The Chairman, Central Working Committee of Assemblies of God South-South Council, Nsikak Akpan, blames the love for material things on the crisis in the church.
He had an interesting chat with Punch's Etim Ekpimah. Excerpts:
Which of the two factions does the South-South zone belong to? Is it the Prof. Paul Emeka faction or that of Dr. Chidi Okoroafor?
My faction is that of Rev. Dr. Chidi Okoroafor. In this church, we listen to our leaders; this is the way we are instructed. Since our leader decided to follow a different path, we all have to toe the line. Although when it comes to the grass roots, we have been telling the people that what we are doing as a church is not right. But there is a point when you cannot argue further, and in order for you to be loyal, you must be a follower and since then I have been following him.
Some Nigerians have described the crisis in the Assemblies of God Church as an embarrassment to the Christendom. How do you react to this?It is too embarrassing to me as a person, as a child of God and as a man of God. I am not okay with it. They really messed up the church because in Nigeria here, the Assemblies of God is known to be the mother of Pentecostal churches. But the way we are portraying ourselves in the media or what is being published about the church has now been crisis, beatings, backbiting, while other churches are propagating the gospel. So, it is a big mess, though our leaders are not seeing it that way.
Is it true that the present crisis began when Rev. Emeka sacked the principal officers of the Evangel University without consulting the executive committee members or was there another issue?
Well, I will not say whether it is true or not since we don’t have the opportunity of working with them at that level. So, I don’t really know what caused their problems. But one thing we know is that this church has a set of rules; we have guidelines. Even if something of that nature was going on, I believe that there should be a way for them to call him to order and say this is not how the church is supposed to go. At least, to protect the name of the church and the name of God or what people will say about our church.
Is it also true that if Prof. Emeka is not referred to as ‘Rev. Prof.’, he gets angry?
Personally, I called the professor and asked him, ‘is it this professor issue that is making you angry?’ He said ‘No’. Because I know that Rev. Dr. Osueke, who was our former General-Superintendent, was not referred to as a professor. So, whether he is a professor or not a professor, he can still become our General-Superintendent. I do not think that is the problem.
What is the update on the rivalry in the church between the factions?
The problem that we are having now is that after a lot of negotiations, dialogues, and more, we are trying to see how we can talk to our leaders to agree with us that what is going on in the media and what people are saying about our church is not good. But, instead of listening to us, they said there are rules in the church. One’s voice will not be heard and as a result of that, no matter how much noise one makes, nobody will hear. But I personally told them that there is a way we can resolve this issue rather than disgrace ourselves as we are doing now all over the country, and in many parts of the world where we have churches.
Many years ago, Assemblies of God Church was the pride of many churches with the way it maintained discipline, but now it is one crisis after another. What changed?
As I said, we still remain the mother of Pentecostal churches though we have failed. I believe that the Bible said that a righteous man will fall and rise again. We will come back if only they will listen to a simple guideline from God.
I tell you that if they will take to the recommendation of decentralising the affairs of the church, I believe all the troubles we are going through will cease.
I take time as a person to project this issue of decentralisation. I consulted people, held meetings and asked, ‘what is really the problem?’ When we asked what we could do in order for us to settle the problem once and for all and regain our dignity as a church, we discovered that the only thing that would bring peace back to our church is decentralisation and nothing else.
Decentralisation of the general council administration? Is that not calling for chaos?
We discovered that with this decentralisation, we will fall into zones. By this, we will determine how many zones we are going to have, whether it will be based on six geo-political zones or that of the church, which is based on 12 zones.
Do you know that our case is in the Supreme Court? Let me say that the Assemblies of God’s case is in the Supreme Court of law and as a result of that, most of our preachers no longer preach on radio. What will you preach? Which church will you mention at the end of the programme? Where will you ask people to go?
They do not know what we are going through. Many people have left our church and we have now discovered that
there is a group of people that have sworn that they can never belong to Chidi’s faction and then the other side swore that they would never belong to Emeka’s faction. And we now said, how can we bring these people together in order for us to regain our dignity and we saw that the only way out was to decentralise the church’s administrative structure.
Apart from crisis that we are hearing about which we have investigated and discovered that it is not about any other thing but material things. Materialism is the cause of all these things.
We also know that it is because of power tussle, because of position and so we believe that if they will allow this decentralisation to come and stay in the Assemblies of God, automatically the court cases will die. Automatically, Emeka will be forced to return to his own zone and Chidi will go back to his own zone and everybody will turn to their various zones.
Then from there, there will be little economic power at the centre to cause struggling among people. There will no longer be a situation where people will say, “I will kill you if I cannot be the General-Superintendent.” We believe that this is the only way to bring peace, oneness and togetherness to the church.
