Concept

Prosperity Gospel in Africa

Intro

The prosperity gospel teaches that God wants every believer to be healthy and rich, and that you can claim those blessings by having enough faith, speaking positive words, and giving money to the church as a "seed" that God will multiply. It is preached in some of Africa's biggest churches and heard on radio and television across the continent.

It is easy to see why it draws people. Africa has many poor people, and this message offers hope, dignity and a God who cares about daily needs. But many African Christian leaders have warned that it twists the Bible, enriches preachers at the expense of the poor, and leaves people disappointed or even turned away from God when the promised wealth does not come. This page sets out the teaching fairly, what it gets right, and where African evangelical leaders say it goes wrong.

Inside Faith Tabernacle, Ota, Nigeria, the main auditorium of Living Faith Church Worldwide (Winners' Chapel), whose founder David Oyedepo is among the best-known African preachers of faith and prosperity. Photo: Ogboinba, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons), resized.

◎ See this page's graph and discover linked topics →

In full

The prosperity gospel (also prosperity teaching, the health-and-wealth gospel, or in its American form, Word of Faith) is defined by the Africa chapter of the Lausanne Theology Working Group as "the teaching that believers have a right to the blessings of health and wealth and that they can obtain these blessings through positive confessions of faith and the 'sowing of seeds' through the faithful payments of tithes and offerings."

In Africa it is associated above all with some of the neo-Pentecostal and charismatic ministries that grew from the 1970s, though the Lausanne statement notes that it "cuts across denominational barriers" and appears in mainline Protestant churches too. Its African form draws on two sources:

1. American Word of Faith teaching (Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts' "seed faith"), spread through books, broadcasts, conferences and Bible schools from the 1970s.
2. African religious expectations that religion should deliver tangible well-being, health, fertility, protection and success, a feature of traditional religion that the Lausanne statement suggests prosperity teaching may continue in Christian dress.

The most important African response is the Lausanne Theology Working Group Statement on the Prosperity Gospel, produced from consultations at Akropong, Ghana, in October 2008 and September 2009, chaired by the Ghanaian theologian J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, and published in the Evangelical Review of Theology in April 2010. It affirms the elements of biblical truth in prosperity teaching, then concludes that the teachings of its most vigorous promoters "are false and gravely distorting of the Bible" and that in such dimensions it "can be soberly described as a false gospel."

How widespread is it?

• The Pew Forum's 2006 Spirit and Power survey asked whether God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith. According to Christianity Today's report of the results (Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell, "Gospel Riches," July 2007), 85% of Kenyan, 90% of South African and 95% of Nigerian Pentecostals said yes.
• Pew's Tolerance and Tension survey of 19 sub-Saharan countries (2008 to 2009, published 2010) found that in most countries more than half of Christians believe in the prosperity gospel.

The belief is therefore not confined to a few celebrity preachers; it shapes the expectations of very large numbers of ordinary believers.

The teaching in its own terms

A fair statement of what prosperity preachers commonly teach:

1. God's will is blessing. God is a good Father who wants his children to flourish in every area, spiritual, physical and material. "Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth" (3 John 2, KJV).
2. Christ's work includes material blessing. "Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9, KJV) is read to include material riches.
3. Faith and confession release blessing. Believers should speak God's promises aloud and refuse words of defeat.
4. Giving is sowing. Tithes and offerings are seeds that God multiplies back to the giver (Malachi 3:10; Luke 6:38).
5. Poverty and sickness are enemies. They are curses or attacks to be resisted, not God's will for believers.

What it gets right

Steel-manning the teaching matters, and the Lausanne statement itself does so. Its points of agreement:

• God's power is real. The statement affirms "the miraculous grace and power of God" and welcomes churches that lead people to expectant faith.
• Scripture has a vision of human flourishing that includes material welfare. It rejects an "unbiblical dualism" that separates the material from the spiritual. God "giveth thee power to get wealth" (Deuteronomy 8:18, KJV).
• Hard work, education and good stewardship are biblical, and to the extent prosperity teaching encourages them, the statement says, "it can have a positive effect on people's lives."
• Poverty angers God. The statement affirms that it is not God's will that people live in abject poverty, and confesses that the church has often lost its prophetic voice.
• Many testify to real change, more faith, more education, better working lives, and the statement rejoices in this.

Scholars add that prosperity teaching can give poor people a sense of dignity and agency, and that its emphasis on discipline, sobriety and saving has documented effects among some converts.

