The Storefront With the Cross on Its Sign

Every Sunday morning in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and a hundred other cities, an extraordinary thing happens. Millions of people dress their finest, pile into danfos and Corollas and the occasional Lexus SUV, and make their way to buildings that look, from the outside, like they mean business. Sometimes literally. The same architecture. The same signage sensibility. The same security presence at the door. The same air conditioning visible in the promise of tinted windows. The same feeling, as you walk in, that someone has thought very carefully about the experience you are about to have and whether you will come back next week.

This is not a metaphor. This is a description.

Somewhere between Pentecost and the present day, a significant portion of the church made a choice that nobody announced and everybody participated in. The choice was this: that the model of the marketplace — with its branding, its customer retention strategies, its competitive positioning, its product differentiation — was not merely a useful administrative tool but the actual operating framework of spiritual community. That Sunday morning was not the gathering of a people called out of darkness into marvellous light, but a weekly transaction. That the congregation was not a body but a clientele. That the man on the platform was not a shepherd but a CEO with a special line in celestial promises.

We did not fall into this. We walked in.

And because we walked in, we can — if we are honest enough, and brave enough — walk out.

A Scene That Has Played Before

Before we talk about what is happening now, it is worth pausing to ask what has always been happening. Because the commercialisation of sacred space is not a Nigerian invention, and it is not a modern one. It is, if anything, one of the oldest human impulses in recorded history — the impulse to take what belongs to God and turn it into something that earns a profit.

When Jesus walked into the outer courts of the Jerusalem Temple in the final week of His earthly ministry, He found exactly what we find in too many of our assemblies today: a market. Merchants selling animals pre-approved for sacrifice. Money changers converting Roman coins into Temple currency at a premium, naturally. The mechanics of worship converted into a revenue stream. The house of prayer turned into what He called, borrowing the words of Jeremiah, a den of robbers.

“It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.” — Matthew 21:13 (ESV) He did not file a complaint. He did not convene a review committee. He did not send a carefully worded pastoral letter. He turned over the tables.

That image is worth sitting with for a moment — not because we are advocating furniture violence as a church reform strategy, but because it tells us something about how Heaven regards the monetisation of the sacred. This is not a minor pastoral concern to be addressed in a subcommittee. This is the kind of thing that moves the meekest man who ever lived to physical action. The tables went over because what was happening underneath them was a desecration, not a management inefficiency.

Acts 8 gives us a shorter scene, but an equally instructive one. Simon the sorcerer, previously celebrated across Samaria for his extraordinary powers, recently converted and baptised, watches the apostles Peter and John lay hands on new believers and witnesses the Holy Spirit descend. And he has a business idea.

“Give me also this power so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.” Peter answered: “May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!” — Acts 8:19-20 (NIV) Simon’s error was not peculiar to the first century. It is the founding philosophy of an entire wing of contemporary Christianity: that divine power is a commodity, that the Spirit is a product, and that the right offering unlocks the right result. Peter’s answer was not gentle, and it was not hedged. It was a full stop at the end of a sentence that too many of our pulpits have decided to treat as a comma.

The problem is that we have, in the centuries since, kept reading past that full stop.

Two Congregations, One Strategy, Zero Gospel

Here is where this becomes distinctly contemporary, and distinctly West African.

The commercialisation of church is not a uniform phenomenon. It has tailored itself, with admirable marketing precision, to the economic profile of its audience. The strategy varies by congregation. The extraction mechanism does not.

Walk into an assembly where the majority of worshippers are navigating unemployment, debt, sickness, and the crushing arithmetic of daily survival and you will hear a particular message. You will hear about ancestral curses. You will hear about spiritual debts that must be settled before any breakthrough can flow. You will hear about the babalawo your great-grandmother consulted three generations ago and how that single consultation opened a door into your bloodline that only a prophetic encounter — one accompanied, naturally, by a corresponding seed — can shut. The congregation comes broken and leaves burdened, having exchanged the little money they came with for the vague promise of a curse now broken.

