It must be pointed out that the emergence and eventual rise of the Pentecostal industry that threw up Pastor Chris Oyakhilome and a slew of others was the outcome of classical marketing – pure differentiation strategies in a world in which people were bored and fed up with traditional church doctrines, modes of worship and other conservative issues.
Just as the birth of the Anglican Communion in the 16th Century happened following the rebellion of King Henry VIII and the consequent birth of the Church of England out of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pentecostal explosion had its roots in the inabilities of the orthodox churches to accommodate the style, marketing and other intangible needs of members of the various churches.
Pentecostalism borrowed generously from pop culture, lacing the otherwise modest and subdued traditional modest of worship with razzmatazz that accommodated self-expression and other lifestyle accoutrements. Sunday sermons became like parties where those expressly or subduedly uncomfortable with tradition modes of worship found the space to do things differently.
The challenges of life in many parts of the word arrived to be a strong enabler. In the Unted States, those at the middle -to – low rungs of the economic pyramid thronged these placed where miraculous means of breaking out of their circle were promised. In Nigeria, as in most parts of Christianised Africa, these churches became the alternatives to the vastly irresponsible and non-responsive governments across nearly all the countries.
This man has apparently seen the end of Pentecostalism as presently wired and he is working very hard to be in great position to profit from a future shift in social, scientific and even economic paradigms. He is attempting to mix science with religion.
Here, the church promised a paradise here on earth, far away from the one in heaven promised by the early churches. Pastors took advantage of the pains and sufferings of the people and the near absence of government care to offer a different kind of hope – the hope that through God, enabled by tithes, offerings and (some would add) fasting, miracles of financial liberation will be made available to all who believed. The ticket to heaven, at this stage, was no longer for the righteous; it was cleverly altered to be a function of Grace, dispensed by an increasingly transactional God who measures his blessings based on the regularity of tithes, the volume, value and frequency of donations to the pastor’s enterprise.
It was under this regime that Pastor Chris Oyakhilome made his entry into Pentecostalism. Having started his ministry as a student of Bendel State University (Ambrose Alli University). Ekpoma, where he minored in Architecture and majored in soul winning, Chris Oyahilome did not look back. With the looks and affected voice that sited into the pop culture, winning the souls of young people in search of different answers to their social and economic problems was an easy task. God gave him the unction to evengelise the youths of the old Bendel State, and through his ministry, Youth for Christ, God established the largest fellowship in the university at the time. Tis fellowship was so large that it was reported that the Vice Chancellor of the University attended some of its pogrammes back them.
After graduation, Oyakhilome moved his trade to Lagos, one of the world’s most densely populated commercial capitals, and soon Christ Embassy was born. His segmentation at the start was spot on, targeting young people with purpose-designed messages, dress sense and rhetoric. His trademark jerry curls created acceptance to young people who desired a departure from the contained expression demanded by the old order. He reinforced this by the funkification of gospel music, bring closer home, the America discotheque ministrations Kirk Franklin, Bibi & Cece Winans and the others.
It took the government to stop him and others from using television shows to propagate what many suspect were fake miracles. His resistance against this was limp, but he moved on. The market was so vast, superfluous with desperate people seeking divine answers to all manner of challenges for anyone to bother with a government that wants to legislate against televangelised miracles.
I give it to him, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome is a very smart person. Apart from surviving a marital challenge that threatened to slow the progress of his church’s growth, he was also quite smart in placing his siblings, Beayeta Akhuemokhan (née Oyakhilome), Mercy Oyakhilome, Kenneth Oyakhilome, Linda Okocha (née Oyakhilome), Kathy Woghiren (née Oyakhilome) and Lovelina Osazuwa (née Oyakhilome) in charge of many aspects of his church’s businesses, thereby keeping it all in the family, he possesses a farsightedness that is not common among faith-based businesses.
This man has apparently seen the end of Pentecostalism as presently wired and he is working very hard to be in great position to profit from a future shift in social, scientific and even economic paradigms. He is attempting to mix science with religion.
It’s trial and error at the moment, but the dizzying consistency with which he invades spaced that are purely science-based should be the subject of serious investigation. And just like in laboratories where life-changing experiments are conducted he does not min the number of fatal errors he commits; he knows that once he gets one right, it has the possibility of overwriting the cemeteries of his previous fatalities. Afterall, how many times did Elon Musk try and fail before becoming the champion of space travel lending his ships to NASA for rescue operations?
I guess the most controversial of Pastor Chris’s gaffe occurred when he said 5G has the capacity for man to provide a new creation on earth’.Pastor Chris described 5G as the “final union between men and machines where a human being becomes part man and part machine’,and went on to urge his adherents to not adopt it.
It is not clear if he and his church are using 5G in their telephony and data, but this was not the end. Pastor Chris was also caught in the act of linking 5G to corona virus that triggered the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020. His position on this, particularly his advocacy against lockdowns put in place around the world to contain the spread of the virus attracted sanctions from UK’s OfCom. But if you think this would slow him, this pastor was only getting started.
When Pope took ill and later died, Pastor Chris, in April, 2025, climbed his pulpit to pontificate that it was sicknesses associated with the Covid 19 vaccine that killed the Catholic Pontiff.
‘While he was trying to encourage the world to take the vaccines, he stated that if Jesus were here, he would have taken the vaccine, and I found that very insulting’, Pastor Chris had said during his message to his congregation that eventually went viral.
While the world was still chewing his conspiracy theory on the death of the Pope, this pastor spewed again, that malaria vaccination was dangerous. I do not know if, with the benefit of history, Pastor Chris ever read about how malaria vaccination helped the white men who brought the Christianity that he is trading with survive the hostile Wesst African malaria-infested climate to propagate the gospel and penetrate western education.
Early in May 2025, as the world turned to Rome for the selection of the new Pope, India and Pakistan stoked the embers of way while Israel bombed Yemen and threatened to annex Gaza, Pastor Chris succeeded, in the midst of these global issues, to rivet attention to himself by advising people to take in a lot of salt, as according to him, ‘salt is actually the ultimate medicine that can cure all manner of diseases’.
Against this line of reasoning, doctors warn that excessive salt intake can lead to different debilitating conditions like, stroke, high blood pressure, kidney disease, osteoporosis and stomach cancer, but I doubt if the god that exacts miracles in Pastor Chris’s world knows of the existence of such conditions.
Chris Oyakhilome studied Architecture, but he is drawing a different building plan in his career as a pastorpreneur – he is redrawing the relationship between science and religion.
He is aware that the present generation is asking questions about the promises, mostly unfulfilled, the church had made to their forebears; he is anticipating the raid of science and technology on his trade secrets, and he is struggling quite desperately, flailing like a fish trapped in a net.
What I am not sure of is what his end game is; is he trying to prove science wrong and thus, retain his horde of young followers? Is he hoping that one of his rather wild guesses will be somehow correct so he has a bragging right to remain relevant in the future? Is he even trying to take the attention of the future generation away from science in the hope they don’t get to probe what are clearly unverifiable claims by him?
Lest I forget, he was also famous for his end time ministrations. But I am beginning to guess his time (on the grandstand) will end long before the end of time.
Okuhu is a journalist, public relations professional, brand strategist and teacher
