission fields in rural areas, that the Church can give a little support to, to do a better job, but monies to empower them were diverted to structures and universities. My contention is that the Church should be primarily and fundamentally concen itself with building the kingdom of God. Education and social mandates should be secondary. Building the kingdom and bringing people to Christ, changing society for better is the primary mandate of the Church and anybody who’s a minister of God and forsakes that mandate will be forsaken by Him. (Nigerian Compass)


http://www.transparencyng.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5005%3Anigerian-christians-are-the-most-gullible-in-the-world-dr-akin-john&catid=147%3Areligion&Itemid=131

I guess it takes one conman to know others. It always amuses me when one pastor (or whatever they call themselves) accuses his fellow conmen of immorality and so on.
You almost get the impression of the pot calling the kettle black.
As for Nigerians being the most gullible in the world, he should know. Afterall, he is one of the parasites feeding on the gullibility of those who are foolish enough to listen to the inanities that sprout from his lips.