This is not theology. This is fear merchandised as deliverance.

Walk into a wealthier assembly, one where the cars in the parking lot suggest that financial breakthrough has already arrived for much of the congregation, and the menu changes entirely. Here, you will find professional worship artists whose appearance fees would raise eyebrows in the music industry. You will find motivational speakers with Scripture verses woven through their presentation slides. You will find business leadership summits and networking breakfasts wearing the costume of discipleship. The seed is still being sown. But it is sown between the testimony of a successful entrepreneur and the smooth close of a beautifully produced video package.

The version targeting poorer congregations extracts through terror. The version targeting wealthier ones extracts through aspiration. Both are extracting. Both are selling something the gospel was never designed to sell. And both, when a member of the congregation dares to say so, will produce the same response: that the critic is a witch, that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and that anyone questioning the man of God is clearly a vessel for the enemy.

The accusation of witchcraft is, in its own way, a rather elegant business move. It simultaneously discredits the critic, frightens the audience into silence, and reinforces the authority of the platform. Three problems solved with one throw of the word.

Ezekiel, who had no such platform to protect, said this plainly — which may explain why it appears so rarely on the projection screens of our largest assemblies:

“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 34:2-4 (NIV) What Ezekiel delivered as an indictment, parts of the contemporary church have apparently received as an instruction manual.

What the Salesman Never Mentions

There is a passage that does not circulate widely in the world of prosperity preaching. Not because those who preach in that world have not read it. Because they have read it, and they know what it would do to their model if their congregation took it seriously.

Paul, writing to Timothy, gives one of the most precise anatomies of what happens when faith becomes a fundraising strategy:

“They think that godliness is a means to financial gain. 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 6:5-10 (NIV) Read that again. Not “money is the root of all evil” — the popular misquotation that provides everyone with a comfortable out, since we can all agree we do not technically love the stuff, we merely appreciate it warmly. The text is exact: the love of money. The orientation of the heart toward wealth as a primary object. The treatment of spiritual service as a vehicle for financial accumulation.

Paul does not say this produces mild inconvenience or a temporary detour. He says it plunges people into ruin and destruction. He says it causes people to wander from the faith. He says it pierces them with many griefs. The imagery is of impalement — not of minor wounds, not of bruises that heal in a week, but of being run through.

And yet an entire ecosystem of Christian media, Sunday preaching, and institutional practice has been constructed on exactly the foundation Paul is warning against. Not despite this passage. Alongside it, in the same Bible, from the same pulpits.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from within a Germany where institutional Christianity had made its peace with a monstrous regime, described in The Cost of Discipleship what he called cheap grace — grace dispensed without repentance, without the cross, without any cost to the recipient. Grace as a product. Grace as the thing you receive by showing up and putting something in the offering bag. He wrote that cheap grace is “the grace we bestow on ourselves” — the theology we construct to justify what we were going to do anyway.

The prosperity gospel is cheap grace wearing a designer suit and sitting in the front row of its own conference.

What the salesman never mentions is Matthew 6:24. Not because he does not know it, but because it dismantles his entire operation from the foundation:

“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) You cannot. Not “it will require considerable balance.” Not “it is technically possible but difficult.” You cannot. Jesus used the word because He was not making a pastoral recommendation. He was describing a structural impossibility. Two masters, one slave — the arithmetic does not resolve. And when an institution is built on the premise that it does resolve, that institution is not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is preaching something that shares its vocabulary while reversing its logic.

The Competition for Customers Nobody Owns

One of the most revealing symptoms of a church that has become a business is what it does to its relationship with other churches. In a genuine movement of God, the salvation of one soul anywhere — in the congregation down the road, in a small fellowship meeting under a tin roof, in a prayer group of six people in someone’s sitting room — is cause for celebration. Paul said as much from a prison cell: that whether Christ was proclaimed from pure motives or impure ones, he rejoiced, because Christ was proclaimed.

