Why Does Everyone Hate Harvesters?

I attend Harvesters for four Sundays.

Twenty years ago, Harvesters was founded. This made a lot of Christians angry, and it has been widely regarded as a bad move in many circles. Over the last two months, I attended several Harvesters Sunday services to find out why.

Since Substack doesn’t pay me for my many moronic labors, I couldn’t afford to go to the main church over at Lekki. However, I went to a branch near my house, and the experience was pleasant.

Christ Embassy Followed Me Here?

Before attending Harvesters, I’d attended Christ Embassy for a couple of months. In that newsletter about LoveWorld, I explain how much they care about the here and now. The pastor made it very clear that we didn’t want more riches for ourselves than God wants for us, and poverty is actually a sign of subpar speaking in tongues ability. Or something of that nature.

Not once throughout the four Sundays did we learn anything about going to heaven or paradise. This was a huge departure from the Lord’s Chosen, which I’d also attended, whose mantra was “I wish you heaven at last”. Christ Embassy didn’t wish me heaven at last; rather, it wished me money at last. Harvesters? Well, on the first Sunday they wished me babe at last by inviting me to a singles mingle program. I didn’t go.

On the first Sunday, I witnessed something like a corporate partnership between Harvesters and Christ Embassy. A Christ Embassy (with a magnificent head of hair) pastor arrived on the flat screen and informed us all about a program to make our Christian journey right for heaven. I couldn’t believe it; I’d attended this church for two months, and it took going to another church to get them to preach the “heaven at last” gospel to me.

New Age Church, New Age Swag

I’ve not attended church regularly since 2018, so anytime I go to a new church I’m always surprised at how liberal they are now. Maybe this is a dead horse, but the outfits are simply immaculate. In fact, you may be forgiven if you assumed that some of the congregants had to walk on a runway after the service.

I know it likely doesn’t have an effect on conviction, but I will probably never get used to the flamboyance Nigerian Pentecostals are used to displaying. And it is unique to them, as you never see this pattern with Catholics or Anglicans.

In truth, my criticism is more sociological, not religious. The reason why Nigerian schools mandate school uniforms for kids isn’t because the uniforms are beautiful, but because uniformity is good. It is difficult to discriminate by class when everyone wears the same uniform.

However, in an environment where people can take great pains to distinguish themselves through clothing, it is impossible to guarantee equal treatment. I know this is a difficult problem to solve, as it is stupid to tell congregants not to wear their Sunday best to church. But it is a problem nonetheless.

Come to Harvesters… For Everything

If Harvesters were a church, it would be a large mall. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or what issues you are facing, there is something in Harvesters for you. At my first Sunday at church, a singles program was advertised. I didn’t pay much mind, as I expected it to be the regular church service where the pastor seriously advised you to avoid sexual sin no matter what.

But it wasn’t. I didn’t attend it (as I do not think any single Christian sister would want to talk with a travelling writer), but the description was very different from the sort of singles programs I’d heard of. Apparently, it was just a space for single people to mingle and get acquainted — and possibly get married.

This was an especially smart strategy, as many churches often lose their young women when they get married to members outside the church. Imagine if they could forestall that eventuality by getting young women connected to young men of the same church — or even better, of the same parish.

When that happens, the Church gets a stable family unit it can guide and counsel, and it also gets some assurance that the fruits of the union would populate its children’s ministry for years to come. So as far as strategies go, the program was an excellent one, and I would be shocked if other churches aren’t already doing the same. Church members who get married to each other stay in the church and add even more church members. It is a fantastic arrangement.

If you are single and believe that Lagos women have shown you much in this life, you can join Harvesters to get a sweet Christian sister to marry. And if you are scared of divorce, forget about it. Divorce will not happen to you as long as you don’t manifest it. I heard this from the pastor.

Harvesters Is Very Well Run

If you have ever tried to host an event of even a hundred persons, you will understand the level of work and clarity of systems needed to host people and give them a good experience. Add the logistics of getting the lights on and managing the extremely complex electronics systems, and you get something resembling a Herculean task.

The people over at Harvesters manage this task exceptionally. The branch I attended has four services, and the services are always packed. Yet they somehow kept to time every time, and things hardly went wrong. This would be normal news for members of the church, but it is certainly not the general experience of church goers in Nigeria.

On one Sunday, I sat close to an inconspicuous-looking sister who had half of a headphone on her head. Over the course of the service I realized she was the director of the service, as she kept whispering camera angles into her mic. Do you know the sort of fidelity to excellence one must have to sit in the service and tell operators what camera angles to switch to?

