The Temple Has Merchandise

A Sunday Morning That Looks Like Business

Anyone who has driven past a big church in Lagos or Abuja or Port Harcourt at ten o’clock on a Sunday knows the scene. Marshals in matching vests wave the cars into rows. A guard checks the gate. The windows are tinted, a generator hums somewhere behind the hall, and the signboard carries a logo a branding agency would be proud of. Inside, the air conditioning works, which is more than can be said for the clinic down the road. Somebody has thought hard about your experience, and about whether you’ll be back next week.

None of that is sinful on its face. Visitors should be welcomed, car parks need managing, and a sound system that cuts out in the middle of a prayer helps nobody. My complaint begins further in, with a change of assumption that nobody announced and a great many joined. In too many places the marketplace stopped being a tool the church used and became the picture of what a church is. The congregation turned into a clientele. The platform turned into a head office. And the man in front became something between a shepherd and a chief executive, with a special line in promises about heaven.

We didn’t fall into this. We walked in, one reasonable decision at a time. Which means we can walk out the same way.

What Jesus Found in the Temple Courts

Selling sacred things is older than Nigeria, and older than television. On Matthew’s account, Jesus walked into the outer court of the Jerusalem temple in the last week before His death and found a market. (John places a cleansing at the start of His ministry instead, and scholars still argue about whether there were two. I’m following Matthew here.) Animals were on sale for sacrifice. Money changers sat at tables, turning the coins people carried into the Jewish and Tyrian shekels the temple tax required.

Be fair to the traders for a moment. A pilgrim who had travelled a long way needed an animal and the right coins, and somebody had to supply them. The service was real. What made the scene wrong was where it stood. The outer court was the one part of the temple where people who weren’t Jews could come near to pray, and Mark records Jesus quoting Isaiah that the house was meant to be “for all the nations”, then stopping anyone from carrying goods through it. Commerce had taken the room that belonged to the people God most wanted in.

“It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

— Matthew 21:13 (ESV)

Notice the phrase He chose. A den is where robbers retreat to feel safe, not where they do the robbing. The words come from Jeremiah, who told the worshippers that God would let them stay in the land only if they did not “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow”. They went on stealing and swearing falsely, then came and stood in the house and said, “We are delivered!” Hence the question God puts to them.

“Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”

— Jeremiah 7:11 (ESV)

Commentators weigh these things differently. Some put the weight on exploitation at the tables, others on a prophetic sign of judgement against the whole arrangement, and others on Jeremiah’s point that religious activity can become a hiding place for people whose lives contradict it. I think the charge can carry all three. John records words that fit a Nigerian Sunday uncomfortably well, said to the men who sold doves.

“Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”

— John 2:16 (NIV)

He didn’t set up a review committee, and He didn’t send a carefully worded letter. He overturned tables. I’m not recommending that as a method of church reform. I’m pointing out how seriously the gentlest person in the Gospels took the matter.

The Man Who Tried to Buy the Spirit

Acts 8 gives a shorter scene with the same smell. Simon had been the celebrated sorcerer of Samaria. Luke says he believed Philip’s message and was baptised. Then Peter and John arrived from Jerusalem, the Samaritans received the Holy Spirit as the apostles laid hands on them, and Simon saw a business opportunity. He offered money and asked for “this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:19, NIV).

“May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!”

— Acts 8:20 (NIV)

Peter didn’t negotiate. He went on to tell Simon that his heart wasn’t right before God and that he should repent, and Simon, to his credit, asked the apostles to pray for him. Whether his faith was real, Luke leaves open. What the text does show is a man who had spent his life selling spiritual power, who watched the Spirit arrive, and whose first thought was a price. The old church word for buying and selling church office, simony, takes its name from him.

His error didn’t die in the first century. Any ministry that treats healing, breakthrough or the Spirit’s presence as stock to be released by the right offering is standing in Simon’s shoes, whatever its brochure says.

How One Model Sells to Two Crowds

The model adjusts itself to whoever is sitting in front of it. I’m describing a pattern here, and I’m not pointing at any pastor, because plenty of people who preach this way believe every word of it.

Picture an assembly where most of the people are carrying unemployment, debt and sickness. The message on offer there is often about curses and spiritual debts that must be cleared before anything can move. A great grandmother’s visit to a traditional diviner, three generations back, is said to have opened a door in the bloodline, and a prophetic encounter (with a seed attached, naturally) is the way to shut it. The congregation arrives with little and goes home with less, holding a promise that something has been broken.

