By Richard Dablah
“So they left everything and followed him.”
Luke’s gospel, chapter 5, verse 11. That sentence once carried the weight of renunciation. It demanded fishermen walk away from nets heavy with fresh catch. It summoned tax collectors from ledgers of profit. It made martyrs.
Today, that same verse floats on PowerPoint slides and Facebook posts in African churches—flattened, decorative, drained of consequence. Because in truth, very few are leaving anything. Most have come to take.
We have not followed Christ out of conviction. We have followed him as escape. And for many of our pastors, the calling is no longer a burden—it is a business.
The Inheritance of the Stage
It began long before Agradaa and the prophets of livestream.
The colonial missionaries—Methodist, Catholic, Anglican—had structure. They built schools and clinics alongside churches. But their theology came with deep violence: African cultures were demonic, our ancestors condemned, our cosmologies to be uprooted and replaced. Converts were taught to disavow their names, strip away traditions, and kneel before an imported God.
Then came the local response. The breakaway prophets of the 1920s and 30s—Simon Kimbangu in Congo, Isaiah Shembe in South Africa, William Wade Harris in Liberia—who took the Bible and poured it into African tongues and signs. They reclaimed faith, yes. But they also re-Africanized the sacred, fusing spiritual warfare with cultural survival. From there, the seed of spectacle was planted.
By the 1980s, the ground was ripe. Austerity. Structural Adjustment. Collapsing states. Churches rose where governments failed. Evangelists arrived with microphones and stadiums, miracles and slogans. Reinhard Bonnke toured the continent with apocalyptic flair, casting out demons by the thousands. And watching from the bleachers were young Africans—hungry, jobless, already disillusioned—who saw not just salvation, but stagecraft.
They learned well.
Tricks of the Trade
Today’s African televangelist knows the script by heart. Theatrics, not theology. Volume, not virtue.
They know when to cry. When to faint. When to whisper in tongues. The “prophecy” comes mid-sermon, always precise: “There’s a woman here—you’re bleeding. It’s fibroids.” The crowd gasps. “God says he’s giving you twins.” She falls. The camera zooms.
But that’s just the beginning.
Deliverances are performed like choreography. The possessed crawl. The pastor shouts. Assistants stand ready with white cloths and offering envelopes. One must always film. Then edit. Then upload. Title it “ Marine Spirit Husband Cast Out in Accra” . Tag it with fire emojis. Feed it into the algorithm.
Then the money comes.
YouTube pays per thousand views. Facebook boosts drama. TikTok thrives on short, shocking clips. Offerings now come through Momo and PayPal. “Partner with this ministry,” they say. “Your $77 seed will unlock your 7 blessings.”
And what of the miracles?
There’s a network for that, too. Borrowed wheelchairs. Staged testimonies. Hired actors. Spiritual freelancers who circulate from church to church playing sick today, healed tomorrow. They are paid in brown envelopes. They sign NDAs. Some even have rates—extra if they can fake a demon voice.
This is not hearsay. It is documented. It is rampant. It is normalized.
And it works because it targets the broken: women seeking children, jobless graduates, traders suffocated by debt. The promise is always the same: come, and you will receive. But first, you must give.
The scam is sophisticated. The emotion is real. The theology is hollow.
A Faith Built on Desperation
What has emerged in much of Africa is not Christianity—it is crisis religion. An entire spiritual economy built on the failure of the state. Where there is no healthcare, there are healing crusades. Where there is no justice, there is “spiritual revenge.” Where people live one paycheck from ruin, the prosperity gospel sells dreams in installments.
This is not faith. It is trauma-baptized.
No one wants to say it aloud, but it must be said: many of our churches are grief processing centers in disguise. People come not for doctrine, but for deliverance from their lives. What we call “revival” is often mass catharsis. And what we call “testimony” is usually projection: I must believe God gave that woman a house, because if He didn’t, what’s left for me?
And so, belief is weaponized. Dissent is silenced. The pastor becomes king. Accountability vanishes.
Agradaa Is the Mirror
Patricia Asiedu—once Nana Agradaa, now “Evangelist Mama Pat”—is not the aberration. She is the template. She just had fewer filters, less polish. Before her jailing for charlatanism, she operated a money-doubling scheme under spiritual branding. When it collapsed, she slipped on white lace and changed the logo. Same hustle, different cross.
She is not alone.
Across the continent, the most followed pastors are digital entrepreneurs with spiritual branding. They employ social media managers. They pay influencers to boost “testimonies.” They hire ghostwriters for devotionals. They calculate spiritual language as brand identity.
Some started sincere. Most didn’t. It no longer matters.
Because the machine is running. And it runs on desperation.
What Must Die
This is not a call to abandon faith. It is a cry for its rescue. We need a Christianity that confronts injustice, not explains it away with demons. We need pastors who lead communities, not build empires. We need faith that tells the truth—even when the truth is: there is no shortcut. No miracle money. No seed sown that will substitute for hard systems, education, reform, and honest work.
We must unlearn the gospel of spectacle. We must deplatform the pulpit celebrities. We must mourn what has become of our faith before it calcifies into something beyond redemption.
Because at the center of this crisis is not Agradaa. It is us. We clicked. We shared. We tithed. We built this golden calf and called it God.
And if Christ were to walk into many of these churches today, he wouldn’t flip the offering table—he’d unplug the livestream.
—Nihil humanum a me alienum puto.