The funny thing is I could not even recognize the difference, and I doubt most worshippers could, yet she did it anyway. It is that sort of spirit that has helped the church grow so quickly, so fast. It is the sober reminder of the Bible verse that tells us excellence will eventually have us sit with kings and queens.

Unfortunately for this sister, it was just poor me she sat next to that day. But I suspect she is going places.

It doesn’t end there. Everything about the church seems so well thought out, so well put together. Consider their website, for instance, and compare it to another Nigerian “international” church’s website. Even their social media game is incredible, and one must believe that these products are engineered by professionals.

Since these professionals are likely not paid (I could be wrong!), one can only imagine the depth of conviction they have to work so hard and so well for nothing but heavenly rewards. And even if they were paid, it is only proof that the leadership of the church knows what it means to be good, and is pursuing it aggressively.

By the end of my fourth service, I asked myself if there were many better-run companies than the branch of Harvesters I attended. I didn’t think so. It was just too good.

Viral Video on The Flat Screen

Harvesters is well run, but sometimes the sermon runs into some issues. For instance, on my first Sunday, our pastor informed us that he saw a viral video online and wanted to share it. As readers of this blog may know, I really hate mixing my church service with online content, so this was unsettling for me to say the least.

After we watched the viral video, the contents of which I have promptly forgotten out of respect for my brain, the pastor spent twenty solid minutes preaching about the lessons therein. And then, to show me that I can run but I can’t hide from hearing nonsense, he simulated a male orgasm to make a biblical point.

He then told us that sleeping with your secretary once is a mistake, but twice isn’t. So if you are sleeping with your secretary, stop it. Seriously. If you haven’t, do it once and say it is a mistake. Never do it twice.

Unlike the CCI pastors, I only got to listen to one pastor preach at Harvesters. He is a black, tall, thin, bald man who has a striking resemblance to my seatmate in primary school. He has a deep voice and the after-effects of a sophisticated Yoruba accent. His suits are forever sharp, and you get the feeling that he is some executive-level director somewhere. The good news is that I loved listening to his voice; the bad news is I didn’t understand a few things he said.

Blaming the Victim: A Sermon on Job

“Don’t read the Bible for genesis, read about where it talks about Jesus first because the bible is All about Jesus.”

One day, the pastor began preaching by taking issue with a common Nigerianism. He said that we ought not to say “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” whenever we experience loss, as that isn’t God’s plan for us. To show us how what is literally written in the Bible isn’t in God’s nature, we opened to the book of Job.

Now, before I move on, the book of Job has always bothered me. In truth, I don’t care very much about the sufferings of Job. If your bestie decides to gamble your properties, health, and life of your kids on the off chance that you won’t unfriend him, that is your headache. My big issue is his kids. All ten of them died. Can you imagine losing ten kids? Can you imagine being one of the kids that died?

Imagine the scene when the kids arrive at the gates of heaven and ask for the reason they died (if they are allowed to).

Yeah, so what is your own name?

John…

John who? Do you know how many Johns died every day? What is your surname? Who is your father? And please be snappy with it, you can see it is a long queue.

I thought there was no time in heaven…

That one concern you? First name and father’s name please.

I am John, son of Job. Please can I know why I was taken away — along with my six siblings — in the prime of our lives? Our father loved God! He even used to sacrifice for us in case we sinned!

You won’t believe this coincidence. It is that love your father has for God gangan that led to your death and that of your siblings. Ehya, poor boy.

I don’t get it.

You see, God gambled the life of your siblings and your mom on the off chance that your father wouldn’t turn on him. He told Satan to Go Crazy, and I trust Lucifer. He really showed your father that men mount. So yeah, you were killed to see if your death would pain your father so much that he would curse God. Apparently, Job wouldn’t cry for just one child, so all of you had to go. And also, Jesus hasn’t come yet so you are kind of going to hell. And also, your father didn’t curse God, which makes me wonder exactly how horrible you guys must have been to him.

What?

The point here is that Job wasn’t the real victim of his story, but his kids who were needlessly murdered for a cosmic gamble. Of course, to add insult to injury, we learn that God gave him back his sons. Which were actually seven other kids.

I think I would crash out very well if I were in hell and discovered that I’d been replaced by my newborn siblings after getting murdered to restore God’s bragging rights over the devil. You may say, well, Elewa, aren’t you going too far? To which I reply, do you think killing all of someone’s kids to test them is too far?