Now picture the other room, where the cars in the car park suggest that breakthrough has already arrived. The menu changes. There are worship artists, motivational speakers with a verse on the slide, business summits and networking breakfasts dressed as discipleship. The seed is still sown, but between a testimony from a successful entrepreneur and a well produced video.

One version takes its money through fear and the other through ambition. Neither is selling what the gospel was given to deliver. It would be wrong to say all this is invented demand. A Pew report on Africa south of the Sahara, published in 2010, found that in most of the countries it covered more than half of Christians believed in what it defined as the prosperity gospel, the idea that God will grant wealth and good health to people who have enough faith. People are not being tricked into wanting this. They’re being sold what they already hope for.

And when somebody in either room asks where the money goes, some platforms have a ready answer: that the questioner is rebelling, and that “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” (1 Samuel 15:23, KJV). Samuel said that to King Saul, who had set aside the word of the Lord. It was a rebuke to a king, and it was never meant as a shield for a platform. As a piece of machinery it’s efficient, because it silences the critic and frightens the room in one go.

Ezekiel had no platform to protect, which may be why this passage appears so seldom on the projection screens of large churches.

“Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.”

— Ezekiel 34:2 to 4 (NIV)

Some of us read that as an indictment. A few corners of the church seem to have filed it as a business plan.

What Paul and Jesus Said About Money

Paul wrote to Timothy about people who think “godliness is a means to financial gain” (1 Timothy 6:5, NIV), and then described where that road goes.

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”

— 1 Timothy 6:6 to 10 (NIV)

Read it slowly, because it’s so often misquoted. Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, which is a more uncomfortable sentence, since most of us can say with a straight face that we don’t love the stuff, we only appreciate it warmly. Paul’s picture of the damage is physical. People who chase wealth pierce themselves through. And he’s describing the people who treat the ministry as a way to get rich, in a letter that was sent from one church leader to another.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in Germany in 1937, gave the name cheap grace to forgiveness handed out without repentance and without following Christ, a grace you could hold as a possession. The prosperity version has a different price tag, but it makes a similar promise. A blessing you can buy with the right seed is also something you can have without following anyone.

Jesus put the matter more bluntly than either of them.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

— Matthew 6:24 (NIV)

He said “cannot”. He wasn’t offering advice about balance. He was describing a job with two employers, where the arithmetic never works out. An institution that builds its whole operation on the idea that it does work out is using the vocabulary of Jesus with the logic turned round.

Why Churches End Up Competing

You can test a church by how it reacts when a member joins the one down the road. In a healthy movement, a soul saved anywhere is good news, whether it happens in a hall with a thousand seats or a sitting room with six chairs. Paul, writing in chains, said he was glad whenever Christ was preached “whether from false motives or true” (Philippians 1:18, NIV).

A church that runs on market logic can’t say that. The neighbouring church is a rival for market share. The family that moves across town is a customer lost. A new branch opened near yours is an invasion of territory. The vocabulary of branding and customer experience has slipped into church growth talk so easily, and with so little alarm, because the assumption behind it has been quietly accepted. It has very little to do with the shepherd who left ninety nine sheep to go after the one.

The Fair Objection From the Church Treasurer

Picture a church treasurer in Ibadan, tired, with the diesel invoice in one hand and the list of teachers’ salaries in the other. He has heard enough. “Do you know what it costs to keep this place running? The pastor has a family. And your own Bible says the labourer deserves his pay.”

He’s right about the bills, and he’s right about Paul.

“In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel.”

— 1 Corinthians 9:14 (NIV)

A church needs money, and I’d go further and say a church needs honest, well kept accounts more than it needs to be poor. Poverty isn’t a spiritual qualification. Nobody should read this and conclude that a generator, a salary or a branded T shirt is a sin.

But look at what Paul does with his own right. A few verses on, he says that his reward is that “in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not make full use of my rights as a preacher of the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:18, NIV). He grants the principle, and then he refuses to cash it in where cashing it in would put a price on the message.

So the line isn’t between churches that handle money and churches that don’t. It runs through the questions nobody enjoys asking. Is the blessing priced? Does the sermon get written to move the offering? Ask whether a member can request the accounts without being called a witch, and you’ll learn a good deal. A church can have an air conditioner and a conscience. The trouble starts when the air conditioner begins to write the sermon.

