The Sunday Mail
Pastor Zulu
My Perspective
The days of Jeremiah (3:15) Israel had become unfaithful and God assigned the shepherds (pastors, prophet’s apostles etc.) with the responsibility to give the nation knowledge and understanding.
In Matthew 28 the church was not only commanded to go and make disciples (followers) but also to teach. So the church has a God given mandate to teach society,( James 3:1-2).
As much as we may enjoy the honours of being a man of God, but there will come a time of judgment over the content we gave our spiritual students. The teaching on anointed water, oils, pens, condoms, miracle babies, miracle abortions, pennies enlargements and so forth is a mere abuse of the Lord’s anointing and over spiritualising things.
Africa is one of the most Christianised continents and inversely the poorest continent with about one out of every three kids having nothing to eat.
Pastors today influence a greater percentage of our society. We need to revise or evaluate what we are teaching people especially when we look at the level of poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, gay marriages, political instability, climate change, HIV and Aids, the deadly cancer and corruption among others.
As pastors we need to balance what we teach and give congregants a spiritual diet that addresses every aspect of their lives, spirit, soul and body.
Martin Luther King Jr, in his autobiography, says he had a conviction that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a spiritual moribund religion only waiting for a day to be buried.
If people are homeless and we tell them to believe God for a house, or sell them anointed bricks, women are divorced, we sell them anointed condoms and wrist bands and assure them the right men is coming without properly engaging social transformational strategies that bring about sanity in the home, are we feeding them with knowledge?
In “Rich Pastor, Poor Pastor” Madojemu explains that there are three dimensions to the battle. Moses represents the spiritual dimension. Prayers and fasting which is our dependency on God and all spiritual implications. The truth of the matter is that there is also the physical dimension in which Joshua is actually fighting the Amelikites physically using skill and weapons. (Exodus 17:8-13)
The Amelekites of our day are the challenges I have mentioned before like poverty. We need to jump into the economic battlefield and apply our economic skills and strategies that will work to turn around our economy.
The third and most important dimension that has been ignored especially by church folks is that of the intellectual realm, represented by Aaron and Hur. These are neither in the valley nor the mountain.
They are think tanks, they don’t use muscles, they use mind power. They used their intellect to link what’s happening in the valley and on the mountain. And they discovered that Moses’ hands had to be kept up, they decided to put a stone to seat and support his hands.
Finally Joshua won, Moses won and Israel won.
According to The Sunday Mail of November 15, 2015 “Lessons from China’s accelerated development”), one of the eight factors that led to China’s success was the active engagement of research-oriented think tanks in policy formulation and implementation.
I am not in anyway undermining the power of prayer and fasting, but Christians also need to be in the battlefield and produce the Aarons who think.
We can’t leave everything to chance as confirmed in the popular phrase “as the spirit leads”.
As a pastor who is interested in influencing the society in which I am a part of, I also managed to attend the ICASA conference at HICC.
What puzzled me was that out of the 40 or so groups participating, only Celebration Church had a stand and were issuing handouts of Christian literature.
I asked myself: “Where are the other churches, why are they not part of this noble idea of reducing HIV infections to zero in Africa?”
Then I gave them benefit of doubt: “They must be praying somewhere, either in Domboshava or Bindura.”
Churches have been accused of fuelling the rate of deaths from incommunicable diseases in the name of faith healing.
Anointed men have asked people to abandon medication and cling on to bottles of anointing oil claiming that they have power to heal.
It’s not that I don’t believe in healing because I also pray for the sick at my church and they bring testimonies of healing but if they are on drugs I instruct them to visit the doctor who prescribed their medication to confirm the healing and give appropriate medical advice.
Maybe I sound like a faithless pastor but I read in Mark 1:43 that after Jesus healed a leper even though he was the Son of God, he asked him to go and show himself to the priest first so that he confirms the cure.
So, by me, ICASA was like the secular world trying to clean up the mess that the church has caused.
If we are not careful we may be heavenly focused until we become earthly useless. Issues of HIV and Aids, corruption, child marriages, drug abuse, immorality, technological challenges and child sexuality need to be mentioned in our sermons.
It may sound taboo to talk about sex in church, but guess what, these youth are engaging into sexual activity. We may be in denial but that’s a fact. I would liken the churches reaction to socio-economic and political challenges to that of Job’s three friends. (Job 2:13)
For seven days and nights they were just watching their friend in pain and nobody said a word, it might not be literally seven days but it was a long period.
The Church of God can we be like Job’s friends, to sit on the fence and watch society suffering without getting into the battlefield and facing the Amalekites head-on.
The same happened during the era of HIV, it was taboo to speak of HIV from the pulpit and in church, people where stigmatized and the church just watched like Job’s friends in the name of “speak no evil”.
Let the church of God arise and face reality.
Pastor Zulu is from Inner-City Christian Church
