Cash for Blessings,,,

I am not one to fight preachers of the word of the most high. It is the source of life and I believe in freedom to spread it to the whole world, in accordance of the commands of Christ contained in the good book, directing the fathers of the gospel to go into all the world, preaching the word, and making disciples of all nations.

However, am pressed to try and speak against a number of trends that, as per the wisdom granted to me by the most High through the knowledge of His word, amount to deception, manipulation, and selfish schemes to self enrichment, at the expense of many poor followers looking to strike gold in the name of financial prosperity, and some rich alike, hoping to get richer.

We will continue with this topic in later posts, but let me highlight one incident that left me appalled at the illusory tactics of one televangelist, bent at enriching himself in the name of offering countless blessings to those in need of them. (We will discuss the misinterpretation of BLESSINGS later.) You will recall that it is this preacher who made alot of noise on TV after the government indicated that it would start vetting and probably subjecting church finances to tax. I will hold names for now.

This preacher was doing his kawaida service on TV, and as usual pronounced a lot of blessings to those willing to kujitolea kwa mali yao to God.

This particular day, the giving was different. The preacher declared that God would bless all those whose names started with the letters he was about to read out. So, I got interested and decided to wait for my names initials to be called out, and sure he did read them, and among the first ones. However, something told me that there was something fishy about this…fortunately for me, the preacher decided to repeat the letters, and I decided to check out how many letters were read out. I started the count as he called them out, and to my astonishment, he called 23 letters out of the 26 of the alphabet!!!

Before I told myself that God must have planned blessings for quite a majority, I decided to check out the missing letters. Your guess is as good as mine, the missing letters were X, Y and Q!!! And here comes my analysis.

It is common knowledge that most persons' names start with all the mentioned letters of the alphabet, save for the left out X, Y and Q, which account for a negligible minority. My take: -  

-          The preacher left out these three letters to conveniently avoid casting doubts on the authenticity of this “revelation” if he called out all the letters of the alphabet.

-          The preacher had to make sure that the letters he decided to call, or which were "revealed" to him, represented a majority of his audience and listeners, and the ones he left out only represented a negligible minority, who most likely were not watching TV after all.

The preacher then brandished a mobile phone, gave two mobile numbers to which listeners were supposed to MPESA their gift, and “message ikiingia tu hivi, utapokea Baraka yako”, he said.

It is upon this premise that I agonize at having to speak against this “televangelist’s”, and many others' way of getting congregations to give cash so as to reap blessings.

I am in no way against giving for the advancement of the work of God, I take pleasure in giving to the poor, the needy, the hungry, the unclothed, the unsheltered e.t.c. but it is the way the gospel of giving is presented to the listeners, with little or no reference or guidance from the word of God, and where the money ends up, building mega churches, buying the pastor the latest car in the market, buying the pastor a home in the best neighborhoods…but of course, these are all “a manifestation of the blessings of God”, or are they? You be the judge….

I rest for now….We will talk more later...