Eliphas Mill-Jam 

The topic of Godliness is not a new one in Africa and in our beloved country. Journeying through the pages of centuries, even before Christianity came through the missionaries, our ancestors practised worshipping of kinds. 

Spirituality is therefore a thing of old. Today, we have churches of various denominations, of which the ‘revivals’, as labelled, are highly castigated and many of their pastors are seen as fake and dishonest. 

While we respect the feelings and humanity of those who fell victim to churches at the hands of insincere individual pastors, we still are left with a question to answer: Who is to be blamed? The church or individuals?

I am not sure if someone without the knowledge of the Constitution can ever win a court case. It’s even vulnerably risky to live without the revelation of your human rights, for someone can abuse them without you even realising it. It’s the same case with Christianity. 

We have individuals who can read, but they have no knowledge of the Bible. They don’t understand how the Kingdom of God operates, and these are the people who usually fall victim to fake pastors. God knew fake pastors will arise, even Jesus confirmed it. That’s why he gave us scrolls back then, and the Bibles now. It’s for our guidance. I, therefore, don’t blame fake pastors for scamming and fooling people. I would rather blame people for their ignorance and lack of Bible study. Instead, they are rather quick to spend time watching football, reading erotic novels and all kinds of materials that will never bail them from the hypocrisy of fake pastors, rather than spending time with God to learn his ways.

Christians of today should master their Bibles so well that fake pastors will find no one to scam. If not, we will keep giving them our properties, even if there is no record in the Bible whereby Jesus claimed anyone’s property. The Bible is the only tool that we can use to validate the relevance of a pastor’s claims. How then can we run away from it? This is the time to be real and evaluative of ourselves. How often do we read it?

Another issue that people have is that some of them go to church with wrong intentions. Do you really go to church to get saved and hear the word of God, or do you go there for prophesies and solutions? Most people’s going to church is centred around desperation for prophecies and breakthroughs. Desperation in itself is blindness and when it meets ignorance, the end-result is always brainwashing and pain. It is true we have problems that the church has solutions to, but it is your ignorance, spiritual infancy as well as intentional dwarfism, as far as salvation is concerned, that fake pastors take advantage of. That’s why they are able to manipulate you into doing all kinds of unscriptural things. The Bible warns us that desperation without knowledge is not good, and we must avoid that.

You must challenge yourself, as a genuine Christian who has the will to do what is right and walk the right path of God, to take this journey seriously and read your Bible well, meditating on it day and night so that you may be careful to do all that is written in it, just as the Lord commanded Joshua. 

Even Jesus, who is God, was in the temple listening to the teachers and asking them questions, learning from them at age 12, and there you are as old as you are, clubbing and partying all night. 

The next thing you hear is that your wife is pregnant for the pastor, and you would want to swallow even innocent men of God, calling every church fake while forgetting that you too don’t do the will of God but call yourself a Christian, which is fake.

Let us then read our Bibles well, taking Christianity seriously and studying the life of Jesus carefully because every pastor has it to imitate. Believe me, no fake pastor can defeat a Christian who knows the Bible, even if they be uneducated. Shalom!

* Eliphas Mill-Jam studies education at the University of Namibia, where he serves as a peer counsellor aand educator. Apart from being an evangelist, he is a life and relationship coach, keen to inspire others.