I was quite elated to see the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Barrister Nyesom Wike, stand beside the Senior Pastor of Dunamis International Gospel Centre (DIGC), Dr Paul Enenche, and his wife, Dr Becky Enenche, as they cut the tapes signalling the commissioning of the pedestrian bridge built by the church on the 10-lane Abuja Airport Road on Friday, 30 October.
The church had applied for approval to construct the bridge on the prime Abuja Road, as far back as 2018. The then minister did not work on the file until it was brought to Wike’s attention. An equally elated Enenche, a medical doctor who should know the value of life, told the gathering that the bridge was built out of “love and commitment to impact” the community.
He said: “God is love. To be a messenger of God means to be a messenger of love. Love is about what we give, not what we get. We may make a living by what we get, but we make a difference by what we give. Our impact is more important than our income.
“Posterity and what we are remembered for is more important than prosperity. We are remembered not for wealth, possessions or accumulated resources, but for the problems we solve and the contributions we make.”
Wike, who also expressed his happiness at commissioning such an intervention from a church, said it was important that the church was setting a good example. He praised the “exemplary model of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)” on display by the church.
Wike said: “Government cannot do everything alone; there is nowhere in the world where government carries every burden. That is why we emphasise comprehensive social responsibility.
“You have carried out what we call corporate social responsibility. Instead of utilising these resources elsewhere, you sacrificed for the welfare and safety of the people.”
The feat performed by Pastor Enenche’s church could pass as one of those things churches routinely do, but I regard this as a significant step in nation-building. The Abuja Airport Road is not just a busy corridor; it is a massive 10-lane road which ordinarily should look unthinkable to cross without a pedestrian bridge. Yet residents of Airport Road have been coping with this near-impossible mission since the road was opened in 2010. Without a pedestrian bridge, a sane person would easily write off any attempt to cross from one side to the other as a sure suicide mission. Drivers regularly observe countless pedestrians who practise this attempted suicide daily. With the launch of the DIGC on the Lugbe corridor, traffic became more intense, and more people needed to cross the busy road into the Dome, the church’s iconic building on the Airport Road.
I never knew that the leadership of that church saw the plight of the commuters as a burden on their shoulders until the commencement of construction work on the pedestrian bridge, when it became obvious that Dunamis Church was responsible for the project.
It is a good signal that the church can play practical roles in the life of believers and that religion can achieve more than spiritual essence in the life of a human being.
Having evolved through a relationship that spans persecution, partnership, competition, and then collaboration, the church has, over the years, mastered its role as described in the Theory of the “Two Swords” as enunciated by Pope Gelasius I, who ruled in the late fifth century. According to this theory, the “two swords,” also called the Gelasian doctrine, referred to a world governed by two authorities—the sacred authority of priests (spiritual) and the royal power of kings (temporal). The two sides were distinct but cooperative. While the spiritual authority remained superior in matters of salvation and faith, the royal power of the kings remained on top of the hierarchy in secular matters. Though decades of tension followed the postulation of that theory, with the church amassing much more power around the Middle Ages and the era of papal dominance in both spiritual and temporal matters, we can simply agree that the standard operational procedures between the state and religion, as we have them today, evolved from the Gelasian theory.
Having learnt the interdependent roles of the church and the state over the centuries, the European missionaries who brought Christianity to Africa practised the religion in a similar manner. In places where government was lacking, they filled the void and ensured the development of the human person in a functional way. What do I mean by that? The churches established by the missionaries never shied away from taking up the role of the state where the state was foot-dragging, and they collaborated with the state where it was possible. For instance, the missions set up schools, equipped them, and ran the governmental structures of those schools without waiting for the government’s interventions. Through the widow’s mite contributed by churches, they established the big schools we see today. Many of them, though later taken over by the government, still retain the name identity originally given by the missions.
So, when I saw Pastor Enenche, his wife, and the church members join Minister Nyesom Wike to inaugurate the pedestrian bridge over the Abuja Airport Road, I was not only impressed by a church giving back to the community in which it operates; I believe it aligns with my idea of practical Christianity. Dunamis Church deserves all the kudos it can get for attempting to save as many lives as we cannot account for. Some pastors would simply have asked their members to apply faith and cross the road at will. They would say, “Call the name of the God of Pastor so-and-so,” and you will be saved from the overspeeding cars and buses. Many church members would believe such with audacity and perish in the process. Countless accidents have happened at that spot. The church itself acknowledged the danger of hit-and-run incidents on such a highway. I recall the pastor—or was it his wife?—saying that they had tried several options to mitigate the challenge of their members and community people crossing the gigantic road. Sometimes they lined up Coaster buses to ferry people from one side to the other, but many residents were impatient to wait for the buses to fill up or to make the return trip. Any regular user of that road would easily realise the high speeds drivers apply on the Airport Road and on Abuja roads generally. It is truly suicidal to attempt to cross those roads without using a pedestrian bridge. Yet the sheer idea of completing such a road without an adequate number of pedestrian bridges is a huge failure on the part of the government in the first place.
If our churches must take a cue from Pastor Enenche and his wife, they must shed the toga of conservatism in tackling societal problems. They must recognise that for a country like Nigeria, the government may not always take the lead in doing the good things. The church and religious leaders can show the way. And I remember that the churches of old were not lacking in that courage. Even after the colonialists had set the standard, Nigerians who took over maintained that standard and made the church play pivotal roles in development. Two incidents come to mind as I write this. I remember when I was registered at St Mark’s Anglican Primary School, Aiyetimbo, Ondo, in the mid 1970s. The Anglican Church had the school fitted with staff quarters, the headmaster’s house, and a dispensary. I also recall that the teachers were always refreshed whenever they came into the school premises. They were also readily at their workplaces. Every Thursday they would ask us not to eat breakfast before getting to school, because that was the day for special smoothies, small chops and snacks, all paid for by the church. And there was no discrimination in their admission. Children of Christians of any denomination, Muslims and traditionalists, were welcome to the school, and we all benefited from the goodwill of the Anglican Church. I know that the largesse was made possible through the tithes and offerings of the big, small, and not-so-small members of the church across the world, but the resources were well managed. I also recall growing up as a Baptist Church child. The pastors and deacons would once a month announce offerings for the “university we want to build,” and our parents would give us tokens to drop in the offering bags. That was in the 1970s, when the Federal Government had not yet contemplated the idea of liberalising education. Today, Bowen University sits in Iwo, Osun State, and it is thriving. It was the practical realisation of the vision of a church which saw tomorrow and worked towards it.
Things have, however, changed. The churches of yesterday are different from what we have today. Yesterday, the children of nobody could be fed with delicacies in schools owned by the church free of charge; today, when the churches have money, they prefer to load it into the bank. What, for instance, should stop the big churches from building world-class hospitals in each of the six geopolitical zones of the country and keep subsidising their services with direct calls for offerings from willing members? Why can’t the church and our religious leaders shame the government’s pretence of addressing brain drain by launching centres of excellence in the health sector, for instance, such that, as much as they try to fix our minds on heaven, we will first guarantee ourselves good health on earth? The church and our religions can truly do more than they are doing. As they win souls, they need to keep the souls healthy. They can sidestep the government’s inadequacies utilising the tokens they raise from widow’s mite, and they can step into the critical sectors by subsidising health and education, for instance.
