The Nigerian public is taking a curious gamble with its studied indifference to Chris Oyakhilome, founder of Loveworld Inc., better known as Christ Embassy. In a country crawling with crackpot preachers, Oyakhilome has managed to distinguish himself not merely by style, but by the unease he provokes among his peers.
The wider Pentecostal establishment has long regarded him with suspicion which, even by the elastic standards of Nigerian Pentecostalism, is saying something. He kept company, spiritually at least, with the late TB Joshua, another figure who inspired devotion among followers and discomfort among colleagues.
Both the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria and the Christian Association of Nigeria have, in their own polite way, treated Oyakhilome as one might treat a distant relative who insists on bringing fireworks to a petrol station. Oyakhilome looks the part, of course. Matinee idol looks, high stepping, hip dressing and a voice honed to a smooth, almost broadcast polish. He has the bearing of a man who expects to be believed and usually is. 
Years ago, Pastor EA Adeboye of the Redeemed Christian Church of God was asked about Oyakhilome and others of similar stripe, among who was also Samson Ayorinde. Adeboye, a man not given to public confrontation, tried to sidestep the question by a reporter from The Nation. Pressed, he conceded that he would not be found ministering in their churches. In ecclesiastical language, that is less a raised eyebrow than a slammed door.
None of this has dented Oyakhilome’s following. If anything, it seems to have boosted it. His adherents display a level of devotion that moves well beyond admiration into something closer to surrender. It is not quite accurate, I believe, to say they place him alongside God. From the evidence of their words and behaviour, they appear to regard him as something like God’s senior adviser, if not His supervisor.
There are stories that would be comic if they were not faintly alarming. A hotel cashier once stole N39m and donated it to the church, apparently in pursuit of spiritual favour. Oyakhilome, rather than recoil, commended the gesture in a personally signed letter. The law, less impressed, intervened.
This would all be merely another entry in Nigeria’s long catalogue of religious eccentricities were it not for the substance of what Oyakhilome says and the certainty with which he says it. He has, on occasion, dismissed blood pressure monitors as harmful and warned against anti-hypertensive drugs, claiming to have been told by the Holy Spirit, which is a surprise because he acts like the Holy Spirit is his direct report. The claim is from a man whose organisation runs a hospital, where a gravely ill friend sadly passed away last December. One wonders what the cardiologists make of it all, assuming they are allowed to keep their jobs.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he suggested links between 5G technology and the virus, a theory that collapsed under even the most casual scientific scrutiny. He cast public health measures as instruments of control, again with great confidence and no evidence. Confidence, in his world, appears to be a substitute for proof.
That, worryingly, is the point.
Science proceeds by doubt, by testing, by the slow accumulation of evidence. It is tentative, often irritatingly so. Oyakhilome’s method is the reverse. The conclusion arrives fully formed, wrapped in certainty and the explanation is constructed afterwards, often with a sprinkling of scientific vocabulary for effect.
His healing testimonies follow a familiar script. Doctors pronounce doom. The faithful defy it. The patient survives, prospers, produces children against biological odds. It is stirring stuff. It is also, very often, a distortion of how medicine actually works. Prognoses are probabilities, not prophecies. Reproductive biology is not inclined to suspend its rules because a preacher insists upon it.
There is, too, a convenient contradiction at play. Medicine is invoked for diagnosis, then dismissed when its conclusions prove inconvenient, only to be invoked again when a miracle requires validation. It is rather like trusting a referee only when he awards you a penalty.
None of this is an argument against faith. Faith has its place among those with the use for it. So does science, which requires no belief of the religious kind. The problem arises when one is dressed up as the other. When spiritual conviction is presented as empirical fact, particularly in matters of health, the consequences can move from the abstract to the dangerously real.
Nigeria has seen many charismatic figures come and go. Oyakhilome endures, buoyed by a following that takes his word not as guidance, but as gospel in the most literal sense. The risk is not that he is wrong. Many people are wrong, all the time. The risk is that he is believed.
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