On wealth of pastors.
I am definitely not the richest man in this church, there are many members who are richer than I do, but you must understand that I am not a full time pastor. I don't live of this church. I am an accountant by profession and have been in practice since 1987. I have my own resources provided to me by God. So, if you mention my income, it has nothing to do with the church.
If you see any money in my account then, you know it is from Ighodalo and co or other companies which I head as chairman. But having said that, the Bible says the man who preaches the word should live by the word so you find out that from time to time when a pastor has preached a good word and has helped you, you contribute towards his well-being and overtime if he is a prudent man, those resources would accumulate an the pastor should be comfortable and to live well.
But my own advice to people like that is that they must be able to give back what they, have to other people to make life better for them. How many beds can a man sleep on at the same time? But, it is not difficult to find a pastor becoming wealthy very quickly, if he is a good and honest pastor.
Churches and soaring crimes in Nigeria
The level of decay in Nigeria is so deep that it is going to take God and the church a long time to resolve. Lagos , for instance, have over 12 to 14 million people and 50 percent of the population do not go to Church and others who say they go to church do not really go to church. So, church influence is less than 10 percent of the population in Nigeria .
Even amongst those who go to church, they still have some hidden tendencies that have not really cleared. Because of these, it is difficult to hold the church responsible because the church has a limited influence on this matter, even though it may appear large because of the number of billboards, posters and many churches. But having said that, if not for the prayers of the church, things, would have been much worse than this in Nigeria .
We are morally and socially responsible to the people
The Redeemed, Christian Church of God and especially Christ's Church is a Church that really believes that church should be socially morally responsible. The church is a fundamental part of a society and by that, I mean that a lot of churches shield themselves and their people out of the society they don't participate in national debate, they don't Participate in politics, they don't participate in moral an social issues.
But God is the bedrock of any society, so we have to go back and be relevant in the society. In doing this, we have continued to contribute to the society. We have care clinic where we feed the poor, we give them clothes and free medications every two months. We go to poor areas preaching the word and caring for them at the same time.
We also have social reformation group the group goes to various aspects of society and see where we can intervene. We have donated borehole and generator to Gbagada General Hospital . We have also donated orthopedic bed to Ikeja General Hospital , and we have also helped those at Igbobi.
We have road marshals that we pay every month to control traffic in this area. Then we have our heritage home, which is like motherless babies homes, which we will open by the grace of God in October. We have also assisted people with serious medical ailment and who cannot finance it themselves as I speak, we have a man in Indian who we didn't know before he came to us and we have spent over, N5million sending him to Indian although part of the contributions was made by some well meaning Nigerians.
Apart from preaching the word of God to the people, we at Christ s Church also put measures in place to better their lives.
Why I went into publishing
Firstly, it is because there is need to change the way things are in the Nigeria media because it is full of sensational journalism, biased reportage. We felt that if we continue like that our Children and young generation would be fed with the wrong kind of information and you know that it is knowledge and information that determines what a child becomes.
Children these days are fed with what they see on TV and read newspapers where everyday you read about someone who steals, another caught sleeping with another man's wife, somebody raped or even murder a fellow human being. I consider all these kind of journalism as not good for our society. That is why we established Timeless Newspapers, to sanitise and refine the Nigeria press by reporting issues and events from a balance and positive angle and not someone who is trying to push his interest into the press.
Timeless is well received:
We started small with a very limited resources but we have kept our focus and vision. And we know that with time, there would be provision into that vision. S0, we've done well, we have not missed any publication since we started in 2003. The paper is monthly and it is well received with many, people feeding us comments of their views on what they read. We also have some people who read and criticise us in certain areas, such that when we were about giving up at a time, they encouraged us to keep on with what are doing.
We have surmounted some challenges..
Initially, we had a constraint of funding because we are funding it through our own little resources and that constraint is still there. But because we want to keep our paper unbiased we are not throwing it open to general subscription by anybody. We don't want anybody to hijack our vision and the paper. It is a growing paper that is financed from our resources.
The second constraints was manpower, this is because we didn't have the finance to employ big reporters so we had to also grow ours from in-house therefore, that was a bit of constraints. But somehow through the grace of God we have been able to overcome most of these things and ,now we are quite stable and I am happy with that.
We get advert, we have support from Nigeria Breweries who advertise Maltina. We get support from a technological arid insurance company. So we have advert support even though it is not good enough. The church and some individuals from the church also contribute to the funding of the paper. Apart from that some people put their time and they are not necessarily compensated for it. So we have been able to survive that way.
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