The commercial church cannot do this. Competition is not incidental to its structure; competition is structural. The church across the road is not a sister ministry in the work of the Kingdom. It is a competitor for market share. The believer who transfers from your congregation to theirs is not a sheep that found water — they are a customer you lost. The church that opens a branch in a location near your existing branch is not expanding the reach of the gospel; it is encroaching on your territory.

This is why the same Christianity that proclaims “seek first the Kingdom of God” has produced assemblies that position themselves with the same competitive calculation as retail franchises. This is why the language of branding, product differentiation, and customer experience has migrated so naturally into church growth literature without triggering more alarm than it has. The vocabulary reveals the operating assumption. And the operating assumption, examined honestly, has very little to do with the shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep to go looking for the one that was lost.

C.S. Lewis, writing Screwtape’s advice to a junior devil in The Screwtape Letters, observed that one of the most effective strategies for neutralising a believer’s prayer life was to get them focused on the quality of the singing, the irritating habits of fellow churchgoers, and the theological shortcomings of the vicar rather than on God. The spiritual danger Lewis identified in a fictional demon’s instruction manual has become the marketing strategy of the actual church: make the experience, the production quality, the personality of the speaker, the comfort of the seats — the primary selling point. Put the consumer experience at the centre. And in doing so, move God quietly to the edges, where He remains available for brand association purposes without interfering with the revenue model.

The Volta: What Still Holds

Here is where the argument must turn not because the critique above has been exhausted, but because a reckoning without a resurrection is merely despair wearing the mask of analysis.

The church has not been entirely swallowed.

This matters enormously. Not as a feel-good ending to a difficult article, but as a fact that requires the same intellectual rigour we have applied to the criticism. If we are going to be honest about the corruption, we must be equally honest about what the corruption has not destroyed.

In the same city where a pastor is selling prayer cloths soaked in anointing oil, guaranteed to break financial limitation, there is a woman who drives to a poorer neighbourhood every Saturday to teach children who cannot afford school fees and she does it in the name of Jesus and she wants no credit and there is no camera present. In the same week that a megachurch hosts a paid-entry business summit for believers seeking divine investment returns, a small congregation somewhere takes up an impromptu offering for a widow and presses the full amount into her hands, quietly, without a testimony slot. In the same denomination where titles are handed to new converts to fill volunteer slots, there is an elder who has served the same small fellowship for thirty years and has never once asked what he would receive for it.

The genuine church — the one Jesus said He would build, and that the gates of hell would not overcome — has survived every corruption thrown at it across two thousand years. It survived the Inquisition. It survived the moment when European Christianity looked at the transatlantic slave trade and decided that the gospel and the slaveholder’s whip could coexist in the same theological framework — a wound so deep that the phrase “the white man’s God” still carries voltage in certain conversations across West Africa, and rightly so. It survived the Donatist controversy and the Arian controversy and the simony of medieval popes and the sale of indulgences and every other effort to reduce the body of Christ to an instrument of institutional power.

It survived the American export of the prosperity gospel and its enthusiastic African franchise.

It will survive this too. Not because the institution is indestructible — history is littered with Christian institutions that fell and deserved to — but because the Head of the church is not an institution. He is a person. And He has never abandoned His people, even when His people have badly misrepresented Him.

Augustine of Hippo, a North African theologian who understood both the grandeur and the institutional failure of the church from the inside, wrote the sentence that remains, sixteen centuries later, the most exact diagnosis of why no commercial substitute for God will ever ultimately work. He wrote it at the beginning of his Confessions, before he had even finished explaining who he was: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

Not until we find the correct seed to sow. Not until we identify the right prophetic key. Not until we have given enough to unlock our financial breakthrough. Until it rests in God. This is not a transaction architecture. This is the language of longing, of return, of belonging. And belonging cannot be franchised, cannot be branded, cannot be extracted with a strategic offering moment on a Sunday morning.

The heart knows this, even when the pew does not.

