Usually, weekday church services do not attract a lot of worshippers because people have adult things to do – a baby to feed, a career goal to accomplish, parents and siblings to care for. Within this existential milieu, time is of the essence. Sparing 2–3 hours in church after a busy day doing a depressing job is no small sacrifice, not least when you do it faithfully every week.
For worshippers at the Celebration Church International (CCI) in Ibadan, they seem to have a lot of time on their hands as they gathered for their mid-week service. I walked into a church filled to about 65 per cent capacity, an impressive attendance. But upon seeing the mostly youthful congregation, the surprise faded.
Almost immediately, I realised this isn’t a typical church service. Usually, a pastor stands behind the rostrum and gives an hours-long sermon punctuated by several Bible quotations. This is different. The pastor, whom I later learned from social media is named Tomiwa Immauel, was having a conversation with one of his congregants who volunteered to simulate what a debate between a Christian apologist and a sceptic would look like. The pastor role-played the sceptic, and his interlocutor played the apologist. They were having a back-and-forth on the evidence for God. The interlocutor makes a familiar argument about intelligent design. Given the complexity of the universe, it’s statistically and logically impossible for order to have come out of chaos without a creator, he argues. Playing the devil’s advocate, the pastor asks further questions to pressure-test the intelligent design argument.
The simulation ends with the pastor making some observations. He admonishes his members not to sound rehearsed; otherwise, they can easily get stumped by a simple question or retort. They should know their arguments so well and personalise the points and examples. They shouldn’t be bellicose but do their best to have a conversation, not a debate. They should also be honest when they don’t have a good response yet. They should be vulnerable, not glib when responding to questions on evil and suffering. These are great points, I thought to myself.
He asks for another volunteer. This time, they simulated a conversation between a Muslim and a Christian apologist. The pastor reprises the role of the devil’s advocate. He starts by questioning his interlocutor about the deity of Jesus. Nowhere in the Bible did Jesus specifically say he is God and he must be worshipped as such. This makes Christianity a false religion. In his retort, the other discussant cites examples from the Bible of where Jesus does extraordinary things that can only be done by God. Saying then that Jesus never exactly says that he is God and hence should be worshipped is grasping at pedantic straws. He debunks the exact word fallacy quite intelligently, I thought.
The pastor counter-retorts with the Muslim position that the Bible has been corrupted. His interlocutor intelligently asks which parts of the Bible have been corrupted and which parts have not. The pastor praises this move. This move corners Muslims because now, the burden of proof is on them. They almost always don’t have any evidence to present regarding the oft-repeated claim of textual corruption, he adds. The pastor also makes a point about how the Quran acknowledges the authority, inspiration, and preservation of the Bible. But if the Bible is corrupted, then the Quran is false for acknowledging a corrupted book. And if the Bible is uncorrupted, the Quran remains false for contradicting the teachings of the Bible. In apologetic circles, this is called the Islamic dilemma. I could tell the pastor has watched a lot of Christian apologists like David Wood, GodLogic, and Apostate Prophet. Not bad at all, I thought.
He had another simulation where he played an atheist. No one volunteered to simulate what a conversation would look like with a Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, or Isese worshipper. But he made some general comments to debunk common claims made in those circles. From the reactions of the congregation, I could tell that this is a church that is invested in apologetics. Throughout the simulations, the guy seated to my right was having a conversation with the lady behind him. They both were giving additional arguments to the ones the pastor was making.
Before attending this service, my opinion of CCI was that it is just another typical charismatic denomination. But I was pleasantly surprised to see a pastor teaching apologetics. To be fair, I’d chanced upon a few clips on social media of the church’s founder, Emmanuel Iren, giving some apologetic responses to difficult questions about the Bible and Christianity. I just never thought this trickled down to their branches.
Within the past year, I’ve noticed a renaissance of Christian apologetics online. This is a break from a decades-old tradition in the Nigerian church of not making any attempt to rationalise religion. People who asked difficult questions in the past were often demonised or insulted by the clergy. I’ve had my fair share of that. But seeing Nigerian Christians write long posts on X and make response videos to debunk lies and factoids often spread by atheists and Muslims has been quite surprising for me.
Nigeria is a net exporter of Christianity. We have huge denominations and megastar pastors. Our churches have universities, publishing houses, TV stations, mini cities, and sprawling buildings. Yet, for a long time, almost no attention was paid to engaging atheists, agnostics, sceptics, and nones of different stripes in good faith.
Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world if God truly exists? Of all the thousands of religions in the world, why Christianity? What evidence is there that the Bible has not been corrupted? Did Jesus even exist at all? Why is the God of the Old Testament conspicuously different from the God of the New Testament? Isn’t Richard Dawkins right when he said, “the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”? How does one make sense of the logic of the Trinity? And what about the other epistles and Gospels that did not make the Biblical canon? These are some of the questions the Nigerian church has shied away from answering the curious and confused.
I am old school at heart when it comes to religion. I feel uneasy with the theatrics I see in modern charismatic denominations. But I’ve come to realise that old-school and new-school denominations have a lot to learn from each other. For example, the old school needs to learn to get off its high horse and be less judgmental. Interestingly, and rather ironically, the new school needs to learn to be less laissez-faire. It is a balancing act, and I don’t pretend that achieving that sweet spot will be easy, if ever possible.
Another example of what the old school can learn is CCI’s commitment to reconcile faith with reason. It turns out that faith can be rationalised. And best believe, there is an entire population of people out there starving for that knowledge.
Admin