This story, aside from all of the moral lessons in it, is horrible and doesn’t paint God in good light. In fact, if we heard some pagan talk about a similar story, we would chalk it up as evidence of pagan wickedness. Wouldn’t we say, at least our own God won’t sanction the murder of our kids to prove a point? Isn’t that the lesson from Abraham’s story?

The best way a serious Christian should parse the story is to consider it a parable. The death of fictional kids is bad enough, but surely not as bad as killing actual people to settle a gamble. Even though that has its own issues—for example, how do we know the other things in the Bible are real and not similarly parables—it’s still less clunky than believing God actually sanctioned the death of seven innocent kids and many others to win a bet.

In normal circumstances one would expect pastors to avoid preaching about Job. But these aren’t normal times. The pastor does not just preach about Job, he blames the poor man for all his troubles. He tells us to open to Job 3.25:

“For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me.”

You see, says the pastor. Job had this fear and dread in his heart, that is why the thing he feared befell him. If only he wasn’t such a little p##ssy, nothing bad would have happened to him. So God didn’t actually give and take away; instead, Job gave everything he had away because he was a spineless little coward. Again, this is a real sermon.

At the point Job made the statement in question, he’d just broken his silence after seven days. This silence was prompted by the death of his children, the loss of all his property, and the deterioration of his health. It all happened Job despite being the holiest man on earth. Can you imagine such a predicament befalling you?

When his friends meet him, he is sitting on an ash heap and treating open sores on his body with broken pottery. His condition is so desolate that even his friends couldn’t recognize him at first. We find that Job saying what he dreads has overcome him wasn’t an expression of faithlessness, but an understatement of the predicaments he was suffering. And yet, we are supposed to think all of his problems were really his fault.

If you disagree with my understanding of this story, you are invited to answer a simple question. What would your position be if I sacked a loyal employee, took all his money, and threw him in jail just to see if he would curse me?

God, of course, didn’t do it himself, but I fail to see how that would meaningfully change the analogy. I am not a lawyer, but I believe it is obvious God knowingly let the crime go on, understood the removal of his protection from Job would make Satan’s job easier, and knew, beforehand, all that was going to happen to him. After all, Satan took permission from him.

If God were man, it would be trivial to nail him for criminal conspiracy in that matter. But God isn’t man, so what can you do but write a Substack about it?

“If you speak without it being abundant in your heart it will not work.”

The overarching message, of course, is the word-of-faith dicta that most Nigerian Christian life is governed by. The dictum is that once you believe in something seriously enough—no matter how ridiculous it is—it will happen to you.

Even if one takes the Bible seriously, it is near impossible to reasonably take this lesson from the sermons of Christ. Doesn’t it seem obvious that even the demonstration of faith is subject to the will of God? No, you cannot tell a mountain to move if God doesn’t want it to, no matter how much faith your pastor says you should have.

My God Wants Me To Win

At the heart of the Christian journey is the personal God. As a Christian, you aren’t just worshipping an omnipotent creator; you are worshipping a friend and close companion. This isn’t true for most other religions. While this gives many Christians respite from the vicissitudes of life, it runs into a few logistical problems.

As a young boy, I often listened to pastors pray for our enemies to die by fire. I usually wondered about the logistical nightmare it must be, as your enemy could also be a Christian praying for you to die. In fact, knowing the paranoia that grips most Nigerians over the most mundane things, it is more than likely that your enemy has also taken your matter to several pastors just like you have.

What is the personal God to do in this instance? Kill no one? Judge the matter properly and kill just one? Kill both? Who knows. Thankfully, Jesus isn’t an assassin and he murders no one for anybody.

Thankfully I never heard this sort of prayer at Harvesters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t flirting with logistical issues of their own.

All this while you didn’t tithe, did God kill you?

If we worship a personal God who wants more material success for ourselves than we even do, it may be important to wonder why Nigerian Christians suffer so much. There is an ongoing festival of slaughter of Christians in the middle belt of the country, and thousands have been murdered brutally in the last 15 years. If we all have mini reincarnations of God living in our hearts, of what use has it been to the victims of these tragedies?

If God won’t stop those killers by divine intervention, why do we assume he is even slightly concerned about giving us a better job and a bigger car? Or do we think the people murdered in their churches do not have enough faith to warrant God’s intervention?

Older church fathers, with far smarter heads on their necks, solved this problem by arguing, quite correctly, that the least of God’s concerns is our material comfort. They didn’t even need to do that, as Jesus already said it would be near impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Paul and all the other apostles lived like vagabonds, moving from house to house. The early Christians were a picture of poverty and had a reputation for being destitute. Did they not have enough faith?