Where African evangelical leaders say it goes wrong

The Lausanne statement and other African critics identify these problems:

1. God's power is treated as a technique. It rejects "as unbiblical the notion that God's miraculous power can be treated as automatic, or at the disposal of human techniques, or manipulated by human words, actions or rituals."
2. Wealth is made the measure of faith. It rejects the idea that spiritual welfare can be measured by material welfare, that wealth is always a sign of God's blessing (since it can come by oppression or corruption), or that poverty, illness or early death are always signs of a curse or of weak faith.
3. It enriches the preacher, not the poor. The statement observes that it "vastly enriches those who preach it, but leaves multitudes no better off than before, with the added burden of disappointed hopes."
4. It blames the poor. By stressing spiritual and demonic causes of poverty, it ignores injustice, exploitation and corruption, and makes the poor feel their poverty is their own fault.
5. It damages African community. It stresses individual success without community accountability, weakening the traditional African commitment to care within the extended family.
6. It distorts Scripture. It twists texts out of context, rarely preaches the Bible carefully, and replaces the call to repentance and faith with a call to give money.
7. It drives people from God. When promised wealth does not come, many "give up on God," or lose faith altogether.
8. It moves away from the cross. Many of its teachers, though raised in evangelical churches, have in practice abandoned "the authority and priority of the Bible" and "the centrality of the cross of Christ."

The statement also raises a deeper question: whether much popular African Christianity is "a syncretised super-structure on an underlying worldview that has not been radically transformed by the biblical gospel," so that the popularity of prosperity teaching may mark a failure of contextualization. See African Traditional Religion and Christianity.

Other African voices

• Pentecostal leaders. Bishop Joseph Ojo of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria told Christianity Today (2007) that some pastors "have invaded the pulpit but do not have the calling," adding, "Their god is their belly." David Oginde of Nairobi Pentecostal Church said, "The kingdom of God is built on the Cross, not on bread and butter."
• Reformed and evangelical pastors such as Conrad Mbewe of Zambia have preached and written against prosperity teaching for decades.
• Scholars. Asamoah-Gyadu, who chaired the Akropong consultations, has written extensively on Ghanaian charismatic Christianity, appreciative of its vitality and critical of its materialism. Paul Gifford's Ghana's New Christianity (2004) argued that the focus on personal breakthrough displaces attention from structural causes of poverty.

Grammar and hermeneutics

The key prosperity proof-texts settle on careful reading before any wider theology is needed:

1. 3 John 2 is a letter greeting, not a promise. "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health" uses the standard health wish that opened ordinary Greek letters of the period. John expresses a hope for his friend Gaius; he does not state a universal guarantee. The verb usually rendered "prosper" means to go well or have a good journey, and John measures it by the soul: "even as thy soul prospereth."
2. 2 Corinthians 8:9 is about grace, measured by the cross. The verse's context is a collection for poor Christians in Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 8 to 9). Paul uses Christ's self-impoverishment to urge the Corinthians to give generously to others, and the riches in view are those of grace (compare 2 Corinthians 6:10, "as poor, yet making many rich").
3. Malachi 3:10 addresses Israel's temple storehouse under the old covenant. It is a covenant summons to an unfaithful nation, not a formula guaranteeing individual returns on donations.
4. Descriptive blessing is not prescriptive guarantee. Proverbs describe how life generally goes under God's wisdom; they are not promises that every faithful person will be rich, as Job, the prophets and the apostles show.

A biblical theology of wealth and suffering

• Warnings. "They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare... For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows" (1 Timothy 6:9-10, KJV). Paul warns against those "supposing that gain is godliness" (1 Timothy 6:5, KJV).
• Jesus on possessions. "Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth" (Luke 12:15, KJV). See also the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16-21) and "ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24, KJV).
• Contentment. Paul had "learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content" (Philippians 4:11, KJV), knowing both abundance and need.
• Faithful suffering. The heroes of faith include those who "wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented" (Hebrews 11:37, KJV). The apostles were often hungry, beaten and poor (2 Corinthians 11:23-28).
• The cross. Jesus calls disciples to deny themselves and take up the cross (Mark 8:34). The gospel's center is not the believer's success but Christ's sacrifice for sinners.
• Generosity and justice. Scripture's answer to poverty is God's care, the church's generosity and justice for the poor (Acts 4:32-35; James 5:1-6), not a transaction between the giver and God.

Apologetic relevance

• A target for critics. Skeptics often point to wealthy preachers and exploited congregations as evidence that Christianity is a scam. The honest answer is that Scripture itself condemns such preaching, and that African church leaders have been among its strongest critics.
• A test of discernment. The prosperity gospel is a case study in testing teaching by Scripture rather than by results or popularity. As the Lausanne statement says, "Popularity is no proof of truth; and people can be deceived in great numbers." See Christian Discernment.
• Not the whole of African Christianity. The prosperity gospel is one strand among many; most of Africa's Christians belong to Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches whose official teaching rejects it.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Paul Gifford, Ghana's new Christianity (2004). Open Library

See also

• Africa and Christianity, the master hub
• African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, the movement where prosperity teaching is most common
• Pentecostalization of Global Christianity, the global movement and its excesses
• African Traditional Religion and Christianity, the traditional expectations of well-being prosperity teaching may continue
• Christianity in Africa Today, the wider picture of African Christianity
• Christian Discernment, testing teaching by Scripture
• Problem of Evil, suffering and the faithful believer
• Argument from Transformed Lives, genuine change versus marketed results