What the Law Can and Cannot Fix

Nigeria’s law has been circling this ground, and 2026 has been a busy year for it.

The reformed tax laws, many provisions of which were due to take effect on 1 January 2026, draw the line the treasurer would rather blur. A guidance paper prepared for Catholic dioceses in December 2025 reads them this way: income tied to a charitable mission stays exempt, while commercial income, such as the rent from an event hall, is taxable and may attract value added tax and withholding tax. Stipends, allowances and housing payments to clergy are treated as taxable pay. In January 2026, BusinessDay reported on an analysis that put it more sharply, saying the legal separation between the sanctuary and the shop was no longer optional, and that although tithes and offerings are not taxed directly, how they are used would be examined more closely. Those are readings by advisers and commentators, not the text of the statute, and church finance officers will want the Acts themselves in front of them.

The other front has been the state’s power over churches. The Companies and Allied Matters Act of 2020 let the Corporate Affairs Commission suspend the trustees of religious bodies and appoint interim managers. The Christian Association of Nigeria went to court over it. In March 2023, the Federal High Court in Abuja restrained the Commission from using those powers against the association and churches, and in April 2023 a separate suit, brought by a lawyer, Emmanuel Ekpenyong, produced a judgment striking down sections 839 to 848. In early October 2026, reports said the Court of Appeal in Abuja had upheld that nullification in most of its parts, holding that the sections infringed freedom of religion and association. (It stopped short of a blanket nullification of section 851, ruling that one unconstitutional only to the extent that it let an administrative committee decide disputes in place of the Federal High Court.) Meanwhile the Catholic Bishops’ Conference asked the National Assembly in September 2026 to halt the Foreign Aids (Regulation, Transparency and Disclosure) Bill 2026, which they said could let officials refuse registration or renewal to churches and others whose work was judged “not in the national interest”.

Television ministries have lived under a different kind of rule for years. The scholar Asonzeh Ukah (2011) studied the National Broadcasting Commission’s policy on “unverified miracles” and the disputes it provoked after broadcasting was opened up in 1992.

There are good arguments on both sides of these fights, and I won’t pretend to settle them. But look at what they add up to. The courts have narrowed the power of government to run a church from outside. The revenue service will ask for receipts. Neither can ask what a congregation ought to ask itself, which is whether anyone left the service closer to God. And with the state stepping back, the audit falls back on the elders and the members. Nobody else is going to examine a church’s conscience for it.

Here the argument has to turn, because a tidy answer would be a false one. The books can be made honest. The question Jesus asked in the temple courts was about whose house this is.

The Church That Is Still Standing

If I stopped there, I’d be handing you despair and calling it analysis. The church hasn’t been swallowed. That claim needs the same hard look I’ve given the criticism.

Picture a woman who drives to a poorer part of town every Saturday to teach children whose parents can’t pay school fees. She does it in Jesus’ name, there’s no camera, and nobody has asked her to give a testimony. Picture a small congregation, in the same week that a big church somewhere charges for a business summit, taking up an unannounced offering for a widow and pressing every naira into her hand with no thanks required. Both scenes are constructed, but anyone who has spent time in Nigerian churches will recognise them. This kind of church rarely makes the news, which is part of how it survives.

The church Jesus said He would build has outlived every corruption thrown at it. It outlived the years when European Christians looked at the transatlantic slave trade and found a way to fit the gospel and the whip into one theology, a wound so deep that “the white man’s God” still carries a charge in conversations across West Africa, and rightly so. It outlived the Donatist and Arian quarrels, the selling of church offices and the selling of indulgences. It will outlive the export of the prosperity gospel and its enthusiastic local franchises too. Not because any institution is indestructible (history is littered with Christian institutions that fell and deserved to) but because the Head of the church is a person who hasn’t abandoned His people, even when they’ve misrepresented Him badly.

Augustine of Hippo, a North African who knew both the grandeur and the failures of the church from the inside, wrote near the beginning of his Confessions that God had made us for Himself.

“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

— Augustine, Confessions I.1 (E. B. Pusey, Trans.)

Not until we find the right seed. Not until we spot the prophetic key. Until it rests in God. That is the language of longing and return, and it can’t be franchised, branded or collected in a strategic offering moment. The heart knows it, even when the pew has forgotten.