Does God really want all Christians to drive the latest Benz, especially when he specifically said that a rich man has almost zero chance of seeing the kingdom of God? What sense does it make to you if you believe this?

Today, almost every pastor with means drives a magnificent car and lives in a mansion. Is there any popular pastor today that cannot be accurately described as a rich man? One must wonder what plans they have to enter into the kingdom of God. Or maybe Jesus was just joking around? I guess we will see.

Despite thousands of years of Christian theorizing and preaching to refute this position, it is still the cornerstone of many Nigerian church services. God wants you to buy a Benz and build a house in Banana Island and you are still doubting? Don’t you have enough faith?

I heard this exact gospel at CCI, I heard it every single Sunday at Christ Embassy, and I have now heard it once at Harvesters. Do you know where I didn’t hear it? The Lord’s Chosen.

Cry For The Camera

As a young boy, I attended a lot of Aladura churches. I even attended an Igbo version of the C.A.C to show my commitment to Nigeria. If you have attended one, you know how often people are wont to fall into trances and have these elaborate demonstrations in front of the church.

At first, this seemed really miraculous to me and was evidence of the power of the pastor. But over a few years I started realizing that so many of these women who fell into these trances or got delivered never had a change of life. They lived in the same homes, wore the same tattered clothes, and had the same struggles regardless of the deliverance service.

So what were they really getting delivered from? There is only so many times you can watch the same woman get delivered from the spirit of poverty before wondering what exactly is going on here.

When I was older with a little more sense, I realized that it is likely that the woman was just as lost to the source of her constant needless deliverance as I was. It was likely that she was just taken in by the euphoric state of the service and fell into a trance as a result.

In most modern churches, people do not throw themselves into trances. Instead, they cry, and those tears are the perfect marketing material for the church. Go through the social media of any serious new-age church, and you will struggle to go five posts without seeing a beautiful picture of a lovely sister lost in the spirit and tears.

It has gotten so bad that I have now seen tweets from people saying the publishing of these pictures is an intrusion of privacy. But is it really? I doubt it. It is far more likely that one of the motivations (not all of it, certainly) for the sobbing during services is the possibility of getting on the screen.

Can you imagine how validating it must be to see your worship marketed as exemplary of the serious Christian? Even some fellow who isn’t usually moved to tears could conjure some up in the hopes of that validation.

What does that have to do with Harvesters, you ask. Is it everything they must tell you, I reply.

Why Do People Not Like Harvesters?

Harvesters has somehow acquired a certain reputation for degeneracy online. Many people now believe the church is the prime spot for entertainers, musicians, and other similar people who certainly do not come across as Christian in public life.

I recently came across an interview of a club owner thanking God for bringing customers to his joint, and the comments had people making snide remarks about his church. “Isn’t it Harvesters he attends,” said one comment. “Na Dem,” said another.

While I understand the nature of such comments, I seriously wonder what people would have the church do. Preach every Sunday about leaving alcohol and women alone? They already do that. Have strict dress codes at the church entrance? Denounce entertainers who attend their services?

None of the services I attended took sin leisurely, and the pastor spoke nonstop about sexual morality and holy living. He didn’t shy away from it whatsoever. What else should he do? Kill himself so that Nigerians will stop exhibiting bad behavior after service? Call up erring members during service and talk down to them?

Tiwa Savage was recently seen at a church service. Should the pastor go on a monologue against immoral music while she is in attendance? I am the last to carry water for religious leaders, but it seems like this problem is deeper than what online commentators can fathom.

Any serious change to the way the church conducts itself will receive backlash from the congregants. Is that backlash worth pandering to anonymous commentators who likely have even bigger sins they are hiding? Of course not.

Will I Be Recommending Harvesters?

Yes. The service is probably pound for pound the best spiritual experience you can get in Lagos. My criticisms of the church are true of most Nigerian churches, so I don’t think it’s too bad if you settle for the one bird you have in hand.

If you start looking for two in the bush in the name of searching for a perfect church, you may fall into the hands of crazier people. Besides, the women are extremely beautiful to look at. What more could a young, sensitive man want from a church?

What Church Should I Attend Next

Over the past six months, I have attended CCI, Loveworld, two Lord Chosen’s church, and now Harvesters. I am quickly running out of mega churches to attend, so you can also exhibit some basic degeneracy and help me pick my next pastor.

If you have a different idea, you can always email me directly! Goodbye, and see you on the next one.