Pentecostal cinema

Pentecostal cinema

By Clem Oluwole

Christianity and Islam may remain immiscible for all I care. But there are a few positive things adherents of the two major religions can learn from one another. A couple of years ago, I was watching the CNN when my curious eyes fell on (a) news footage. The Saudi authorities had to fire the head of religious police in the kingdom apparently for failing to ensure the Saudis attend mosque unfailingly. The police are also supposed to make sure that worshippers conform to prescribed dress code. Unlike in Saudi Arabia where every Tanimu, Dauda and Haruna is an adherent of Islam, Nigeria is not a Christian state so it would not be easy to pass a law compelling every Tom, Dick and Harry to go to church every day of the week for all manner of programmes.

However, I have observed something about Pentecostalism since its arrival in the early 80s to Nigeria. I don’t have any statistics to back up my claim, but I do know that there are many (Pentecostal) churches in Nigeria than beer palours. Yet, Nigeria remains a citadel of all kinds of immorality and criminality which these churches profess to fight against.

Yes, there is something Christendom in Nigeria can learn from Saudi Arabia… as per dressing to the church. And I hope both CAN or Christian Association of Nigeria and its rancorous offshoot, Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria or PFN, are reading me. The Holy Writ tells us that by their fruits we shall know them. But the kind of female Christian fruits I have been seeing for a very long time leave a sour taste in the mouth. They are what you would call an eye-sore. The fruits we are referring to here are the modes of dressing. Most Nigerian Christian women see the church as a platform to show off and out-do one another in the latest fashion. And so while the older ones dress to kill, the younger ones dress to seduce and sentence men to death for eternity.

I am not going to lose my sleep over the older generation of (wealthy) Christians who come to church to flaunt their opulence. The ones that really piss me off are those who belong to the new generation churches called Pentecostal. Those who attend the orthodox churches like Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and ECWA still show some degree of maturity and decency in their modes of dressing.

I joined the Pentecostal bandwagon about 20 years ago and my first port of call was a church (name withheld) in Jos which was founded by a bishop from the Edo/Delta axis. Everything seemed to be going well with the church until one Sunday morning when the sitting arrangement on the altar was changed on the order of the resident pastor. I observed that there were more chairs at the altar where the pastor, his wife, and the elders hitherto occupied. Then gradually, the choir members who used to sit by the corner of the auditorium began to inch their way to the altar which was five or so steps above the floor of the church. The service got underway and everything looked okay until some female choir members wearing skirts that were struggling above the knees became too relaxed. They parted their legs and you could see their undies. I nearly screamed ‘cinema ofe e!’ meaning free cinema. In my primary school days, we used to raise that alarm to alert the girls who sat carelessly to close up their laps. Even as immature as the girls were, you could see the embarrassment on their faces as they scrambled to adjust their laps.

I nudged a member sitting next to me and pointed in the direction of the altar, asking whether he could also see the Technicolor side attraction at the altar. He let out a sudden laughter on hearing ‘Technicolor’ and his false tooth flew out of his mouth into the ‘onile gogoro’ (skyscraper) headgear of a member of the congregation who sat two rows in our front.

After the service, I summoned an emergency meeting of the Men’s Fellowship Exco of which I was president to address the cinema issue. The meeting mandated four of us to take the matter up with the resident pastor. We advised him to return the choir to the status quo to avoid unnecessary distraction. He thanked us for the observation but to our utter dismay, the choir remained at the altar the next Sunday. Even the female members of the church felt their morality had been offended. I later gathered that all the pastor told the cinema girls was to sit properly because in his words:’ The eyes of the president of the Men’s Fellowship cannot stay in one place’. And so the Sunday-Sunday cinema continued until the pastor was posted out of the branch. It was a big relief when the new pastor sacked the cinematographers from the altar.

A few years later, the bandwagon wheeled me to another church where one Sunday, I had the misfortune of sitting behind a young lady in her early 20s. It was praise singing time. We all stood on our feet dancing, clapping and singing. The lady in question wore a pair of tight trousers made of soft material and this emphasized her beefy behind beyond measure. Her spaghetti blouse was short, revealing her waistline. Even though my face was looking towards the altar quite alright, I was monitoring with the extreme corners of my eyes as she was vibrating like someone monkeying with a live wire. My dictionary is yet to provide me with words to describe the make-up on her face. All I know is that even Jezebel will turn in her grave. At a point, I had to stop singing and my prayer line had to be: ‘Heavenly father, deliver me from this evil’. As for temptation, I had already been led into it.

As you can see from the foregoing accounts, there is a desperate need for the church as a body to set up vigilante groups (a Christian version of Saudi Arabia’s religious police) whose main task will be that worshippers conform to a (decent) dress code to be set by CAN and PFN. Those who violate it should be shown the red card by the doors. These days, you even see some young boys walking casually into the church premises sporting jerseys belonging to Chelsea’s Spurs’ Adebayor, Real Madrid’s Ronaldo, Barca’s Messi, etc, as if they have come to worship the god of soccer. The other day, I sighted a young man wearing a sleeveless vest and bouncing along the aisle as if he had come t show off his muscular arms to the congregation.

The theory that it is the heart that God sees and not the appearance is arrant bunkum. The appearance is a reflection of the heart. God is too decent and holy to be found in an environment where those who come to worship turn out in attires fashioned from Gehenna.



End of sermon.