RECORD has it that Nigeria is now the highest
sending missionary nation in the world.
All over the world, Nigerian churches are impacting their societies from Alaska to South Africa. In most countries, Nigerian Pastors have some of the biggest churches. The Redeemed Christian Church of God has perfected this act greatly and spends millions of dollars per month on missionaries. In the UK alone, RCCG has over 500 churches; in Central Europe, over 300 churches and there are less than 10 countries in the world, where we do not have an RCCG parish. I just planted a church in Liechtenstein last month. In August, I will be planting another in
Azerbaijan. Within 13 years in Belgium, we have planted 15 churches. This is a land,where people claim that churches do not grow, but we have proved them wrong. The challenges we encounter are cultural and racial. It takes time to win one European into the church. One soul in Europe is equivalent to winning 100 souls in Nigeria. There is also the challenge of cost. It costs a lot to rent a place of worship and offerings are usually low because the Europeans are
not used to giving good offering and gifts to the church, because government sponsors their traditional churches. Their buildings are maintained and the priests' salaries paid by the government. So, most of our churches have to rely on money from the Mother church and other sponsors in Nigeria. The high exchange rate has really affected the churches that still receive support from home.
Another challenge is the issue of resident permit and finding mission-minded pastors. Some of our pastors have no resident permit,which greatly affects the work. Sometimes our inability to find a trained pastor to pastor a parish means that we use whatever is available. There are no financial gains in setting up these parishes, as most of them rely on the Mother church in Nigeria for over five years or more. When they become weaned, they spend over 70 percent of their income on rents. It is true that the RCCG churches make remittances to
a central purse in the mission head office of each region, but to the best of my knowledge,these remittances are used to help struggling churches and to run programmes and never remitted to Nigeria. The RCCG church never benefits financially from its foreign mission churches. I personally know that Pastor E. A. Adeboye spends lots of his personal money to help mission churches buy church
properties. He spends hundreds of thousands of personal money to sponsor programmes such as the Festival of life in the UK at the early stage. Conclusively, I can say that the mission churches are spiritual investments to fulfill the great commission. Nigeria has done well
in this regard, especially RCCG and that is why I know that God will bless our nation greatly with time. Things will change.
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