Count your blessings name them one by one
Count your blessings see what God has done
Count your blessings, name them one by one
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done
The first surprise about what the Lord has done for Nigerian Christendom in the year of our Lord twenty thousand and sixteen is to make this famous Christian hymn so old school that it no longer applies to the Nigerian shepherd.
Blessings that you could count one by one are old-fashioned and old school. If your blessings arrive in shiploads, you should not be able to count them one by one and that, precisely, is what has happened to Nigerian Christendom so far this year.
The Nigerian Christian shepherd has had more blessings this year than the recipients of the Dasuki/Jonathan windfall. The Nigerian prosperity Pentecostal shepherd has had more blessings this year than the intended beneficiaries of the gargantuan yams in President Buhari’s 2016 budget. And he intends to shout about his blessings on the rooftops in accordance with the Biblical injunction not to hide light under a bushel.
Thus it was that Biodun Fatoyinbo, founder and chief shepherd of the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly in Abuja, felt the need to show the abundance of blessings that has befallen the shepherds of Nigerian Christendom in recent times.
People often think that the blessings of Nigerian new age Christian shepherds lie in wealth and earthly possessions rivalled only by Nigerian politicians: the mansions and the private jets; the business empires and the hyper-elitist private Universities; the Bentleys and the Lamborghinis; the Savile Row suits and the Ferragamo shoes; the jerry curls, the manicure, the pedicure and general grooming done once a month in Milan or Paris.
A Nigerian shepherd will normally be in this elite league within a few years of starting a church but Biodun Fatoyinbo of COZA recently made a powerful statement that these things are not the greatest blessings a shepherd can expect in Nigerian Christendom. The greatest blessing of our contemporary shepherds lies in the fact that the Christian God has granted them the extraordinary fortune of being surrounded by the sort of sheep that Christian shepherds all over the world can only dream of.
It is true that shepherds in South Africa are blessed with sheep who spend their lives eating grass. It is true that shepherds in Kenya are blessed with female sheep who can be ordered to come to church and leave their bras and panties at home in order to guarantee freer and more direct access unto the Lord. These pale in comparison to the sheep with which the Nigerian shepherd is blessed.
God has been so good to the Nigerian shepherd that he did not stop at blessing him with the sort of sheep who populate Nigeria’s vast Christendom but has also ensured that Bible verses and injunctions could be modified for Nigerian conditions and with the express approval of the sheep. Says the Bible: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” It does not work this way in Nigerian Christendom because the shepherd is blessed with a sheep ready to bleed his or her own country to death and lay the life of his or her own country down for the material comfort of the shepherd.
That is why the Nigerian sheep in charge of funds to build roads and hospitals and schools will steal money meant for 180 million people and tithe it to fund the lifestyle of his or her shepherd. The Nigerian sheep who is too lowly and too poor to be in the position to bleed Nigeria to death for the sake of his shepherd will bleed himself to death and go into debt just to service the lifestyle of his shepherd.
That is why it was so easy for Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo of COZA to have been embroiled two years ago in a sex scandal whose outcome could have been predicted by just about any keen student of the abundant blessings of the Nigerian shepherd. Pastor Fatoyinbo sexually assaulted Ese Walters, promised “a robust response” to the lady’s frenzied allegations, and went ahead to ignore his country and people, all the while vigorously acclaimed by his sheep.
It is perhaps not true to say that Pastor Fatoyinbo has not offered his robust response yet. He was recently in Dubai for his birthday bash – arguably the most ostentatious birthday party by a Nigerian so far this year. That is the robust response of a shepherd who knows his sheep and knows his country. The birthday in Dubai, the white-attired yacht party, and all that jazz do not point to a shepherd counting his years on earth and thanking his creator for life. This is a man counting his blessings, yamming them one by one, surprised by the sort of sheep that God has gutted his church with.
But Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo is not alone. He is not an exception to this dominant version of blessings in Nigerian Christendom. Recently, news and photos went viral of a shepherd who goes by the name Dr. Chris Okafor purportedly raising a child from the dead.
Thank God for high resolution JPEG. Very beautiful photos. Real child, looking every bit like a corpse. Lifeless. Only God knows the stress and dehumanization that the unconscious child is put through before being “raised from the dead” by Dr. Chris Okafor. In saner climes, Dr. Chris Okafor would be answering a string of criminal indictments ranging from child endangerment to child abuse and exploitation. He would seriously risk jail time for that stunt.
But Dr. Chris Okafor is one of Nigeria’s blessed shepherds. He knows his sheep. He knows that they are like Biodun Fatoyinbo’s sheep and the sheep of every other shepherd in Nigeria’s prosperity Pentecostal madness. He knows what this “touch not my anointed” sheep will do to the author of this essay once they read it – if they read it.
That is why Dr. Okafor can subject a child to so much abuse openly in the 21st century and suffer zero consequences. On the contrary, he is counting the abundant blessing of the kind of sheep God has given him!
https://www.naij.com/736970-nigerian-pastors-counting-blessings-yamming-one-one.html