Why all Kenyan televangelists deserve to be gagged
BY CORNELL NGARE @cornellngare
Prominent Kenyan preachers have been “raising hell” for the past several days over the new laws seeking to regulate religion. Just the other day, chair of the Evangelical Alliance in Kenya Bishop Mark Kariuki rallied leaders of more than 20,000 churches to protest the new laws. But I am sad to say that the hypocrisy in that meeting at CITAM was palpable.
You see, a few pastors have decided to make a killing over the misery of their congregants by squeezing out every last cent from their pockets. Unsuspecting desperate-souls are giving up the little they have in the name of planting “seeds” in the hope that they will be blessed in return, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.”
But there seems to be an invisible barrier between the altar and the pews in as far as the flow of blessings is concerned. The shepherd is getting richer as the sheep get poorer. Further incidents of pastors preying on their congregants in other not-so-monetary ways show that they are only getting bolder. Wife-stealing, teen-raping, and land-grabbing are no longer beyond the imagination of these self-proclaimed “men of God.”
CELEBRITY PASTORS
So why are church leaders making so much noise when the government decides to “do something” about it? Of course not all preachers are out to get you (though they are all to get you to heaven, or so they say), but what about the few “rotten eggs”? What is the church doing about them?
To date, none of these outspoken pastors have “called out” any of the rogue preachers among them. If the “true” pastors did indeed care for the souls of their hearers, then the least they could do is warn them about the predators out there. Which shepherd doesn’t want to guard his sheep from the wolves?
Yet, these “celebrity pastors” remain silent about the underdogs in their midst. Is it any wonder that the government should act in a way that assumes there is a conspiracy of silence among the clerics?
If you don’t put your own house in order, someone else will eventually be forced to. Because the chaos in your house eventually ends up being a public nuisance and your neighbors are forced react appropriately. That is what the government is doing.
And unless the “good guys” start distancing themselves from the “bad guys” by getting specific and naming names, the church deserves everything that’s coming to it.
