“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” Martin Luther King Jr The failure of conservative C...
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” Martin Luther King Jr
The
failure of conservative Christianity to holistically and practically apply its
moral principles as contained in its gospel message to other dimensions of
human activities and endeavors outside the walls of its worship centers is
indeed a dark chapter in the annals of church history. A comprehensive study of
the Bible in general and the gospel narratives in particular show that God, in
Jesus, was not only concerned in bringing an enhanced quality of life in the
hereafter for heaven-bound folks but also purported to bring an enriched
quality of life in all aspects of man’s life in the here and now.
At every
opportune, as the gospels clearly articulates, Jesus not only addressed the
spiritual needs of mankind but equally the material. To the hungry he gave
food, to the sick in body he healed and to the audience he urged them to lend a
helping hand in meeting the material needs of the underprivileged. Jesus’
mission was life in its totality or in the words of the writer of the gospel of
John, “life in abundance”, in this present era and that to come. Be that as it
may, Jesus condemned the love of money as the root of all evil. Not that money
or material wealth was an evil but specifically the love of it characterized by
an insatiable, obsessive, addictive and deification of money. Casting the
warning of Jesus aside, much to its detriment, modern-day Christianity has
increasingly become characterized by veneration of dough. An affluent lifestyle
is nowadays the yardstick to measure the success of an individual even his
spirituality.
Noteworthy is the rise and sprouting of a new breed of the clergy
who overnight have ascended from wallowing in abject poverty to escalating
fortunes and self-aggrandizement. These clerics have been at the forefront baying
for the acquisition and amassing of material wealth as a principal objective for
a fulfilling, godly and successful life, or so they claim. Subsequently, this
has led to what former South African President, Thabo Mbeki once remarked, in a
speech titled “The Pursuit of Wealth”,
that we have made our central objective in life to revolve around, “the designer labels on the clothes we wear,
the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their
geographic location, the company we keep and what we do as part of that company.”
In short today’s Christianity is
mired in the elevation of the money motive
as the principal and guiding objective in all human endeavors while, for example, paying little practical regard to what each
one of us might do to assist our neighbor to achieve the goal of a better life.
Day
after day, the demons of money deification which are embedded in the sacrosanct
rhetoric of the modern-day clergyman always beckons us to get rich with a
hypnotic regularity which is received by
an uncritical admiration for unfettered affluence by the congregants. Having
thus given way to the deification of dough for personal enrichment modern-day
Christianity under the leadership of these clerical charlatans has led to a
wretched situation indeed, a situation where Christians rely on dough as the
criterion of value, where the wealth cult has replaced a belief in principles
with a rapacious pursuit of personal wealth at all costs.
The
possession of material wealth is not an
evil per see, especially if it is done through ethical means for the common
good. However, if personal enrichment is pursued at all costs with a subsequent
conspicuous public display of the wealth gained from that pursuit, and without
any practical regard to assist our neighbor to achieve better lives then do we
not have a problem at hand? Isn’t that
the deification of personal material wealth characterized by dominance,
precedence, addiction and obsession of personal enrichment should be shunned
and exorcised from all dimension of life especially in Christian circle where
the wealth cult is rearing it ugly head and spreading its cancerous tentacles
unabated? Is contemporary Christianity going to allow the deification of dough
to be the distinctive feature of what Christ left his followers to do as they
eagerly await His second advent?
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