The Question Luke Leaves Open

Luke tells us why Jesus told the parable of the widow and the unjust judge: to show His disciples “that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1, NIV). She had no money, no influence and no one to speak for her. She kept coming to the judge’s door until he gave in. And then Jesus asks something that He doesn’t answer.

“However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

— Luke 18:8 (NIV)

A business can’t produce that sort of faith. It can produce attendance figures, stadium events and sermon clips that do well online. It can’t produce the widow at the door, who keeps coming because there’s nowhere else to go and the God is real. That kind of faith is what remains when the air conditioning fails, the guest speaker cancels, the seed hasn’t yielded and Sunday comes anyway.

So here is a small thing to try. At the next meeting of your church where the accounts are read, if there is one, listen to the numbers and ask the question you would ask of any household you were helping to run. Then, before the next Sunday, find the quietest corner of your house, switch off the phone, and pray without a microphone or a service to hold it up. See who answers. I think He will.

References

Biblical References

Matthew 21:13 (ESV). The words of Jesus in the temple; the epigraph and the anchor for the argument about commerce in sacred space.
Mark 11:15 to 17 (ESV). Quoted briefly (“for all the nations”) and used for the setting in the outer court and the ban on carrying goods through the temple.
Jeremiah 7:5 to 11 (ESV). The source of “den of robbers”; read in context to show that the charge concerns a house used as cover for injustice.
John 2:14 to 16 (NIV). “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”; supports the parallel with commercial worship.
Acts 8:19 to 20 (NIV). Simon’s offer of money and Peter’s rebuke; the ancient case of treating the Spirit as a commodity.
1 Samuel 15:22 to 23 (KJV). The saying about rebellion and witchcraft, set back in its context of a rebuke to a king.
Ezekiel 34:2 to 4 (NIV). The prophetic indictment of shepherds who feed themselves from the flock.
1 Timothy 6:5 to 10 (NIV). Paul on godliness as a means of gain and the love of money.
Matthew 6:24 (NIV). Jesus on serving two masters.
Philippians 1:15 to 18 (NIV). Paul’s gladness that Christ is preached, even from false motives; used against rivalry between churches.
1 Corinthians 9:14 and 18 (NIV). The preacher’s right to a living and Paul’s choice not to use it; the church treasurer’s fair objection.
Luke 18:1 and 18:8 (NIV). The purpose of the parable of the persistent widow and Jesus’ closing question.

Other Sources

Augustine of Hippo. (2002). The confessions of St. Augustine (E. B. Pusey, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3296/pg3296.txt (Original work published c. 401). Book I, chapter 1, quoted in the closing section.
Bonhoeffer, D. (1959). The cost of discipleship (R. H. Fuller, Trans.). SCM Press. (Original work published 1937). The idea of cheap grace, paraphrased and not quoted.
BusinessDay. (2026, January 20). Faith groups face new compliance era as Nigeria centralises tax collection. https://businessday.ng/news/article/faith-finance-inside-nigerias-new-tax-deal-with-churches-mosques/
Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria. (2025, December 20). The general overview of Nigerian tax laws and the influence of taxes in an emerging economy [Guidance paper prepared for Catholic dioceses; author named as A. R. Odukoya]. Nigeria Catholic Network. https://www.nigeriacatholicnetwork.com/?p=26237
Enumah, A. (2026, October 4). Appeal Court upholds nullification of CAMA on CAC powers over religious groups, others. ThisDay. https://www.thisdaylive.com/2026/10/04/appeal-court-upholds-nullification-of-cama-on-cac-powers-over-religious-groups-others/
Gazette NGR. (2023, March 21). Court stops FG from suspending, appointing CAN, church’s trustees. https://gazettengr.com/court-stops-fg-from-suspending-appointing-can-churchs-trustees/
Pew Research Center. (2010, April 15). Tolerance and tension: Islam and Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa (executive summary). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2010/04/15/executive-summary-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa/
Ukah, A. (2011). Banishing miracles: Politics and policies of religious broadcasting in Nigeria. Politics and Religion Journal, 5(1). https://politicsandreligionjournal.com/index.php/prj/article/view/287
Vanguard. (2026, September 20). Catholic Bishops oppose foreign aid regulation bill. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2026/09/catholic-bishops-oppose-foreign-aid-regulation-bill/
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Cleansing of the Temple. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple. Used for the summary of how scholars read the temple action, and for the Tyrian shekel and the outer court.

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.