The Question That Should Keep Everyone Awake

This article ends where it must end: not with a new catchphrase, not with a step-by-step guide to finding a better church, not with the hollow comfort of a summary that pretends the problem is simpler than it is. It ends with the question Jesus asked as He finished the parable of the persistent widow — a parable about a woman who refused to quit pressing her case before an unjust judge, who wore down the judge’s resistance not through charm or payment but through sheer, unreasonable, unstoppable persistence. A parable, in other words, about faith in its rawest form: the kind that keeps showing up when there is no visible reason to show up.

“However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” — Luke 18:8 (NIV) That question was not rhetorical in the comfortable sense. Jesus did not ask it and then immediately supply the reassurance. He let it hang the way a good question always does, pressing against the chest of the listener, waiting for an answer that must come from somewhere deeper than the intellect.

The church that has become a business cannot answer that question well. An enterprise built on the logic of extraction, aspiration, brand loyalty, and competitive positioning cannot produce what Jesus was asking about when He asked about faith. It can produce impressive attendance numbers. It can produce viral sermon clips and stadium events and social media engagement that would make a marketing director weep with gratitude. It cannot produce the widow at the judge’s door — the person who prays because they have no other option, who trusts because the alternative is despair, who keeps coming back not because the experience is excellent but because the God is real.

Faith — the kind that Luke 18 is pointing toward — is not a product. It is not the outcome of a managed consumer experience. It is what remains when the air conditioning breaks and the celebrity speaker cancels and the congregation discovers the building is mortgaged and the seed that was sown has not produced the promised harvest and Sunday morning still comes anyway. It is what cannot be manufactured, marketed, or sold. Which is precisely why it terrifies a system built on manufacturing, marketing, and selling.

What remains when everything else is stripped away?

That is the question. Not as a rhetorical device to end an article neatly, but as the actual question — the one every person sitting in every assembly, regardless of its size or its theology, must eventually answer for themselves. Not the question of whether your church is a good church or a bad church, whether your pastor is genuine or a fraud, whether the worship team is anointed or merely talented. Those are real questions. They are not the deepest one.

The deepest one is whether you have encountered the living God, or whether you have only encountered the performance that surrounds Him.

He is coming. The only thing this article cannot decide for you is what He will find.

References

Biblical References

  • Matthew 21:13 (ESV) — Used as the opening epigraph and as the historical anchor for the argument that commercialisation of sacred space has precedent in the Temple courts; Jesus’s direct confrontation with the monetisation of worship.
  • Acts 8:19-20 (NIV) — The account of Simon the sorcerer’s attempt to purchase the Holy Spirit and Peter’s categorical rebuke; used to establish that the commodification of divine power is an ancient error with apostolic condemnation on record.
  • Ezekiel 34:2-4 (NIV) — The prophetic indictment of exploitative shepherds who feed themselves from the flock rather than feeding the flock; used to demonstrate the long biblical history of this failure and the severity with which God addresses it.
  • 1 Timothy 6:5-10 (NIV) — Paul’s diagnosis of godliness deployed as a revenue strategy; the theological spine of the fourth section and the clearest scriptural framework for evaluating the prosperity model.
  • Matthew 6:24 (NIV) — Jesus’s declaration that no one can serve two masters; used as the definitive structural refutation of any ministry framework built on the dual pursuit of God and financial gain.
  • Luke 18:8 (NIV) — The closing question of the parable of the persistent widow; carried from the source material and developed into the article’s final challenge to the reader.

Other Sources

  • Augustine of Hippo. (397/1991). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published c. 397 CE) — The opening of Book I, on the restlessness of the human heart apart from God; used in the penultimate section as the theological diagnosis of why commercial substitutes for God cannot ultimately satisfy.
  • Bonhoeffer, D. (1959). The cost of discipleship (R. H. Fuller, Trans.). SCM Press. (Original work published 1937 as Nachfolge) — The concept of cheap grace as grace dispensed without repentance or cost; applied as a theological category for the prosperity gospel.
  • Lewis, C. S. (1942). The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles. Screwtape’s strategic advice about directing believers toward the peripheral experience of churchgoing rather than toward God; used in the fifth section as a description of how consumer-focused church culture operates.